Grognor comments on Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 November 2007 06:39AM

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

Comments (32)

Sort By: Old

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

Comment author: Grognor 28 September 2011 08:37:50PM 5 points [-]

Most of our taste buds are actually in the part of the tongue that food only reaches after swallowing.

I'd hazard a guess that this is also where most of the positive reinforcement circuitry eventually happens, but that might be inferring too much based on what I know. I wish I had a psychoanatomy textbook handy. It might also be that the negative reinforcement circuitry happens mostly on the pre-swallow taste buds, which would handily explain your temporary aversion to chocolate -and- the "taste test" phenomenon wherein humans taste something once and, prior to swallowing, proclaim a permanent dislike of that flavor.

A caution: anyone who reads this comment should not take either J_Thomas's hypothesis or mine as actual evidence. I provided one to illustrate just how reasonable the exact opposite of what he said sounded, i.e., that nothing about digestion provides reinforcement.