I genuinely don't understand your point at all. I am not contesting that instincts exist, and I am not sure what you think the disagreement is. Let me rephrase:

I genuinely don't understand your point at all. I am not contesting that instincts exist, and I am not sure what you think the disagreement is. Let me rephrase: There have been two sides to ANN development: architecture and data. If we're analogizing brains to ANNs like the author is doing, then brains also have an "architectural" component and a "data" component. But we need to be clear that evolution (including individual mutations and epigenetics) shapes the architecture, while lived experience shapes the data. The author is claiming that the experience of billions of years of evolution should actually go into the "data" column, somehow, and that human brains at birth have actually learned from the experience of rodent-lizards that lived 200 million years ago. This is just idiotic, and it does not help that the architecture is completely ignored. Again the problem is a fundamental bait-and-switch in the analogy itself. Instinctual behavior is much better-explained by evolution influencing the architecture of the brain, rather than waving your hands and saying "data, lots of it!" The crying baby is much better explained by an ancestor to all birds and mammals who had a neurological mutation that made it whine (perhaps softly) when it was hungry, not because that lizard finally accumulated enough "evolutionary data" to learn how to cry. (What would that data be?) The neurological mutation is of course purely speculative, but it is plausible, which is not the case for what the author is saying. The author claims quite directly that humans learn from billions of years of animal experiences in a very similar way to how GPT learns from billions of lines of text, which is a preposterous claim that requires extraordinary evidence. No evidence is provided. I am confident that this Substack is quackery.