So what do you call it when a newborn deer learns to walk? Is that “deer learning?”

I’d like to hear more about your idea of a “desired outcome” and how it applies to a single celled organism or a goldfish.

To be fair, I think we underestimate just how brute-force our intelligence developed. We as a species have been evolving since single-celled organisms, mutation by mutation over billions of years, and then as individuals our nervous systems have been collecting data from dozens of senses (including hormone receptors) 24/7 since embryo. So before we were even born, we had some surface-level intuition for the laws of physics and the control of our bodies. The robot is essentially starting from square 1. It didn't get to practice kicking Mom in the liver for 9 months - we take it for granted, but that's a transferable skill.

Granted, this is not exactly analogous to how a neural network is trained, but I don't think it's wise to assume that there's something "magic" in us like a "soul", when the difference between biological and digital neural networks could be explained by our "richer" ways of interacting with the environment (a body with senses and mobility, rather than a token/image parser) and the need for a few more years/decades of incremental improvements to the models and hardware