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Here's an interesting question for you: why is it important that you consider this non-universal? What value does it provide you for me to concede an exception, or what difference will it make in your thinking if I say "yes" or "no"? I am most curious.
(Meanwhile, I agree with your summation as an accurate, if incomplete restatement of the bulk of my point.)
Because I'm trying to make sense of your position, but I don't think I can with such a strict conclusion. I don't see any fundamental reason why someone couldn't form preferences more or less directly mediated by reality, it just seems that in practice, we don't.
If you're asking why I'm bringing up universality, it seemed clear that your claims about preferences were universal in scope until you brought up "X is not about Y". "Must logically be" and "tends to be in practice" are pretty different types of statement.
You didn't answer my questions.
I mean, you said some things that sound like answers, but they're not answers to the questions I asked. Here they are again:
and
Your almost-answer was that you don't think you can "make sense" of my position with a strict conclusion. Why is that? What would it mean for there to be a strict conclusion? How, specifically, would that be a problem?
I didn't answer this because it's predicated on an assumption that has no origin in the conversation. I never claimed that it was "important" for me to consider this non-universal. As per being "liberal in what I accept" in the realm of communication, I tried to answer the nearest meaningful question I thought you might actually be asking. I thought the phrase "If you're asking why I'm bringing up universality" made my confusion sufficiently clear.
If you really do mean to ask me why I think it's important that I believe in some property of preference formation, then either I've said something fairly obvious to that end that I'm not remembering (or finding), or you're asserting your own inferences as the basis of a question, instead of its substance. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt that I've misunderstood them in such cases, rather than just assume they're speaking manipulatively.
No particular value in mind. I suppose the greatest value would be in you solidly refuting such exceptions in a way that made sense to me, as that would be a more surprising (therefore more informative) outcome. If you the concede the exception, I don't gain any additional insight, so that's of fairly neutral value.
Not really sure yet, especially in the "no" case (since in that case you may have reasons I haven't yet thought of or understood). I suppose in the "yes" case I'd have greater confidence that I knew what you were talking about if I encountered similar concepts in your comments elsewhere. This discussion has had some difference on my thinking: I don't think I understood the thrust of your point when I originally complained that your distinction lacked relevance.
By strict conclusion, I mean "preferences are modeled strictly in terms of the map: it is logically impossible to a hold preference expressed in terms of something other than that which is expressed in the map". This seems very nearly true, but vulnerable to counterexamples when taken as a general principle or logical result of some other general principle. I'll elaborate if you'd like, but I thought I'd clarify that you meant it that way. If you didn't, theoretical or speculative counter-examples aren't particularly relevant.
I can imagine that, in principle, some other sort of mind than a human's might be capable of being a counterexample, apart from, say, the trivial example of a thermostat, which shows a "preference" for reality being a certain way. An AI could presumably be built so that its preferences were based on properties of the world, rather than properties of its experience, or deduction from other properties based on experience. However, at some point that would need to be rooted in the goal system provided by its programmers... who presumably based it off of their own preferences.... ;-) (Nonetheless, if the AI didn't have anything we'd label "experience", then I'd have to agree that it has a preference about reality, rather than its experience of reality.)
I could also consider an argument that, say, hunger is about the state of one's stomach, and that it therefore is "about" the territory, except that I'm not sure hunger qualifies as a preference, rather than an appetite or a drive. A person on a hunger strike or with anorexia still experiences hunger, yet prefers not to eat.
If you think you have other counterexamples, I'd like to hear them. I will be very surprised if they don't involve some rather tortured reasoning and hypotheticals, though, or non-human minds. The only reason I even hedge my bets regarding humans is that (contrary to popular belief) I'm not under the mistaken impression that I have anything remotely approaching a complete theory of mind for human brains, versus a few crude maps that just happen to cover certain important chunks of "territory". ;-)
I don't actually consider this a good counterexample. It can been trivially shown that the thermostat's "preference" is not in terms of the "reality" of temperature: Just sabotage the sensor. The thermostat "prefers" its sensor reading to correspond to its set point. Wouldn't you agree this is fairly analogous to plenty of human desires?
Agreed. The closest it seems you could come is to prefer satiation of said appetites, which is a subjective state.
Actually, human minds are the primary source of my reservations. I don't think my reasoning is particularly tortured, but it certainly seems incomplete. Like you, I really have no idea what a mind is.
