fwiw the fact that brains work fundamentally differently was my big penny dropping realization after digging into what LLMs are doing. Everything (I assert) a brain does (the function between inputs and outputs) is due to training data. There is no "instinct" and there is no "ROM-driven way to think" in any brain. It's training data all the way down. As a consequence different brains do indeed think in fundamentally different ways.
This is so fundamentally divorced from what we know about cognition in humans or in animals. The idea that we are a pure tabula rasa and only shaped by our "training data" is absurd and false. Just look at the amount of data we need to be able to do things relative to ML models. Look at animals which can do complex tasks moments after birth. We're deeply, deeply shaped by instinct.
Well, everyone being tabula rasa has a point tho. Technically there's no unique physical cause that make development unfold the same for all organisms, or even all humans (see Waddington's epigenetic landscape). It just happens that we develop along very similar trajectories and can draw equivalences between how I think vs how you think. So, from an ontological perspective, if you squint a bit, we all are tabula rasa. But from a phenotypic perspective, of course it's bonkers, you can't teach a frog linear algebra.
