[sonink]

> If so, then sensory inputs and interaction with the physical through them were absolutely a crucial part of how minds evolved, so I find your approach a priori very unlikely to have a chance at success.

If that was the case, people who were born blind would demonstrate markedly reduced intelligence. I dont think that is the case, but you can correct me if I am wrong. A blind person might take longer to truly 'understand' and 'abstract' something but there is little evidence to believe that capability of abstraction isnt as good as people who can see.

Agree that sensory inputs and interaction were absolutely critical for how the minds evolved, but model training replaces that part when we talk about AI, and not just the evolution.

Evolution made us express emotions when we are hungry for example. But your laptop will also let you know when its battery is out of juice. Human design inspired by evolution can create systems which mimic its behaviour and function.

[tsimionescu]

> If that was the case, people who were born blind would demonstrate markedly reduced intelligence. I dont think that is the case, but you can correct me if I am wrong. A blind person might take longer to truly 'understand' and 'abstract' something but there is little evidence to believe that capability of abstraction isnt as good as people who can see.

No, because the mind of a blind person, even one blind from birth, is still the product of a billion years of evolution of organisms that had sight, sound, touch, smell, etc.

Not to mention, a person who has no sensory input at all (no sight, no sound, no touch, no smell, no taste, nothing at all) is unlikely to have a fully functioning mind. And certainly a baby born like this would not be able to learn anything at all.

Of course, the situation is not 1:1 by any means to AI training, as AI models do get input, it's just of a vastly different nature. It's completely unknown what would happen if we could input language into the mind of an infant "directly", without sensory input of other kinds.

Still, I think it's quite clear that humans minds are essentially born "pre-trained", with good starting weights, and everything we do in life in essentially fine-tuning those weights. I don't think there's any other ways to explain the massive input difference (known as the poverty of the stimulus problem in cognitive science). And this means that there is little insight to draw for better model training from studying individual human learning, and instead you would have to draw inspiration from how the mind evolved.