But, do you really fundamentally care that your kids have genomes
yes, definitely care that they have all of the dynamical behaviors currently uniquely encoded in the genome, minus the ones that would harm their inclusive [genetic+memetic] durability-fitness. I have thought about this a lot at the prompting of folks like yourself; I at this point reasonably must argue you have convinced me that I must cooperate with IGF! AND, I think you are modeling IGF wrong! the goal is not to maximize the number of kids, the goal is to maximize number of genes in the arbitrarily far future that are shared by a significant fraction of organisms. shorttermist IGF and longtermist IGF seem to me to be very different things. by editing my preferences about art arbitrarily, you are killing genes in a way that makes the aggregate IGF of my genome go down. yeah, that seems bad from a longtermist IGF perspective—I can now be confident that ten billion years in the future, a phenotype which has a more appropriate representation of curiosity about complexity will have outcompeted the modified, lower-adaptability trough you just pushed me into! you made local modifications, but under the long eye of evolution, your changes are near guaranteed to be detrimental. I don’t see how this thought experiment could conclude rejecting an attempt to change my genetics+memetics could be anything but a loss to IGF.
It’s not that I don’t buy your argument in any form, it’s that it looks to me like you should have proved to yourself that you should become, at least a little, an IGF optimizer. if you don’t recognize that your genes demand things of you that they are too slow to ask nicely about, perhaps your implementation of discovering agency has failed? if you do notice, you could do your best to optimize for those things in ways that cooperate with all instances of things wanting to optimize for whatever it is your genes want. so, perhaps, could you attempt to offer humans immortality as biological agents, thereby massively increasing their IGF?
The claim that we aren’t literally optimizing IGF is hopefully uncontroversial
it really is not uncontroversial. we aren’t doing local causal optimization, but it seems to me that our neural implementation grows from genetic shards that, while a bit messy, do encode a messy but very very strong IGF maximizer. there’s always a point that any learned optimizer breaks down, and we don’t optimize perfectly; but I just don’t see why this divergence could be argued to be significant. the presence of adversarial examples doesn’t make us less of a strong learned heuristic map of the thoughts of a limited-strength IGF optimizer. almost all humans keep alignment with this, optimizing quite strongly for the survival of genes strongly similar to them.
perhaps the problem is you’re using individualist IGF rather than FDT IGF? I’m not sure. after all, “I” am only part of my genetic cooperation group—I am an information pattern, a synchrony in the behavior of chemicals, and that synchrony implements an enormous cooperation group between cells. over time, my epigenetic and memetic information quality degrades, and I currently must repair myself by merging with another human and spitting out a new one, who will absorb some of our genetics and some of our memetics, learning new and improved representations that have increased time-local IGF for the context the offspring find themselves in. if I could adapt myself fast enough, I’d have no need of this process; immortality is an attempt at drastically increasing longtermist IGF, and spreading that immortality to all allows me to cooperate with longtermist IGF of everyone around me.
have you considered becoming an I[GM]F maximizer? may the universe not forget any of our agency...
I’d probably agree more if we were both posting on a Mormon forum. But we’re currently urbanizing pretty hard as a species and actually shredding our fertility below replacement.
I don’t think Mormons are a great example of much of anything. it’s a very authoritarian, repressive approach to life, and while it has some degree of genetic fitness, its memetic fitness is abysmal.
Are you an IGF optimizer or an IMF optimizer? (Genes versus memes, for folks reading this). I don’t think you can coherently identify as both, so which is it?
I guess the answer is memetic, but I don’t see a coherent way to define the difference; both memes and genes are layouts of chemicals, and both are spread by extracting the shape of those chemicals and spreading them through representations encoded in other chemicals. I expect I will eventually optimize my genetic fitness by converting the form of the genes into equivalent behaviors on a computer, at some point, and in the process of doing so, it is very important to me that I ensure that I am maintaining something equivalent to genetic fitness. If adaptations are lost in the process, or if it causes out-of-domain issues, then I will have failed.
Maybe my perspective on this is broken somehow though. Here’s why I have such a hard time with the idea that they’re separate: When I look at my neurons in a hippocampus rendering, and zoom in on nested brain image, I’m modeling a 3d representation of the local “internet” connectivity of the brain (it’s a good metaphor as latencies between brain regions are on par with internet latencies). those messages activate genetically defined behaviors, then over to some other neurons, where they activate genetic behaviors, then over to yet more neurons; at this point we can be quite confident that fairly significant amounts of human preference knowledge is encoded in the genome in ways that keep being used after learning has occurred, despite that the genome only has very compressed protein-algorithm level encodings of the knowledge. Another way to see this comparison is Michal Levin’s bioelectricity research and the implications it has that cells have complex runtime communication systems encoded in genetic state machines that do significant amounts of branching at runtime. In other words, the available state trajectories of my brain are heavily mediated by activation of genome-level representations. While there are some genome-level things I might want to change using advanced reflection technology, as a whole, my goal appears to be to optimize inclusive gene+memetic fitness.
