HamletHenna comments on Do Humans Want Things? - Less Wrong
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Comments (52)
This is wrong:
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, ...
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?
Psychophysics also provides examples of absolute value encodings over external stimuli such as the thresholds of pain, the absolute threshold of hearing, and absolute pitch.