In the same way as with actual slates. Saying their present content need not depend on previous content is not the same as saying they were initially blank, or initially identical.
The software is expressed in hardware (you can put me into a coma and I'll come back online), and in most minds it has not bootstrapped itself into domain unspecific universality, and won't get there. Btw. agnosticism requires justification of your degree of uncertainty.
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The human mind is universal (provably so) because you can do exactly what a Universal Turing Machine can do. Now beyond that you are also actually creative - so you can also *comprehend* things. You might like to read BoI/FoR/Popper for sections on "justificationism".
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If 6% of all people cannot learn basic arithmetic, then the human mind is not a universal function approximator. (Turing universality itself is not a very useful criterion, because in the narrow sense it is also fulfilled if you connect twenty mousetraps with a bit of yarn.)
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