Wiseman comments on Rebelling Within Nature - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 July 2008 12:32PM

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Comment author: Wiseman 14 July 2008 06:22:54AM 0 points [-]

I don't get this side debate between Eliezer and Caledonian.

Caledonian's original comment was "Deeper goals and preferences can result in the creation and destruction of shallower ones", which cites a common and accepted belief in cognitive science that there is such a thing as hierarchical goal systems, which might explain human behavior. Nothing controversial there.

Eliezer responds by saying that emotions, not goals, have to be flat, and further, that "each facet of ourselves that we judge, is judged by the whole", which is only ambiguously related to both goals and emotions.

Now Caledonian, did you mean something other than just generic goals to explain this conflict?

Or Eliezer, do you really believe that a goal system is necessarily flat, or that emotions == goals? If so, under what pretense?