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Yvain comments on The Blue-Minimizing Robot - Less Wrong
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I suspect Richard would say that the robot's goal is minimizing its perception of blue. That's the PCT perspective on the behavior of biological systems in such scenarios.
However, I'm not sure this description actually applies to the robot, since the program was specified as "scan and shoot", not "notice when there's too much blue and get rid of it.". In observed biological systems, goals are typically expressed as perception-based negative feedback loops implemented in hardware, rather than purely rote programs OR high-level software algorithms. But without more details of the robot's design, it's hard to say whether it really meets the PCT criterion for goals.
Of course, from a certain perspective, you could say at a high level that the robot's behavior is as if it had a goal of minimizing its perception of blue. But as your post points out, this idea is in the mind of the beholder, not in the robot. I would go further as to say that all such labeling of things as goals occurs in the minds of observers, regardless of how complex or simple the biological, mechanical, electronic, or other source of behavior is.
Although I find PCT intriguing, all the examples of it I've found have been about simple motor tasks. I can take a guess at how you might use the Method of Levels to explain larger-level decisions like which candidate to vote for, or whether to take more heroin, but it seems hokey, I haven't seen any reputable studies conducted at this level (except one, which claimed to have found against it) and the theory seems philosophically opposed to conducting them (they claim that "statistical tests are of no use in the study of living control systems", which raises a red flag large enough to cover a small city)
I've found behaviorism much more useful for modeling the things I want to model; I've read the PCT arguments against behaviorism and they seem ill-founded - for example, they note that animals sometimes auto-learn and behaviorist methodological insistence on external stimuli shouldn't allow that, but once we relax the methodological restrictions, this seems to be a case of surprise serving the same function as negative reinforcement, something which is so well understood that neuroscientists can even point to the exact neurons in charge of it.
Richard's PCT-based definition of goal is very different from mine, and although it's easily applicable to things like controlling eye movements, it doesn't have the same properties as the philosophical definition of "goal", the one that's applicable when you're reading all the SIAI work about AI goals and goal-directed behavior and such.
By my definition of goal, if the robot's goal were to minimize its perception of blue, it would shoot the laser exactly once - at its own visual apparatus - then remain immobile until turned off.
Ironically, quite a lot of human beings goals would be more easily met in such a way, and yet we still go around shooting our lasers at blue things, metaphorically speaking.
Or, more to the point, systems need not efficiently work towards their goals' fulfillment.
In any case, your comments just highlight yet again the fact that goals are in the eye of the beholder. The robot is what it is and does what it does, no matter what stories our brains make up to explain it.
(We could then go on to say that our brains have a goal of ascribing goals to things that appear to be operating of their own accord, but this is just doing more of the same thing.)
Can you spell out the philosophical definition? My previous comment, which I posted before reading this, made only a vague guess at the concept you had in mind: "this sort of conscious, reflective, adaptive attempt to achieve what we 'really' want".
I think we agree, especially when you use the word "reflective". As opposed to, say, a reflex, which is an unconscious, nonreflective effort to acheive something which evolution or our designers decided to "want" for us. When the robot's reflection that shooting the hologram projector instead of the hologram fails to motivate it to do so, I start doubting its behaviors are goal-driven, and suspecting they're reflexive.