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It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from s

It's because humans (and other animals) have enormous innate capacities and knowledge which makes learning new things much much simpler than if you start from scratch. It's not really because of human's computational capacity.

MrScruff 1y ago
By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing. I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  I'm not arguing against computational theory of mind, I'm just saying that innate behaviours don't require the same level of scale as learnt ones. Existing at birth is not the same thing as innate. Puberty is innate but it is not present at birth.
  - MrScruff 1y ago
    That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represent?
    - rafaelmn 1y ago
      This is obviously wrong from genetic defects that cause predictable development problems in specialized areas. They are innate but not present at birth.
xnx 1y ago
> enormous innate capacities and knowledge Hundreds of millions of years of trial-and-error biological pre-training where survival/propagation is the reward function
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  Yes but it remains innate to the individual.
Nopoint2 1y ago
There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses. Maybe a way to AGI could be figuring out how to combine a video generator with a LLM or something similar in a way that allows it to understand things intuitively, instead of doing just lots and lots of some statistical bullsit.
- Jensson 1y ago
  > There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? We do have that, ever felt fear of heights? That isn't learned, we are born with it. Same with fear of small moving objects like spiders or snakes. Such things are learned/stored very different from memories, but its certainly there and we can see animals also have those. Like cats gets very scared of objects that are long and appear suddenly, like a cucumber, since their genetic instincts thinks its a snake.
  - Nopoint2 1y ago
    Of course it is learned, and fear is triggered by anything unfamiliar, that causes a high reconstruction error. Because it means you don't understand it, and it could be dangerous. We are just not used to encoding anything so deep below the eye level, and it freaks us out.
    - Jensson 1y ago
      Do you really think every single ant is learning all that on its own? And if ants can store that in their DNA, why don't you think other animals can? DNA works just fine as generic information storage, there are obviously a ton of behaviors and information encoded there from hundreds of millions of years of survival of the fittest.
    - 1y ago

MrScruff 1y ago

By innate do you mean evolved/instinctive? Surely even evolved behaviour must be expressed as brain function, and therefore would need a brain capable of handling that level of processing. I don't think it's clear how much of a human brains function exists at birth though, I know it's theorised than even much of the sensory processing has to be learned.

suddenlybananas 1y ago
I'm not arguing against computational theory of mind, I'm just saying that innate behaviours don't require the same level of scale as learnt ones. Existing at birth is not the same thing as innate. Puberty is innate but it is not present at birth.
- MrScruff 1y ago
  That's an interesting point. I can see that, as you say puberty and hormones impact brain function and hence behaviour, and those are inate and not learned. But at least superfically that would appear to be primarily broad behavioural effects, similar to what might be induced by medication. Rather than something that impacts pure abstract problem solving, which I guess is what the Atari games are supposed to represent?
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    This is obviously wrong from genetic defects that cause predictable development problems in specialized areas. They are innate but not present at birth.

xnx 1y ago

> enormous innate capacities and knowledge Hundreds of millions of years of trial-and-error biological pre-training where survival/propagation is the reward function

suddenlybananas 1y ago
Yes but it remains innate to the individual.

Nopoint2 1y ago

There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? It just isn't needed. Just like you can find let's say kangaroos in the latent space of an image generator, so we learn abstract concepts and principles of how things work as a bonus of learning to process the senses. Maybe a way to AGI could be figuring out how to combine a video generator with a LLM or something similar in a way that allows it to understand things intuitively, instead of doing just lots and lots of some statistical bullsit.

Jensson 1y ago
> There is just no reason to believe that we are born with some insanely big library of knowledge, and it sounds completely impossible. How would it be stored, and how would we even evolve it? We do have that, ever felt fear of heights? That isn't learned, we are born with it. Same with fear of small moving objects like spiders or snakes. Such things are learned/stored very different from memories, but its certainly there and we can see animals also have those. Like cats gets very scared of objects that are long and appear suddenly, like a cucumber, since their genetic instincts thinks its a snake.
- Nopoint2 1y ago
  Of course it is learned, and fear is triggered by anything unfamiliar, that causes a high reconstruction error. Because it means you don't understand it, and it could be dangerous. We are just not used to encoding anything so deep below the eye level, and it freaks us out.
  - Jensson 1y ago
    Do you really think every single ant is learning all that on its own? And if ants can store that in their DNA, why don't you think other animals can? DNA works just fine as generic information storage, there are obviously a ton of behaviors and information encoded there from hundreds of millions of years of survival of the fittest.
  - 1y ago