But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain.
So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB port, but it definitely can be programmed.
Training is feeding the "complex electrical circuit" some input data, repeating it as nauseam in hope that somehow, the machine manages to store and interpret enough of this knowledge to do something with it.
Programming is just throwing data somewhere into some memory and instructing the processor to interpret this data as instructions to follow.
There is no such thing as a processor in the brain that somehow would read some memory somewhere and execute a set of actions.
It’s just « eyes see cake. I know that grabbing it and eating it releases dopamine so I’ll send the required signals to get this into mouth » it’s not ./eat_cake -f --ignore-consequences
I doubt that computers would be as useful as they are if some coach had to train brain-based computers what is Excel and how it should work.
This feels a little bit like a rhetorical trick. You're right that there is _something_ similar about training a person and programming a computer, but I'd hardly call the two things directly analogous. It strains the definition of the word train to say you trained a computer with a python script and it strains the definition of the word programmed to say you programmed a person to play the cello.
Tech people see everything as essentially similar to tech, but its come to be my understanding that biological systems are a fundamentally different kind of thing than technological ones.
But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain.
So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB port, but it definitely can be programmed.