Suppose the universal-learning-machine side of the debate is correct. Then the genome builds a big within-lifetime learning algorithm, and this learning algorithm does gradient descent (or whatever other learning rule) and thus gradually builds a trained model in the animal’s brain as it gets older and wiser. It’s possible that this trained model will turn out to be modular. It’s also possible that it won’t. I don’t know which will happen—it’s an interesting question. Maybe I could find out the answer by reading that sequence you linked. But whatever the answer is, this question is not related to the evolved-modularity-vs-universal-learning-machine debate. This whole paragraph is universal-learning-machine either way, by assumption.
By contrast, the evolved modularity side of the debate would NOT look like the genome building a big within-lifetime learning algorithm in the first place. Rather it would look like the genome building an “intuitive biology” algorithm, and an “intuitive physics” algorithm, and an “intuitive human social relations” algorithm, and a vision-processing algorithm, and various other things, with all those algorithms also incorporating learning (somehow—the details here tend to be glossed over IMO).
I think that’s a different topic.
We’re talking about the evolved-modularity-vs-universal-learning-machine debate.
Suppose the universal-learning-machine side of the debate is correct. Then the genome builds a big within-lifetime learning algorithm, and this learning algorithm does gradient descent (or whatever other learning rule) and thus gradually builds a trained model in the animal’s brain as it gets older and wiser. It’s possible that this trained model will turn out to be modular. It’s also possible that it won’t. I don’t know which will happen—it’s an interesting question. Maybe I could find out the answer by reading that sequence you linked. But whatever the answer is, this question is not related to the evolved-modularity-vs-universal-learning-machine debate. This whole paragraph is universal-learning-machine either way, by assumption.
By contrast, the evolved modularity side of the debate would NOT look like the genome building a big within-lifetime learning algorithm in the first place. Rather it would look like the genome building an “intuitive biology” algorithm, and an “intuitive physics” algorithm, and an “intuitive human social relations” algorithm, and a vision-processing algorithm, and various other things, with all those algorithms also incorporating learning (somehow—the details here tend to be glossed over IMO).