That said, I do seem to have preferences that concern other minds. These don't seem reducible to experiences of inter-personal behavior... they seem largely rooted in the empathic impulse, the "mirror neurons". Of course, on its face, this is still just built from subjective experience, right? It's the the experience of sympathetic response when modeling another mind. And there's no question that this involves substituting my own experiences for theirs as part of the modeling process.
But when I reflect on a simple inter-personal preference like "I'd love for my friend to experience this", I can't see how it really reduces to pure experience, except as mediated by my concept of invariant reality. I don't have a full anticipation of their reaction, and it doesn't seem to be my experience of modeling their interaction that I'm after either.
Feel free to come up with a better explanation, but I find it difficult to deconstruct my desire to reproduce internally significant experiences in an external environment in a way that dismisses the role of "hard" reality. I can guess at the pre-reflective biological origin of this sort of preference, just like we can point at the biological origin of domesticated turkeys, but, just as turkeys can't function without humans, I don't know how it would function without some reasonable concept of a reality that implements things intrinsically inaccessible and indifferent to my own experience.
I chose to instantiate this particular example, but the general rule seems to be: The very fabric of what "another mind" means to me involves the concept of an objective but shared reality. The very fabric of what "another's experiences" means to me involves the notion of an external system giving rise to external subjective experiences that bear some relation to my own.
You could claim my reasoning is tortured in that it resembles Russel's paradox: One could talk about the set of all subjective preferences explicitly involving objective phenomena (i.e., not containing themselves). But it seems to me that I can in a sense relate to a very restricted class of objective preferences, those constructed from the vocabulary of my experience, reflected back into the world, and reinstantiated in the form of another mind.
Another simple example: Do you think a preference for honest communication is at all plausible? Doesn't it involve something beyond "I hope the environment doesn't trick me"?
Right. And don't forget the mind-projection machinery, that causes us to have, e.g. different inbuilt intuitions about things that are passively moved, move by themselves, or have faces that appear to express emotion. These are all inbuilt maps in humans.
Most of us learn by experience that sharing positive experiences with others results in positive attention. That's all that would be needed, but it's also likely that humans have an evolved appetite to communicate and share positive experiences with their allies.
It just means you prefer one class of experiences to another, that you have come to associate with other experiences or actions coming before them, or co-incident with them.
The reason, btw, that I asked why it made a difference whether this is an absolute concept or a "mostly" concept, is that AFAICT, the idea that "some preferences are really about the territory" leads directly to "therefore, all of MY preferences are really about the territory".
In contrast, thinking of all preferences being essentially delusional is a much better approach, especially if 99.999999999% of all human preferences are entirely about the map, if we presume that maybe there are some enlightened Zen masters or Beisutsukai out there who've successfully managed, against all odds, to win the epistemic lottery and have an actual "about the territory" preference.
Even if the probability of having such a preference were much higher, viewing it as still delusional with respect to "invariant reality" (as you call it) does not introduce any error. So the consequences of erring on the side of delusion are negligible, and there is a significant upside to being more able to notice when you're looping, subgoal stomping, or just plain deluded.
That's why it's of little interest to me how many .9's there are on the end of that %, or whether in fact it's 100% - the difference is inconsequential for any practical purpose involving human beings. (Of course, if you're doing FAI, you probably want to do some deeper thinking than this, since you want the AI to be just as deluded as humans are, in one sense, but not as deluded in another.)
For the love of Bayes, NO. The people here are generally perfectly comfortable with the realization that much of their altruism, etc. is sincere signaling rather than actual altruism. (Same for me, before you ask.) So it's not necessary to tell ourselves the falsehood that all of our preferences are only masked desires for certain states of mind.
As for your claim that the ratio of signaling to genuine preference is 1 minus epsilon, that's a pretty strong claim, and it flies in the face of experience and certain well-supported causal models. For example, kin altruism is a widespread and powerful evolutionary adaptation; organisms with far less social signaling than humans are just hardwired to sacrifice at certain proportions for near relatives, because the genes that cause this flourish thereby. It is of course very useful for humans to signal even higher levels of care and devotion to our kin; but given two alleles such that
the first allele beats the second easily, because the second will cause searches for the cheapest ways to signal kin-helping, which ends up helping less than the optimal level for promoting those genes.
