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torekp comments on Stanovich, 'The Robot's Rebellion' (mini-review) - Less Wrong
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I'm with you there, but I'm at a loss as to how you can reconcile this with your earlier post.
Where most of the information that composes a person comes from and what function they "should" optimise seem like rather different topics to me.
A lot of what we acquire from our environment is not information that impacts on what our goals are, but rather is used to build a model of the environment - which we then use to help us pursue our goals.
That's true, but some of the information does impact what our goals are. We learn "values" from experience, not just "facts". (I'm putting scare-quotes here because I believe the fact/value dichotomy is often overblown.) This gives the person a place to stand which is neither gene nor meme nor simply a mixture of the two. When we rationally reach reflective equilibrium on our goals, I believe, this will continue to be the case.
A huge amount of the value-related information that we get from our environment comes from other living entities attempting to manipulate us. Sometimes, they negotiate with us, or manipulate our sense data - rather than attempting to affect our values. However, sometimes they attempt to "hijack our brains" - and redirect our values towards their own ends, or those of their makers.
The biggest influences come from other humans, symbionts, pathogens and memes. Basically most goal directedness comes from other living, goal-directed systems - so genes and memes - though not necessarily your own genes and memes.
The next biggest source of human values comes from the theory of self-organising systems. The brain is probably the most important self-organising system involved. It mostly has desires that arise by virtue of it being a large reinforcement learning system. Essentially, the brain sometimes acts as though it wants its own reward signals - and it fulfills those desires by doing things like taking rewarding drugs. The brain was made by genes - but wireheading is not exactly what the genes want.
The next-most significant effect on human values is probably mistakes (e.g. sub-optimal adaptations).
Many humans delight in seeking out noble sources of value - probably for signalling reasons. They do not like hearing that genes and memes are primarily responsible for what they hold most dear - and the next biggest influences are probably wireheading and mistakes.
That's the sort of thing I had in mind. Because our conceptual framework is learned from experience, what we learn to seek is not necessarily what our genes "want". Of course if you place a human being in "the ancestral environment" then you will get learned values that serve the "aim of the genes" reasonably well - but not perfectly. In the modern environment, less so. The brain sometimes wants its own reward signals per se, and more often wants certain distal events that have been favored over the learning process.
Having thus discovered certain activities to be meaningful and rewarding, people go on to tell each other about them. This strongly shapes the meme environment.
How noble or ignoble this is, may be in the eyes of the beholder. It doesn't look so ignoble to me.
The idea of values coming from genes does not say anything about whether those desires are adaptive in the modern environment. Humans desire fat and sugar. Those desires are built in - coded in genes. That they are currently probably maladaptive is a different issue.
Saying that we have desires for chocolate gateau and ice cream that we must have learned from our environment seems like a "less helpful" way of looking at it the situation to me. It is better to regard chocolate gateau and ice cream as being learned associations with things actually valued. If they are to be classified as being "learned values", they are learned instrumental values.
That's a half-truth, or maybe a truth-value-less sentence. One could just as easily say humans desire calories and vitamin C. Fat and sugar just happen to be, in the ancestral environment, means to these ends. Or perhaps humans simply desire survival and reproduction. I'm doubtful that any of these interpretations can claim to be the true one, at least until an individual human endorses one.
"Actually valued" suggests that ice cream is not actually valued except as a means to fat and sugar, which is definitely not true. Just try taking away someone's ice cream and offering lard and sugar in their stead.
That's a half-truth, or maybe a truth-value-less sentence. One could just as easily say humans desire calories and vitamin C.
Calories, yes, vitamin C - probably not. It took quite a while for the link between vitamin C deficiency and the foods containing it to be discovered. Humans apparently don't have an instinctive craving for it - perhaps because their diet is normally saturated with it.
Sure - e.g. the maternal instinct.
So: those are not really different interpretations of the same facts, but statements covering several different desires - so we don't have to choose between them.
It was not an intended implication that fat and suger represent all the human gustatory desires.
We don't have to choose between statements of which desires are "coded in genes", but if we affirm too many of them we'll have more assumptions than are needed to explain the data. Why not just say that a purpose of the genes is to bring it about that in an appropriate environment the organism will consume adequate calories - rather than saying that the genes program a desire for fat? "Desire" is a psychological description first and foremost, and only incidentally, if at all, a term of evolutionary biology.
Do organisms desire fat or calories? They mostly like the associated taste sensations and associated satiety. As I understand it, there are separate taste receptors for fat and sugar - so it is probably better to say that humans desire some types of fat and sugar than to say that they desire calories.
There's little difference - since the way the genes bring about the consumprtion is via desires. FWIW, I didn't just say "fat", I said "fat and sugar" - and they were examples of desires - not an exhaustive list.
Genes build our desires, though - in much the same way that they build our hearts and legs.