luminosity comments on Real-world Newcomb-like Problems - Less Wrong

14 Post author: SilasBarta 25 March 2011 08:44PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (35)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: luminosity 26 March 2011 12:07:50AM *  0 points [-]

You would not exist as an evolution-constructed mind unless you would be willing to cause the spreading of your genes at the expense of your life and leisure.

Except that I don't have to be willing to spread my genes, just to undertake actions that will in turn spread my genes. Maybe expense of life is accurate, but surely leisure includes sex and even the pleasures that children can bring.

Even if our desire was solely to spread our genes and not to have sex, this still wouldn't hold true, in that just because you have been constructed by a process of natural selection on creatures that do spread their genes, does not mean that you won't have a mutation that causes you to not feel the need to do so.

Comment author: SilasBarta 26 March 2011 12:26:37AM *  1 point [-]

Except that I don't have to be willing to spread my genes, just to undertake actions that will in turn spread my genes. Maybe expense of life is accurate, but surely leisure includes sex and even the pleasures that children can bring.

Right, that could have been more precisely worded, but I opted for brevity with the understanding that people would know what the more precise version is. That would be something like, "...unless you feel desires to put your life and minimization of effort at risk to do things sufficiently similar to those which, in the ancestral environment, increased inclusive genetic fitness."

Even if our desire was solely to spread our genes and not to have sex, this still wouldn't hold true, in that just because you have been constructed by a process of natural selection on creatures that do spread their genes, does not mean that you won't have a mutation that causes you to not feel the need to do so.

Yes, the relationships are probabilistic, both on the reward side, and (I should have mentioned) on the "you"-side. Likewise, Omega can guess incorrectly that you'll one-box, you may be a "never punish anyone!"-type in a society of defection-punishers, etc.