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SilasBarta comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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Natural selection is the Omega, and the mind propagated through generations by natural selection is the hitchhiker. The mind only gets to the "decide to pay"/"decide to care for children" if it had the right decision theory before the "rescue"/"copy to next generation".
Does it look similar now?
I see the parallelism. If you ask me, though, I would say that it's not a Parfitian filter, but a prototypical example of a filter to demonstrate that the idea of a filter is valid.
What's the difference?
Perhaps I am being obtuse. Let me try to articulate a third filter, and get your reasoning on whether it is Parfitian or not.
As it happens, there exist certain patterns in nature which may be reliably counted upon to correlate with decision-theory-relevant properties. One example is the changing color of ripening fruit. Now, species with decision theories that attribute significance to these patterns will be more successful at propagating than those that do not, and therefore will be more widespread. This is a filter. Is it Parfitian?
No, because a self-interested agent could regard it as optimal to judge based on that pattern by only looking at causal benefits (CaMELs) to itself. In contrast, an agent could only regard it as optimal to care for offspring (to the extent we observe in parents) based on considering SAMELs, or having a utility function contorted to the point that its actions could more easily be explained by reference to SAMELs.
Let me try to work this out again, from scratch. A Parfit's hitchhiking involves the following steps in order:
Parenthood breaks this chain in two ways: first, the "Omega" in step 2 is not the "Omega" in step 4, and neither of these are the "Omega" in step 5; and second, step 1 never occurs. Remember, "natural selection" isn't an agent - it's a process, like supply and demand, that necessarily happens.
Consider, for contrast, division of labor. (Edit: The following scenario is malformed. See followup comment, below.) Let's say that we have Ag, the agent, and Om, the Omega, in the EEA. Om wants to hunt, but Om has children.
Here, all five steps occur in order, Om is Om throughout and Ag is Ag throughout, and both Om and Ag gain utility (meat, in this case) by the exchange.
Does that clarify our disagreement?
Somewhat, but I'm confused:
Taking your objections out of order:
First: yes, I have the scenario wrong - correct would be to switch Ag and Om, and have:
In this case, Om has already given Ag utility - the ability to hunt - on the expectation that Ag will give up utility - meat - at a later time. I will edit in a note indicating the erroneous formulation in the original comment.
Second: what we are comparing are cases where an agent gives no utility to cooperating with Omega, but uses a decision theory that does so because it boosts the agent's utility (e.g. the prototypical case) and cases where the agent gives positive utility to cooperating with Omega (e.g. if the agent and Omega were the same person and the net change is sufficiently positive). What we need to do to determine if the isomorphism with Parfit's hitchhiker is sufficient is to identify a case where the agent's actions will differ.
It seems to me that the latter case, the agent will give utility to Omega even if Omega never gives utility to the agent. Parfit's hitchhikers do not give money to Nomega, the predictor agent who wasn't at the scene and never gave them a ride - they only give money when the SAMEL is present. Therefore: if a parent is willing to make sacrifices when their parent didn't, the Parfit parallel is poor and Theory 2a is the better fit. Agreed?
I'm not sure I understand all the steps in your reasoning, but I think I can start by responding to your conclusion:
As best I can understand you, yes. If there's e.g. a species that does not care for its young, then one day, one of them does, that action would not be best explained by its recognition (or acting as it if had recognition) of a SAMEL (because there was no "AM") -- it would have to be chalked up to some random change in its psychology.
However -- and this is the important part -- by making that choice, and passing the genes partly responsible for that choice, into the next generation, it opens up the possibility of exploring a new part of the "organism design space": the part which which is improved my modifications predicated on some period of parent-child care [1].
If that change, and further moves into that attractor [2], improve fitness, then future generations will care for their children, with the same psychological impetus as the first one. They feel as if they just care about their children, not that they have to act on a SAMEL. However, 2b remains a superior explanation because it makes fewer assumptions (except for the organism to first have the mutation, which is part of the filter); 2b needn't assume that the welfare of the child is a terminal value.
And note that the combined phenomena do produce functional equivalence to recognition of a SAMEL. If the care-for-children mode enhances fitness, then it is correct to say, "If the organism in n-th generation after mutation did not regard it as optimal to care for the (n+1)th generation, it would not be here", and it is correct to say that that phenomenon is responsible for the organism's decision (such as it is a decision) to care for its offspring. Given these factors, an organism that chooses to care for its offspring is acting equivalently to one motivated by the SAMEL. Thus, 2b can account for the same behavior with fewer assumptions.
As for the EEA DoL arrangement (if the above remarks haven't screened off the point you were making with it): Om can still, er, withhold the children. But let's ignore that possibility on grounds of Least Convenient Possible World. Even so, there are still causal benefits to Ag keeping up its end -- the possibility of making future such arrangements. But let's assume that Ag can still come out ahead by stiffing Om.
In that case, yes, Ag would have to recognize SAMELs to justify paying Om. I'd go on to make the normal point about Ag having already cleaved itself off into the world where there are fewer Om offers if it doesn't see this SAMEL, but honestly, I forgot the point behind this scenario so I'll leave it at that.
(Bitter aside: I wish more of the discussion for my article was like this, rather than being 90% hogged by unrelated arguments about PCT.)
[1] Jaron Lanier refers to this replication mode as "neoteny", which I don't think is the right meaning of the term, but I thought I'd mention it because he discussed the importance of a childhood period in his manifesto that I just read.
[2] I maybe should have added in the article that the reasoning "caring for children = good for fitness" only applies to certain path-dependent domains of attraction in the design space, and doesn't hold for all organisms.
This may not be my true objection (I think it is abundantly clear at this point that I am not adept at identifying my true objections), but I just don't understand your objection to 2a. As far as I can tell, it boils down to "never assume that an agent has terms in its utility functions for other agents", but I'm not assuming - there is an evolutionary advantage to having a term in your utility function for your children. By the optimization criteria of evolution, the only reason not to support a child is if you are convinced that the child is either not related or an evolutionary dead-end (at which point it becomes "no child of mine" or some such). In contrast, the Parfit-hitchhiker mechanism involves upholding contracts, none of which your child offered, and therefore seems an entirely unrelated mechanism at the level of the individual organism.
(Regarding my hypothetical, I was merely trying to demonstrate that I understood the nature of the hypothetical - it has no further significance.)
You should put that in the article. (True, it's a causal iteration rather than an acausal prediction. But it'll still make the article clearer.)
Thanks for the suggestion, I've added it.