I think all the things we identify as “intelligence” (including data-efficient learning) are things that the neocortex does, working in close conjunction with the thalamus (which might as well be a 7th layer of the neocortex), hippocampus (temporarily stores memories before gradually transferring them back to the neocortex because the neocortex needs a lot of repetition to learn), basal ganglia (certain calculations related to reinforcement learning including the value function calculation I think), and part of the cerebellum (you can have human-level intelligence without a cerebellum, but it does help speed things up dramatically, I think mainly by memoizing neocortex calculations).
Anyway, it’s not 100% proven, but my read of the evidence is that the neocortex in mammals is a close cousin of the pallium in lizards and birds and dinosaurs, and the neocortex & bird/lizard pallium do the same calculations using the same neuronal circuits descended from the same ancestor which also did those calculations. The neurons are arranged differently in space in the neocortex vs pallium, but that doesn’t matter, the network is what matters. Some early version of the pallium dates back at least as far as lampreys, if memory serves, and I would not be remotely surprised if the lamprey proto-pallium (whatever it’s called) did data-efficient learning, albeit learning relatively simple things like 1D time-series data or 3D environments. (That doesn’t sound like it has much in common with human intelligence and causal reasoning and rocket science but I think it really does...long story...)
Paul Cisek wrote this paper which I found pretty thought-provoking. He’s now diving much deeper into that and writing a book, but says he won’t be done for a few years.
I don’t know anything about octopuses by the way. That could be independent.
I think all the things we identify as “intelligence” (including data-efficient learning) are things that the neocortex does, working in close conjunction with the thalamus (which might as well be a 7th layer of the neocortex), hippocampus (temporarily stores memories before gradually transferring them back to the neocortex because the neocortex needs a lot of repetition to learn), basal ganglia (certain calculations related to reinforcement learning including the value function calculation I think), and part of the cerebellum (you can have human-level intelligence without a cerebellum, but it does help speed things up dramatically, I think mainly by memoizing neocortex calculations).
Anyway, it’s not 100% proven, but my read of the evidence is that the neocortex in mammals is a close cousin of the pallium in lizards and birds and dinosaurs, and the neocortex & bird/lizard pallium do the same calculations using the same neuronal circuits descended from the same ancestor which also did those calculations. The neurons are arranged differently in space in the neocortex vs pallium, but that doesn’t matter, the network is what matters. Some early version of the pallium dates back at least as far as lampreys, if memory serves, and I would not be remotely surprised if the lamprey proto-pallium (whatever it’s called) did data-efficient learning, albeit learning relatively simple things like 1D time-series data or 3D environments. (That doesn’t sound like it has much in common with human intelligence and causal reasoning and rocket science but I think it really does...long story...)
Paul Cisek wrote this paper which I found pretty thought-provoking. He’s now diving much deeper into that and writing a book, but says he won’t be done for a few years.
I don’t know anything about octopuses by the way. That could be independent.