It's not magic, but it's just magic enough to conclusively disprove "brain regions are fixed function" - if information-theoretic reasons somehow weren't enough for you.

Way too much weird re-routing and re-purposing can happen in the brain for that to be the case.

Human brain implements a learning algorithm of some kind - neuroscientists disagree on the specifics, but not on the core notion. It doesn't ship with all the knowledge it needs, or anywhere close. To work well, it has to learn, and it has to learn by getting information from the environment.

> It's not magic, but it's just magic enough to conclusively disprove "brain regions are fixed function"

You cannot confidently disprove anything unless you can back your statement.

> information-theoretic reasons somehow weren't enough for you.

Your “Information-theoric reasoning” is completely pointless though.

> Human brain implements a learning algorithm of some kind - neuroscientists disagree on the specifics, but not on the core notion. It doesn't ship with all the knowledge it needs, or anywhere close. To work well, it has to learn, and it has to learn by getting information from the environment

Nobody said otherwise. But that doesn't mean everything is being learned either. There are many things a human is born with that it doesn't have to learn. (It's pretty obvious when you have kids: as primates humans are naturally attracted to climbing trees, and they will naturally collect stones and sticks, which is what primitive tools are made of).

And all of that "innate knowledge" still fits into under 1 gigabyte of compressed DNA.

1 gigabyte. That's the absolute limit of how much "innate knowledge" a human brain can have in it! Every single instinct, every learning algorithm, every innate behavior and every little cue a brain uses to build itself has to fit into a set of data just 1 gigabyte in size.

Clearly, nature must have found some impressively large levers - to be able to build and initialize brain with 90 billion connected neurons in it off something this small.

> all of that "innate knowledge" still fits into under 1 gigabyte of compressed DNA.

Yes, the same way Turing completeness fits in 8bits, which is both perfectly true (see rule 110) and perfectly useless to derive any conclusion about the limitation of innate knowledge.

Similarly, just because you can encode the number Pi in just two bytes (the ASCII for both “p” and “i” letters) it doesn't mean the number contains only two bytes of entropy.

Your comment is completely nonsensical. Are you disagreeing just to disagree?

Applying information theory out of its domain is nonsensical, yes. That's the point.

And for that reason, your argument about 1GB of data makes absolutely no sense at all.

Bullshit. We're talking about information, and were always talking about information.

The problem is that you claim that you can quantify it based on bad use of irrelevant tools.