> This misses that evolution has been pre-training the human cognitive architecture - brain, limbic system, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, coevolved viral and bacterial ecosystems - for millions of years. We're not a tabula rasa training at birth to perfectly fit whatever set of training data we're presented. Far from it. Human learning is more akin to RAG
Yes, but.
The human genome isn't that big (3.1 gigabases), and most of that is shared with other species that aren't anything like as intelligent — it's full of stuff that keeps us physically alive, lets us digest milk as adults, darkens our skin when exposed to too much UV so we don't get cancer, gives us (usually) four limbs with (usually) five digits that have keratin plates on their tips, etc.
That pre-training likely gives us innate knowledge of smiles and laughter, of the value judgment that pain is bad and that friendship is good, and (I suspect from my armchair) enough* of a concept of gender that when we hit puberty we're not all bisexual by default.
Also, there's nothing stopping someone from donating their genome to be used as a pre-training system, if we could decode the genome well enough to map out pre-training like that.
* which may be some proxy for it, e.g. "arousal = ((smell exogenous sex hormone) and (exogenous hormone xor endogenous hormone))", which then gets used to train the rest of our brains for specific interests — evolution is full of hack jobs like that