If the brain were naturally a universal learner, then surely we wouldn't have to learn universal learning (e.g. we wouldn't have to learn to overcome cognitive biases, Bayesian reasoning wouldn't be a recent discovery, etc.)? The system seems too gappy and glitchy, too full of quick judgement and prejudice, to have been designed as a universal learner from the ground up.
You are conflating the ideas of universal learning and rational thinking. They are not the same thing.
I'm a strong believer in the idea that the human intelligence emerges from a strong... (read more)
Hmm, but isn't this conflating "learning" in the sense of "learning about the world/nature" with "learning" in the sense of "learning behaviours"? We know the brain can do the latter, it's whether it can do the former that we're interested in, surely?
IOW, it looks like you're saying precisely that the brain is not a ULM (in the sense of a machine that learns about nature), it is rather a machine that approximates a ULM by cobbling together a bunch of evolved and learned behaviours.
It's adept at learning (in the sense of learning reactive behaviours that satisfice conditions) but only proximally adept at learning about the world.
We don't learn rational behavior, we learn whatever behavior the learning system rationally has computed is what is needed to produce the most rewards.
Yes, this. But it is so easy to make mistakes when interpreting this statement, that I feel it requires dozen warnings to prevent readers from oversimplifying it.
For example, the behavior we learn is the behavior that produced most rewards in the past, when we were trained. If the environment changes, what we do may no longer give rewards in the new environment. Until we learn what produces rewards in the... (read more)
You are conflating the ideas of universal learning and rational thinking. They are not the same thing.
I'm a strong believer in the idea that the human intelligence emerges from a strong... (read more)
Yes, this. But it is so easy to make mistakes when interpreting this statement, that I feel it requires dozen warnings to prevent readers from oversimplifying it.
For example, the behavior we learn is the behavior that produced most rewards in the past, when we were trained. If the environment changes, what we do may no longer give rewards in the new environment. Until we learn what produces rewards in the... (read more)