It was intended as philosophy (“just saying stuff”) rather than neuroscience. i.e. a black box rather than white box perspective on the mind. The point is that

It was intended as philosophy (“just saying stuff”) rather than neuroscience. i.e. a black box rather than white box perspective on the mind. The point is that you don’t need a recent external environment to grow your knowledge in certain ways. For example, if you locked a sufficiently gifted and immortal mathematician in prison with no knowledge of the outside world after 2021, he can still prove new theorems forever afterwards (provided he has enough coffee). He doesn’t need access to recent mathematical results to keep proving theorems and growing his knowledge base - that’s simply an accelerant. In fact the longer he stays in prison, the more new theorems he can prove because he has ever more lemmas. Whereas if you locked a sufficiently gifted and immortal chemist in prison with no knowledge after 2021, she might be able to synthesize some new knowledge at first (meta analysis, etc), but eventually that would run dry and she wouldn’t be able to say anything new about chemistry anymore without any equipment.