The post is influential, but makes multiple somewhat confused claims and led many people to become confused.
The central confusion stems from the fact that genetic evolution already created a lot of control circuitry before inventing cortex, and did the obvious thing to ‘align’ the evolutionary newer areas: bind them to the old circuitry via interoceptive inputs. By this mechanism, genome is able to ‘access’ a lot of evolutionary relevant beliefs and mental models. The trick is the higher/more distant to genome models are learned in part to predict interoceptive inputs (tracking evolutionary older reward circuitry), so they are bound by default, and there isn’t much independent to ‘bind’. Anyone can check this… just thinking about a dangerous looking person with a weapon activates older, body-based fear/fight chemical regulatory circuits ⇒ the active inference machinery learned this and plans actions to avoid these states.
genetic evolution already created a lot of control circuitry before inventing cortex
Agreed. This post would have been strengthened by discussing this consideration more.
and did the obvious thing to ‘align’ the evolutionary newer areas: bind them to the old circuitry via interoceptive inputs. By this mechanism, genome is able to ‘access’ a lot of evolutionary relevant beliefs and mental models.
Do we… know this? Is this actually a known “fact”? I expect some of this to be happening, but I don’t necessarily know or believe that the genome can access “evolutionary relevant mental models.” That’s the whole thing I’m debating in this post.
It seems reasonable to suspect the genome has more access than supposed in this post, but I don’t know evidence by which one can be confident that it does have meaningful access to abstract concepts. Do you know of such evidence?
The post is influential, but makes multiple somewhat confused claims and led many people to become confused.
The central confusion stems from the fact that genetic evolution already created a lot of control circuitry before inventing cortex, and did the obvious thing to ‘align’ the evolutionary newer areas: bind them to the old circuitry via interoceptive inputs. By this mechanism, genome is able to ‘access’ a lot of evolutionary relevant beliefs and mental models. The trick is the higher/more distant to genome models are learned in part to predict interoceptive inputs (tracking evolutionary older reward circuitry), so they are bound by default, and there isn’t much independent to ‘bind’. Anyone can check this… just thinking about a dangerous looking person with a weapon activates older, body-based fear/fight chemical regulatory circuits ⇒ the active inference machinery learned this and plans actions to avoid these states.
Agreed. This post would have been strengthened by discussing this consideration more.
Do we… know this? Is this actually a known “fact”? I expect some of this to be happening, but I don’t necessarily know or believe that the genome can access “evolutionary relevant mental models.” That’s the whole thing I’m debating in this post.
It seems reasonable to suspect the genome has more access than supposed in this post, but I don’t know evidence by which one can be confident that it does have meaningful access to abstract concepts. Do you know of such evidence?