I feel like the concept of “neural address” is incompletely described, and the specifics may matter. For example, a specific point in the skull, yeah, is a bad way to address a specific concept, between individuals. However, there might be, say, particular matching structures that tend to form around certain ideas, and searching on those structures might be a better way of addressing a particular concept. (Probably still not good, but it hints in the direction that there may be better ways of formulating a neural address that maybe WOULD be sufficiently descriptive. I don’t know any particularly good methods, of the top of my head, though, and your point may turn out correct.)
I think there are various “tricks” the genome can use to approximately reference abstractions that are close to sensory ground truth. However, I think these tricks quickly start to fail once you try to use them on deeper abstractions. E.g., I don’t think there’s any way the genome can specify a hard-coded neural algorithm that activates in response to an ontological shift and ensures that values still bind to the new ontology.
Rather, evolution configured learning processes (humans) that are robust to ontological shifts, which consistently acquire values in a way that was adaptive in the ancestral environment, and which have various other alignment properties. This matters because we can look at examples of these learning processes to try and figure out how they work, how their values form, and how their alignment properties emerge.
I feel like the concept of “neural address” is incompletely described, and the specifics may matter. For example, a specific point in the skull, yeah, is a bad way to address a specific concept, between individuals. However, there might be, say, particular matching structures that tend to form around certain ideas, and searching on those structures might be a better way of addressing a particular concept. (Probably still not good, but it hints in the direction that there may be better ways of formulating a neural address that maybe WOULD be sufficiently descriptive. I don’t know any particularly good methods, of the top of my head, though, and your point may turn out correct.)
I think there are various “tricks” the genome can use to approximately reference abstractions that are close to sensory ground truth. However, I think these tricks quickly start to fail once you try to use them on deeper abstractions. E.g., I don’t think there’s any way the genome can specify a hard-coded neural algorithm that activates in response to an ontological shift and ensures that values still bind to the new ontology.
Rather, evolution configured learning processes (humans) that are robust to ontological shifts, which consistently acquire values in a way that was adaptive in the ancestral environment, and which have various other alignment properties. This matters because we can look at examples of these learning processes to try and figure out how they work, how their values form, and how their alignment properties emerge.
Upvoted and agreed. I think this kind of explanation is pretty unlikely, though (<4%).