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Sniffnoy comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong
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I'm not certain your examples of reference-dependent encoding of sense-data really demonstrate or have much to do with a lack of objective goals. (Of course, the framing effect example demonstrates this plenty well. :P ) As you point out, this is largely just adjusting for irrelevant background, like whether the sun is out, when what we care about has nothing to do with that. This is just throwing away the information at an early stage, rather than later after having explicitly determined that it's irrelevant to our goals.
I agree that the framing effect is more important than the reference-dependence of sense-data encoding. However, the loss of sense-data is not always just "adjusting for irrelevant background", and is not always throwing away something we would later have decided is "irrelevant to our goals."
When I first read the post, I thought you were going to say something along the lines of:
"Evolution has optimized us to strip away the irrelevant features when it comes to vision, since it's been vital for our survival. But evolution hasn't done that for things like abstract value, since there's been no selection pressure for that. It's bad that our judgments in cases like the K&T examples don't work more like vision, but that's how it goes".
Indeed, saying "let's make the problem worse" and then bringing up vision feels a bit weird. After all, vision seems like a case where our brain does things exactly right - it ignores the "framing effects" caused by changed lightning conditions and leaves invariant the things that actually matter.
I wrote a response here.
An illuminating (no pun intended) example of when the adjustment to the ambient level of sense-data affects what people think they want would be nice. Without it the whole section seems to detract from your point.
I wrote a response here.
But I'm not raising a puzzle about how people think they want things even when they are behavioristic machines. I'm raising a puzzle about how we can be said to actually want things even when they are behavioristic machines that, for example, exhibit framing effects and can't use neurons to encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli.
Suppose you have a neurological disorder that will be cured by a 140-volt electrical shock. If your brain can't encode value for propositions or simulated states of affairs or anything like that, but only for stimuli, then this reference point business I described means that your brain doesn't have the option of encoding value for a 140-volt electrical shock, because it never receives that kind of information in the first place. The transducer discards information about the objective intensity of the stimuli before the signal reaches the brain.
As Kaj says, this is a smart solution to lots of problems, but it does mean that the brain cannot encode value for the objective intensity of stimuli... at least given what I've explained in this post so far. (Model-based representations of value will be described later.)
Does that make sense?
If the neurological problem is located in the brain, then the brain does record information about the objective intensity of the stimuli, by being cured or not cured.
I'm confused about what the purpose of this example is. There are easier ways to show why not encoding values for propositions is problematic.
Sure, but what I'm saying is that this doesn't happen in a way that allows your neurons to encode value for a 140-volt electrical shock. Perhaps you've already accepted this and find it obvious, but others (e.g. economists) do not. This kind of information about how the brain works constrains our models of human behavior, just like the stochasticity of neuron firing does.
But I'm not trying to show why encoding values for propositions is problematic. I'm trying to say that the brain does not encode values for objective intensities of stimuli.
Given that one could use propositions about objective intensities of stimuli (as you do now, to point out that what's encoded in this particular simple way is not it), the thesis is still unclear.
Sure, but that depends on a different mechanism we don't know much about, then. What I'm saying is that "Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but it can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because the brain doesn't have that information. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
The brain has (some measure of reference/access to) that information, just not in that particular form. And if it has (reference to) that information, it's not possible to conclude that motivation doesn't refer to it. It just doesn't refer to it through exclusively the form of representation that doesn't have the information, but then it would be very surprising if motivation compartmentalized so.
Right. I guess I'm struggling for a concise way to say what I'm trying to say, and hoping you'll interpret me correctly based on the long paragraphs I've written explaining what I mean by these shorter sentences. Maybe something like:
"Whaddyaknow, we discovered a mechanism that actually encodes value for stimuli with neuron firing rates! Ah, but this particular mechanism can't encode value for the objective intensities of stimuli, because this mechanism discards that information at the transducer. So that constrains our theories about the motivation of human behavior."
Also, this doesn't sound right. Why is that behavioral pattern "value"? Maybe it should be edited out of the system, like pain, or reversed, or modified in some complicated way.
Doesn't really help. The problem is that (normative) motivation is the whole thing, particular (unusual) decisions can be formed by any component, so it's unclear how to rule out stuff on the basis of properties of particular better-understood components.
Behavior is easier to analyze, you can see which factors contribute how much, and in this sense you can say that particular classes of behavior are determined mostly by this here mechanism that doesn't have certain data, and so behavior is independent from that data. But such conclusions won't generalize to normative motivation, because prevailing patterns of behavior might be suboptimal, and it's possible to improve them (by exercising the less-prevalent modes of behavior that are less understood), making them depend on things that they presently don't depend on.
What do you mean by 'normative motivation'?
(Strictly speaking, it's not necessary to know something in order to be motivated by it. If a fact is considered relevant, but isn't known, that creates instrumental motivation for finding out what it is! And even if you can't learn something, you might want to establish a certain dependence of the outcome on that fact, no matter what the fact is.)
Ah, understood.
Okay. I understand that it's a fact that the brain doesn't encode values for objective intensities of sensory stimuli. My puzzlement comes from when you say
I don't see the fact as an additional problem for a theory of human values. But there's no point in arguing about this, as I think we'd both agree that any theory of human values would have to accommodate the fact.
Hmmm. Maybe a clearer way to say it is just that this neurobiological finding further constrains our theories. I'll change the wording in the OP, thanks.