Vladimir_Nesov comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong

23 Post author: lukeprog 04 August 2011 05:00AM

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

Comments (52)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gjm 04 August 2011 06:57:11PM 6 points [-]

This is wrong:

Human brains can't encode value for the objective properties of external stimuli because human brains throw away that information at the transducer. for two reasons.

  1. Human brains throw away some of that information at the transducer. (What an odd way of putting it, by the way: the whole point is that it isn't the brain that's doing the throwing away.) That means that some objective properties aren't directly available to us. It doesn't mean that no objective properties are available to us. And, in any case, ...

  2. The fact that something isn't directly available to our senses is no reason why we can't value it -- excuse me, I mean no reason why our brains can't encode value for it. I can perfectly easily care whether I have $2 or $2000000 in the bank even though my nervous system isn't wired to my bank's computers. I can perfectly easily care whether my wife loves me even though my assessment of whether (and how much, how consistently, etc.) she does is a matter of subtle inferences. Why on earth should we only be able to value things we can perceive directly?

Further to #2, you could certainly argue that there's a particular kind of valuing -- a particularly immediate and instinctual sort -- that can't be applied to the absolute values of things we perceive only relatively. Maybe so (though I'm not convinced; it's possible, e.g., to feel visceral terror at the prospect of losing your job or having a slow degenerative disease or something, even though those aren't things we're wired up to perceive directly) but so what?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 04 August 2011 07:59:25PM *  0 points [-]

Related: What is Evidence?. There needs to be some way that makes the facts about the world control your actions (beliefs, application of moral considerations), but it can be arbitrarily complicated, so long as some dependence is retained.