> brain simply memorizes an awful lot which must work by a different mechanism besides backprop because backprop cannot do one-shot learning
If you look through a neuroscience textbook section on memory systems, it's commonly suggested that the hippocampus does the one shot learning and transfers that over time to the cortex. This is backed up by clinical case studies.
> The brain basically outsources the problem of tunneling through large discontinuities, to cultural/individual trial-and-error and episodic memory
That seems like a good strategy. It also reminds me of AlphaGo's Monte Carlo search + neural network training setup. Since the search is non differential, you do lots of simulations and apply a differentiable DL model to the results to approximate a possibly discontinuous landscape
If you look through a neuroscience textbook section on memory systems, it's commonly suggested that the hippocampus does the one shot learning and transfers that over time to the cortex. This is backed up by clinical case studies.
> The brain basically outsources the problem of tunneling through large discontinuities, to cultural/individual trial-and-error and episodic memory
That seems like a good strategy. It also reminds me of AlphaGo's Monte Carlo search + neural network training setup. Since the search is non differential, you do lots of simulations and apply a differentiable DL model to the results to approximate a possibly discontinuous landscape