Thanks for linking to your papers and definitely interesting you have been thinking along similar lines. I think the key reason I think studying this is important is that I think that these hedonic loops demonstrate that a.) Mammals including humans are actually exceptionally aligned to basic homeostatic needs and basic hedonic loops I’m practice. It is extremely hard and rare for people to choose not to follow homeostatic drives. I think humans are mostly ‘misaligned’ about higher level things like morality, empathy etc is because we dont actually have direct drives hardcoded in the hypothalamus for them the way we do for primary rewards. Higher level behaviours either socio-culturally learned through unsupervised critically based learning or derived from RL extrapolations from primary rewards. It is no surprise that alignment to these ideals is weaker. B.) That relatively simple control loops are very effective at controlling vastly more complex unsupervised cognitive systems.
I also agree this is similar to steven Byrnes agenda and maybe just my way to arrive at it
Thanks for linking to your papers and definitely interesting you have been thinking along similar lines. I think the key reason I think studying this is important is that I think that these hedonic loops demonstrate that a.) Mammals including humans are actually exceptionally aligned to basic homeostatic needs and basic hedonic loops I’m practice. It is extremely hard and rare for people to choose not to follow homeostatic drives. I think humans are mostly ‘misaligned’ about higher level things like morality, empathy etc is because we dont actually have direct drives hardcoded in the hypothalamus for them the way we do for primary rewards. Higher level behaviours either socio-culturally learned through unsupervised critically based learning or derived from RL extrapolations from primary rewards. It is no surprise that alignment to these ideals is weaker. B.) That relatively simple control loops are very effective at controlling vastly more complex unsupervised cognitive systems.
I also agree this is similar to steven Byrnes agenda and maybe just my way to arrive at it