Hm. Here’s another stab at isolating my disagreement (?) with you:
I agree that, in theory, there exist (possibly extremely complicated) genotypes which do specify extensive hardcoded circuitry which does in practice access certain abstract concepts like death.
(Because you can do a lot if you’re talking about “in theory”; probably the case that a few complicated programs which don’t seem like they should work, will work, even though most do fail)
I think the more complicated indirect specifications (like associatively learning where the tree abstraction is learned) are “plausible” in the sense that a not-immediately-crisply-debunkable alignment idea seems “plausible”, but if you actually try that kind of idea in reality, it doesn’t work (with high probability).
But marginalizing over all such implausible “plausible” ideas and adding in evolution’s “multiple tries” advantage and adding in some unforeseen clever solutions I haven’t yet considered, I reach a credence of about 4-8% for such approaches actually explaining significant portions of human mental events.
So now I’m not sure where we disagree. I don’t think it’s literally impossible for the genome to access death, but it sure sounds sketchy to me, so I assign it low credence. I agree that (2) is possible, but I assign it low credence. You don’t think it’s impossible either, but you seem to agree that relatively few things are in fact hardcoded, but also you think (2) is the resolution to the trilemma. But wouldn’t that imply (3) instead, even though, perhaps for a select few concepts, (2) is the case?
Here’s some misc commentaries:
The fact that this works in humans and possibly current NNs
(Nitpick for clarity) “Fact”? Be careful to not condition on your own hypothesis! I don’t think you’re literally doing as much, but for other readers, I want to flag this as importantly an inference on your part and not an observation. (LMK if I unintentionally do this elsewhere, of course)
Note: I don’t expect very many things like this to be hard coded; I expect only a few things to be hard coded and a lot of things to result as emergent interactions of those things.
Ah, interesting, maybe we disagree less than I thought. Do you have any sense of your numerical value of “a few”, or some percentage? I think a lot of the most important shard theory inferences only require that most of the important mental events/biases/values in humans are convergently downstream results of a relatively small set of hardcoded circuitry.
even many animals pretty reliably develop an understanding of death in their world models
I buy that maybe chimps and a small few other animals understand death. But I think “grieves” and “understands death-the-abstract-concept as we usually consider it” and “has a predictive abstraction around death (in the sense that people probably have predictive abstractions around edge detectors before they have a concept of ‘edge’)” are importantly distinct propositions.
There are a bunch of ways we can point at the concept of death relative to other anticipated experiences/concepts (i.e the thing that follows serious illness and pain, unconsciousness/the thing that’s like dreamless sleep, the thing that we observe happens to other beings that causes them to become disempowered, etc)
FWIW I think that lots of these other concepts are also inaccessible and run into various implausibilities of their own.
(Upvoted, unsure of whether to hit ‘disagree’)
Hm. Here’s another stab at isolating my disagreement (?) with you:
I agree that, in theory, there exist (possibly extremely complicated) genotypes which do specify extensive hardcoded circuitry which does in practice access certain abstract concepts like death.
(Because you can do a lot if you’re talking about “in theory”; probably the case that a few complicated programs which don’t seem like they should work, will work, even though most do fail)
I think the more complicated indirect specifications (like associatively learning where the tree abstraction is learned) are “plausible” in the sense that a not-immediately-crisply-debunkable alignment idea seems “plausible”, but if you actually try that kind of idea in reality, it doesn’t work (with high probability).
But marginalizing over all such implausible “plausible” ideas and adding in evolution’s “multiple tries” advantage and adding in some unforeseen clever solutions I haven’t yet considered, I reach a credence of about 4-8% for such approaches actually explaining significant portions of human mental events.
So now I’m not sure where we disagree. I don’t think it’s literally impossible for the genome to access death, but it sure sounds sketchy to me, so I assign it low credence. I agree that (2) is possible, but I assign it low credence. You don’t think it’s impossible either, but you seem to agree that relatively few things are in fact hardcoded, but also you think (2) is the resolution to the trilemma. But wouldn’t that imply (3) instead, even though, perhaps for a select few concepts, (2) is the case?
Here’s some misc commentaries:
(Nitpick for clarity) “Fact”? Be careful to not condition on your own hypothesis! I don’t think you’re literally doing as much, but for other readers, I want to flag this as importantly an inference on your part and not an observation. (LMK if I unintentionally do this elsewhere, of course)
Ah, interesting, maybe we disagree less than I thought. Do you have any sense of your numerical value of “a few”, or some percentage? I think a lot of the most important shard theory inferences only require that most of the important mental events/biases/values in humans are convergently downstream results of a relatively small set of hardcoded circuitry.
I buy that maybe chimps and a small few other animals understand death. But I think “grieves” and “understands death-the-abstract-concept as we usually consider it” and “has a predictive abstraction around death (in the sense that people probably have predictive abstractions around edge detectors before they have a concept of ‘edge’)” are importantly distinct propositions.
FWIW I think that lots of these other concepts are also inaccessible and run into various implausibilities of their own.