Thus we have a good deal of support for the hypothesis that our perceived preferences in some areas are a mix of signaling and genuine preferences, and not nearly 100% one or the other. Generally, those who make strong claims against such hypotheses should be expected to produce experimental evidence. Do you have any?
That's nice, but not relevant, since I haven't been talking about signaling.
Given that, I'm not going to go through the rest of your comment point by point, as it's all about signaling and kin selection stuff that doesn't in any way contest the idea that "preference is about experiences, not the reality being experienced".
I don't disagree with what you said, it's just not in conflict with the main idea here. When I said that this is like Hanson's "politics are not about policy", I didn't mean that it was therefore about signaling! (I said it was "not about" in the same way, not that it was about in the same way - i.e., that the mechanism of delusion was similar.)
The way human preferences work certainly supports signaling functions, and may be systematically biased by signaling drives, but that's not the same thing as saying that preferences equal signaling, or that preferences are "about" signaling.
Well, this discussion might not be useful to either of us at this point, but I'll give it one last go. My reason for bringing in talk of signaling is that throughout this conversation, it seems like one of the claims you have been making is that
Now, I brought up signaling because I and many others already accept a form of (A), in which we've evolved to deceive others and ourselves about our real priorities because such signalers appear to others to be better potential friends, lovers, etc. It looks perfectly meaningful to me to declare such preferences "illusory", since in point of fact we find rationalizations for choosing not what we signaled we prefer, but rather the least costly available signs of these 'preferences'.
However, kin altruism appears to be a clear case where not all action is signaling, where making decisions that are optimized to actually benefit my relatives confers an advantage in total fitness to my genes.
While my awareness and my decisions exist on separate tracks, my decisions seem to come out as they would for a certain preference relation, one of whose attributes is a concern for my relatives' welfare. Less concern, of course, than I consciously think I have for them; but roughly the right amount of concern for Hamilton's Rule of kin selection.
My understanding, then, is that I have both conscious and real preferences; the former are what I directly feel, but the latter determine parts of my action and are partially revealed by analysis of how I act. (One component of my real preferences is social, and even includes the preference to keep signaling my conscious preferences to myself and others when it doesn't cost me too much; this at least gives my conscious preferences some role in my actions.) If my actions predictably come out in accordance with the choices of an actual preference relation, then the term "preference" has to be applied there if it's applied anywhere.
There's still the key functional sense in which my anticipation of future world-states (and not just my anticipation of future mind-states) enters into my real preferences; I feel an emotional response now about the possibility of my sister dying and me never knowing, because that is the form that evaluation of that imagined world takes. Furthermore, the reason I feel that emotional response in that situation is because it confers an advantage to have one's real preferences more finely tuned to "model of the future world" than "model of the future mind", because that leads to decisions that actually help when I need to help.
This is what I mean by having my real preferences sometimes care about the state of the future world (as modeled by my present mind) rather than just my future experience (ditto). Do you disagree on a functional level; and if so, in what situation do you predict a person would feel or act differently than I'd predict? If our disagreement is just about what sort of language is helpful or misleading when taking about the mind, then I'd be relieved.
Consider the difference between a thermostat connected to a heater and a human maintaining the same temperature by looking at a thermometer and switching the heater on and off. Obviously there is a lot more going on inside the human's brain, but I still don't understand how the thermostat has any particular kind of connection to reality that the human lacks. The same applies whether the thermostat was built by humans with preferences or somehow formed without human design.
edit: I'm not trying to antagonize you, but I genuinely can't tell whether you are trying to communicate something that I'm not understanding, or you've just read The Secret one too many times.
The thermostat lacks the ability to reflect on itself, as well as the mind-projection machinery that deludes human beings into thinking that their preferences are "about" the reality they influence and are influenced by.
You're definitely rounding to a cliche. The Secret folks think that our preferences create the universe, which is just as delusional as thinking our preferences are about the universe.
Doesn't it rather have a preference for its sensors showing a certain reading? (This doesn't lead to thermostat wireheading because the thermostat's action won't make the sensor alter its mechanism.)
Really, it's only systems that can model a scenario where its sensors say X but the situation is actually Y, that could possibly have preferences that go beyond the future readings of its sensors. If you assert that a thermostat can have preferences about the territory but a human can't, then you are twisting language to an unhelpful degree.