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SilasBarta comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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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.)
No, my objection is: "never assume more terminal values (terms in UF) than necessary", and I've shown how you can get away with not assuming that parents terminally value their children -- just as a theoretical exercise of course, and not to deny the genuine heartfelt love that parents have for their children.
There is an evolutionary advantage to having a cognitive system that outputs the action "care for children even at cost to self". At a psychological level, this is accomplished by the feeling of "caring" and "love". But is that love due to a utility function weighting, or to a decision theory that (acts as if it recognizes) SAMELs? The mere fact of the psychology, and of the child-favoring acts does not settle this. (Recall the problem of how a ordering of outcomes can be recast as any combination of utility weightings and probabilities.)
You can account for the psychological phenomenon more parsimoniously [1] by assuming the action results from choice-machinery that implicitly recognizes SAMELs -- and on top of that, get a bonus explanation of why a class of reasoning (moral reasoning) feels different -- it's the kind that mustn't be convinced by the lack of a causal benefit to the self.
My version is precisely written to exclude contracts -- the ideal PH inferences still go through, and so natural selection (which I argue is a PF) is sufficiently similar. If they don't "attach" themselves to a child-favoring decision theory, they simply don't get "rescued" into the n-th generation of that gene's existence. No need to find an isomorphism to a contract.
[1] Holy Shi-ite -- that's three p-words with a different initial consonant sound!
Why does the cognitive system that identifies SAMELs fire when you have a child? The situation is not visibly similar to that of Parfit's hitchhiker. Unless you are suggesting that parenthood simply activates the same precommitment mechanism that the decision theory uses when Parfit-hitchhiking...?
I don't understand the point of these questions. You're stuck with the same explanatory difficulties with the opposite theory: why does the cognitive system that identifies _changes in utility function_ fire when you have a child? Does parenthood activate the same terminal values that a PH survivor does upon waking up?
A utility function need not change when a child is born. After all, a utility function is a mapping from states-of-the-world to utilities and the birth of a child is merely a change in the state of the world.
Nonetheless, utility mapping functions can change as a result of information which doesn't betoken a change in the state-of-the-world, but merely in your understanding your own desires. For example, your first taste of garlic ice cream. Or, more to the point, new parents sometimes report dramatic changes in outlook simply from observation of their baby's first smile. The world has not changed, but somehow your place within it has.
See sibling reply to Robin. How are you showing a explanatory advantage to attributing the behavior to utility functions rather than SAMEL recognition? (Or what were you otherwise trying to establish?)
I wasn't trying to show an advantage. You asked a question about my preferred explanatory framework. I interpreted the question to be something like, "How does the birth of a child trigger a particular special cognitive function?". My answer was that it doesn't. The birth of a baby is a change in the state of the world, and machinery for this (Bayesian updating) is already built in.
If you insist that I show an explanatory advantage, I would make two (not intended to be very convincing!) points:
Okay, but if your preferred explanatory framework is strictly worse per the MML formalism (equivalent to rationalist Occam's razor), then that would be a reason that my explanation is preferred.
You claim that my explanation fails by this metric:
However, the two theories we're deciding between (2a and 2b) don't explicitly involve SAMELs in either case. [1]
The only entity in 2b that is not in 2a is the claim that parents are limited to implementing decision theories capable of surviving natural selection. But as I said in footnote 2, this doesn't penalize it under Occam's Razor, because that must be assumed in both cases, so there's no net penalty for 2b -- implications of existing assumptions do not count toward the complexity/length of your explanation (for reasons I can explain in greater depth if you wish).
But to be honest, I'm losing track of the point being established by your objections (for which I apologize), so I'd appreciate it if you could (for my sake) explicitly put them back in the context of the article and this exchange.
[1] Before you glare in frustration at my apparent sudden attempt to throw SAMELs under the bus: the thesis of the article does involve SAMELs, but at that point, it's either explaining more phenomena (i.e. psychology of moral intuitions), or showing the equivalence to acting on SAMELs.
Ok, I accept your argument that Occam is neutral between you and I. SAMELs aren't involved at decision time in 2b, just as "Inclusive fitness" and "Hamilton's rule" aren't involved at decision time in 2a.
I will point out though, since we are looking only at the present, that the utility function in 2a can, in principle, be examined using "revealed preference", whereas your purely selfish child-neutral utility function is a theoretical construct which would be hard to measure, even in principle.
Without Occam, I have to fall back on my second objection, the one I facetiously named "Perplexed's tweezers". I simply don't understand your theory well enough to criticize it. Apparently your decision theory (like my offspring-inclusive utility function) is installed by natural selection. Ok, but what is the decision theory you end up with? I claim that my evolution-installed decision theory is just garden-variety utility maximization. What is your evolution-installed decision theory?
If you made this clear already and I failed to pick up on it, I apologize.
I like the tweezers, but would like a better name for it.
As Perplexed said, there is no requirement that the utility function change - and, in fact, no reason to believe that it does not already have positive terms for children before reproduction. A lot of people report wanting children.
I'm asking these questions because we clearly have not established agreement, and I want to determine why. I assume that either we are using conflicting data, applying incompatible rules of inference, or simply misreading each other's writing. It was this last possibility I was probing with that last question.
Okay, but by the same token, there's no need to assume recognition of the SAMEL (that favors producing and caring for children) changes. (And if it matters, a lot of people report not wanting children, but then wanting to care for their children upon involuntary parenthood.)
None of the things you're pointing out seem to differentiate the utility function-term explanation from the SAMEL-recognition explanation.
That's a test that favors the SAMEL explanation, I think.
So you're agreeing with me in this one respect? (I don't mean to sound confrontational, I just want to make sure you didn't reverse something by accident.)
Right - here's what I've got.
The pattern of "not wanting children, but then wanting to spend resources to care for the children" is better explained by a SAMEL pattern than by a utility function pattern. The fact of people wanting children can be sufficiently explained by the reasons people give for wanting children: a desire for a legacy, an expected sense of fulfillment from parenthood, etcetera. Finally, the fact that this is a SAMEL pattern doesn't mean that the adaptation works on SAMEL patterns - the ability of Parfit's hitchhiker to precommit to paying Omega is a separate adaptation from the childrearing instinct.
I spoke correctly - I didn't express agreement on the broader issue because I don't want to update too hastily. I'm still thinking.