The way the brain does it is by giving users a largely untrained model that they themselves have to train over the next 20 years for it to be of any use.

It is extremely trained already. Everyone alive was born with the ability for all their organs and bodily function to work autonomously.

A ton of that is probably encoded elsewhere, but no doubt the brain plays a huge part. And somehow, it's all reconstructed for each new "device".

Sometimes. Foals are born (almost) able to walk. There are occasions where evolution baked the model into the genes.

Yeah that example came to my mind too.

I suspect there may be trade off undergoing evolutionary selection here, where for some organisms a behaviour is more important from the offset, it's worth encoding more of the behaviour into genes, at what cost I wonder?

It's also possible there is some other mechanism going on at an embryonic stage, a kind of pre-training.

I suspect some of the division is also defined by how complex the task is, or how sensitive the model is to it's own neurons (kind of like PNN). I don't have a well rounded argument, but my instinct is that encoding or pre-training walking is far easier than seeing. Not to mention basic quadrupedal walking/standing is far easier than bipedal, they can learn the more complex coordinated movements after.

In the end, it's a life-long process.

Some parts are copiable, but not the more abstract things like the human intellect, for lack of a better word.

We are not even born with what you might consider basic mental faculties, for example it might seem absurd, but we have to learn to see... We are born with the "hardware" for it, a visual cortex, an eye, all defined by our genes, but it's actually trained from birth, there is even a feedback loop that causes the retina to physically develop properly.

They raised some cats from birth in an environment with only vertically-oriented edges, none horizontal. Those cats could not see horizontally-oriented things. https://computervisionblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/cats-and...

Likewise, kittens with an eye patch over an eye in the same time period remain blind in that eye forever.

Wow, that's a horrific way of proving that theory.

Geez poor kitties, but that is interesting.

Another example:

Children who were "raised in the wild" or locked in a room by themselves have shown to be incapable of learning full human language.

The working theory is that our brains can only learn certain skills at certain times of brain development/ages.

We should also consider the effects of trauma on those brains. If you’ve ever spent time around people with extreme trauma they are very much in their own heads and can’t focus outside themselves long enough to focus enough to learn anything. It definitely impacts intellectual capacity. Humans are social animals and anyone raised without proper socializing and intimacy and nurturing will inevitably end up traumatized.

There's indeed a nice trick to be learned from cognitive science focused in biological cognition: the mind is embodied and embedded. Which means, roughly, that it is not portable. It doesn't store things like "glass at position x,y" but only "glass is at a small movement of the hand towards the right". Consequently, whatever gets encoded only makes sense within a given body and only inasmuch as it relied on its environment (with humans, that includes social environments). The good news is that, despite being not portable, this reliance on physical properties might be a step in the right direction, after all.