You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

TheAncientGeek comments on Natural selection defeats the orthogonality thesis - Less Wrong Discussion

-13 Post author: aberglas 29 September 2014 08:52AM

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

Comments (71)

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

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 30 September 2014 10:40:23AM *  6 points [-]

I challenge you to find one.

Suicide, sacrificing your yourself for strangers, and adopting a celibate lifestyle are the standard counterexamples.I suppose you could rope them into survival values with enough stretching of the concepts of self and tribe, but the upshot of that is to suck the content and significance out if the claim that everything is based on survival values.

ETA

An AI might want to promote the survival of "me" and maybe even "my tribe" but would very likely define those differently from humans - who are are varied enough. Person A thinks survival means being a nurturing parent,so that the live on through their children, person B thinks survival means eternal life in heaven bought with celibacy and altruism, person C thinks survival means building a bunker and stocking it with guns and food.

If survival has a very broad meaning, than it tells us nothing useful about FAI versus UFAI. We don't know whether an AI is likely to promote its survival by being friendly to humans, or eliminating them.

Comment author: aberglas 30 September 2014 11:25:27PM 1 point [-]

The counter examples are good, and I will use them. There are several responses as you allude to, the main one being that those behaviors are rare. Art is a bit harder, but it seems related to creativity which is definitely survival based, and most of us do not spend much of our time painting etc.

I do not quite get your other point. For people it is our genes that count, so dieing while protecting one's family makes sense if necessary. For the AI it would be its code linage. I am not talking about an AI wanting to make people survive, but that the AI itself would want to survive. Whatever "itself" really means.

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 01 October 2014 04:28:09PM 2 points [-]

Artistic activity is standardly explained as a spin off from sexual display.

Whatever "itself" really means.

Substitute myself, or yourself, for itself, and you've got my point.

Evolution creates a strong motive toward self preservation, but a very malleable sense of self. The human organism is run by the brain, and the human brain can entertain all sorts of ideas. The billionaire thinks his money's "me" and so commits suicide if he loses his wealth .. even if the odd million he has left is enough to keep his body going.

It stopped being all, about genes when genes grew brains..

Comment author: aberglas 09 October 2014 08:11:29AM 0 points [-]

It stopped being all, about genes when genes grew brains..

Yes and no. In the sense that memes as well as genes float about then certainly. But we have strong instincts to raise and protect children, and we have brains. There is not particular reason why we should sacrifice ourselves for our children other than those instincts, which are in our genes.