Comment by neom
9 months ago
Neural activity begins around 6 weeks gestation, electrical patterns help establish basic neural circuits, activity dependent neural development shapes connectivity before any sensory input, critical periods where electrical activity literally sculpts brain architecture. Motor patterns get programmed before birth (why babies can suck, grasp, etc.), language processing areas develop structural biases before hearing language, visual cortex develops orientation maps before seeing anything, basic learning algorithms get "wired in" through developmental processes. If a human emerged, was able to function in the world, do things, but had zero electrical activity in the brain, that would be... normal? No: extraordinary.
Humans arrive out of the VJJ with innate neural architectures to be filled and developed - not literal blank slates, there is an OS. The electrical activity during development is literally the biological process that creates our "base programming." LLMs have architectural inductive biases (attention mechanisms, etc.), human brains have evolved architectural biases established through fetal development. We're both "pre-programmed" systems, just through different mechanisms.
Your response about "electrical activity decreases over time" is irrelevant - you weren't talking about adult brain activity, you were talking about the developmental process that creates our initial neural architecture.
tbh: I can't tell if you're engaging in good faith or not.
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