I find this analogy kind of confusing? Wouldn’t the analogous thing be to say that our DNA doesn’t understand, uh, how we are able to skateboard? But like, we generally don’t regard DNA as understanding anything, so that not unexpected.

Where does “we can’t tell whether a person possesses the skill of ‘skateboarding’?” fit in with, DNA not encoding anything specific to skateboarding? It isn’t as if we designed our genome and therefore if our genome did hard-code skateboarding skill that we would therefore (as designers of our genome) have full understanding of how skateboarding skill works at the neuron level.

I recognize that a metaphor/analogy/whatever does not have to extend to all parts of something, and indeed most metaphors/analogies/whatever fail at some point if pushed too far. But, I don’t understand how the commonalities you are pointing to between [NN architecture : full NN network with the specific weights] and [human genome : the whole behavior of a person’s brain including all the facts, behaviors, etc. that they’ve learned throughout their life] is supposed to apply to the example of _knowing_that_ a person knows how to skateboard?

It is quite possible that I’m being dense.

Could you please elaborate on the analogy / the point you are making with the analogy?