[sadhd]

And what does Noam think a human does from the moment his eyes open and the amniotic fluid is drained from his ears? Humans gorge on hundreds of terabytes of data until they reach around puberty. Oh. But it's squishy chemical signals, not gold scratchings on glass. Oh well that's different.

[dang]

Please don't post flamewar-style comments to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[stubish]

A human experiments, predicts, learns and understands. A baby shoves everything in its mouth. It discovers how its actions affect the world, extrapolates, and experiments. It learns metaphor, learns how metaphor is useful to predict similar systems, learns the limitations of metaphor. It isn't just gorging data, it is creating data. It fills in the blanks with guesses and superstition, and maybe even uses reasoning to confirm it's speculation. A baby doesn't just regurgitate, no matter what a sleep deprived parent might think.

[gregjor]

Every parent knows that human children learn to understand language and speak well before they’ve had time to get exposed to “hundreds of terabytes” of meaningful data. This obvious fact informs Chomsky’s work on language acquisition, which led him to posit an innate language capability.

[bagacrap]

I would say humans are pretty good at pattern matching, and thinking of my brain as a "statistical engine" has a lot of intuitive appeal. We are always piecing together an understanding of a scene based on imperfect data.