Comment on Uncategories and empty categories

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 21:49:07 GMT

Your cognitive algorithms, executed in a human body, maximize its inclusive genetic fitness.

No, they don't. They simply, straightforwardly don't. Eating sugar instead of fish, or using birth control, browsing the web (when I could be having sex to increase my count of offspring), and remaining loyal to my fiancee (when I could plainly get better stock than her should I sincerely attempt to maximize the count and fitness of my offspring) are all behaviors generated by my cognitive algorithms that straightforwardly seek goals other than inclusive genetic fitness (in this case: two sensual pleasures, one intellectual one, and a combination of pair-bonded attachment and keeping up the moral trust in our relationship).

I have feelings, which I enjoy. "I" have values which are not aligned with the values of my genes.

There is no need for scare-quotes: just because your individuality does not correspond to an immortal, supernatural soul doesn't mean it corresponds to nothing at all.

But they aren't terminal values in the sense required by Friendly AI theory.

In which case it is the theory that requires correction, not the lower-level (lower-level in the Hierarchical Bayesian sense, closer to the evidence) belief that we have values.

One of the many problems with FAI theory, as Eliezer has written about it, is that you want to "improve" human cognition.

Actually, the chief problem with FAI theory as written by Eliezer is that there simply isn't much of it!

This involves looking at things humans do and deciding which things are values, and which are errors, so you can eliminate the errors but keep the values. But I don't know any way to do this other than tracing all the values back to the terminal values, keeping those, and throwing out the instrumental values.

But it turns out that everything we, the conscious riders on our physical bodies, value, is instrumental.

Our values are only instrumental from the point of view of evolution. That's not an objective point of view: in order to decide that our values are heuristics for maximizing inclusive genetic fitness, you first have to assume very naive definitions of "terminal" (something like: goal of the "least-caused" optimization process) and "instrumental" (something like: goal of a "more-caused" optimization process).

The issue is, of course, that humans don't particularly care (or, much of the time, know) what caused us, and also that locating evolution as the least-caused optimizer is incorrect: entropy is the least-caused optimizer (in fact, it's the only elemental force of optimization in the universe: it drives the arrow of time).

Even this already gives us a way to straightforwardly measure which goals and values are terminal, and which instrumental: the precise causal processes underlying an instrumental goal are a matter of great evaluative import to our human cognitive algorithms, whereas the precise causal processes underlying a terminal goal are a matter of no import at all. When you stop caring how your goal/value/feeling got there, and only care about fulfilling it, you've found a terminal goal/value/feeling.

To take a common example: love! It's true, terminal love when you simply don't give half a damn how it's implemented!

Now, to get further on this I'll need a decent theory of how conceptual and causal/generative abstraction take place in humans, how we get from "chair" to "big cloud of buzzing probability clouds of quarks" and back again, but that kind of progress on human cognitive algorithms and evaluative judgements will give us a solid way to talk about terminal versus instrumental: when the details at the lower-level of reality can be thrown out without altering the evaluative judgement, you've found something that is terminally relevant, and from which value/relevance/usefulness/utility flows backwards into other things during the probabilistic backwards-chaining process the human mind seems to use for planning.

Once again: just because your human concepts do not correspond to objects at the most ontologically basic and causally early levels of reality does not mean they fail to correspond to anything. IMNSHO, if you can find it in yourself to assent to chair realism, you should equally assent to value realism: both those concepts correspond to real things, even if "values" needs reforming (a change in the induced conceptual definition needed to correspond to the appropriate data) from its earlier "innate feature of the world" formulation in order to do it.

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