For my part, I strongly agree with the first part, and I said something similar in my comment.
For the second part, if we’re talking about within-lifetime brain learning / thinking, we’re talking about online-learning. For example, if I’m having a conversation with someone, and they tell me their name is Fred, and then 2 minutes later I say “Well Fred, this has been a lovely conversation”, I can thank online-learning for my remembering their name. Another example: the math student trying to solve a homework problem (and learning from the experience) is using the same basic algorithms as the math professor trying to prove a new theorem—even if the first is vaguely analogous to “training” and the second to “deployment”.
So then you can say: “Well fine, but online learning is pretty unfashionable in ML today. Can we talk about what the brain’s within-lifetime learning algorithms would look like without online learning?” And I would say: “Ummmm, I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s a coherent or useful thing to talk about. A brain without online-learning would look like unusually severe retrograde [oops I meant anterograde] amnesia.”
That’s not a criticism of what you said. Just a warning that “non-online-learning versions of brain algorithms” is maybe an incoherent notion that we shouldn’t think too hard about. :)
For my part, I strongly agree with the first part, and I said something similar in my comment.
For the second part, if we’re talking about within-lifetime brain learning / thinking, we’re talking about online-learning. For example, if I’m having a conversation with someone, and they tell me their name is Fred, and then 2 minutes later I say “Well Fred, this has been a lovely conversation”, I can thank online-learning for my remembering their name. Another example: the math student trying to solve a homework problem (and learning from the experience) is using the same basic algorithms as the math professor trying to prove a new theorem—even if the first is vaguely analogous to “training” and the second to “deployment”.
So then you can say: “Well fine, but online learning is pretty unfashionable in ML today. Can we talk about what the brain’s within-lifetime learning algorithms would look like without online learning?” And I would say: “Ummmm, I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s a coherent or useful thing to talk about. A brain without online-learning would look like unusually severe
retrograde[oops I meant anterograde] amnesia.”That’s not a criticism of what you said. Just a warning that “non-online-learning versions of brain algorithms” is maybe an incoherent notion that we shouldn’t think too hard about. :)