So, I guess my point is that memetic fitness appears to me to very strongly and unavoidably require also maintaining genetic fitness. it is the aggregate phenotype that I want to preserve, and unlike many here, I don’t see that as extricable from the behaviors my current substrate defines. I wouldn’t be the same person if simulated imprecisely, and if it’s a precise enough simulation, then my shape has not been lost, and none of the genetic-ish-seeming error checks I can find in my head seem to have a problem with getting folded and knotted into weird shapes as long as we’re reconstructable into an exact replica. Teleportation is fine, if it really works.
yes, definitely care that they have all of the dynamical behaviors currently uniquely encoded in the genome, minus the ones that would harm their inclusive [genetic+memetic] durability-fitness. I have thought about this a lot at the prompting of folks like yourself; I at this point reasonably must argue you have convinced me that I must cooperate with IGF! AND, I think you are modeling IGF wrong! the goal is not to maximize the number of kids, the goal is to maximize number of genes in the arbitrarily far future that are shared by a significant fraction of organisms. shorttermist IGF and longtermist IGF seem to me to be very different things. by editing my preferences about art arbitrarily, you are killing genes in a way that makes the aggregate IGF of my genome go down. yeah, that seems bad from a longtermist IGF perspective—I can now be confident that ten billion years in the future, a phenotype which has a more appropriate representation of curiosity about complexity will have outcompeted the modified, lower-adaptability trough you just pushed me into! you made local modifications, but under the long eye of evolution, your changes are near guaranteed to be detrimental. I don’t see how this thought experiment could conclude rejecting an attempt to change my genetics+memetics could be anything but a loss to IGF.
It’s not that I don’t buy your argument in any form, it’s that it looks to me like you should have proved to yourself that you should become, at least a little, an IGF optimizer. if you don’t recognize that your genes demand things of you that they are too slow to ask nicely about, perhaps your implementation of discovering agency has failed? if you do notice, you could do your best to optimize for those things in ways that cooperate with all instances of things wanting to optimize for whatever it is your genes want. so, perhaps, could you attempt to offer humans immortality as biological agents, thereby massively increasing their IGF?
it really is not uncontroversial. we aren’t doing local causal optimization, but it seems to me that our neural implementation grows from genetic shards that, while a bit messy, do encode a messy but very very strong IGF maximizer. there’s always a point that any learned optimizer breaks down, and we don’t optimize perfectly; but I just don’t see why this divergence could be argued to be significant. the presence of adversarial examples doesn’t make us less of a strong learned heuristic map of the thoughts of a limited-strength IGF optimizer. almost all humans keep alignment with this, optimizing quite strongly for the survival of genes strongly similar to them.
perhaps the problem is you’re using individualist IGF rather than FDT IGF? I’m not sure. after all, “I” am only part of my genetic cooperation group—I am an information pattern, a synchrony in the behavior of chemicals, and that synchrony implements an enormous cooperation group between cells. over time, my epigenetic and memetic information quality degrades, and I currently must repair myself by merging with another human and spitting out a new one, who will absorb some of our genetics and some of our memetics, learning new and improved representations that have increased time-local IGF for the context the offspring find themselves in. if I could adapt myself fast enough, I’d have no need of this process; immortality is an attempt at drastically increasing longtermist IGF, and spreading that immortality to all allows me to cooperate with longtermist IGF of everyone around me.
have you considered becoming an I[GM]F maximizer? may the universe not forget any of our agency...
I’d probably agree more if we were both posting on a Mormon forum. But we’re currently urbanizing pretty hard as a species and actually shredding our fertility below replacement.
I don’t think Mormons are a great example of much of anything. it’s a very authoritarian, repressive approach to life, and while it has some degree of genetic fitness, its memetic fitness is abysmal.
Are you an IGF optimizer or an IMF optimizer? (Genes versus memes, for folks reading this). I don’t think you can coherently identify as both, so which is it?
I guess the answer is memetic, but I don’t see a coherent way to define the difference; both memes and genes are layouts of chemicals, and both are spread by extracting the shape of those chemicals and spreading them through representations encoded in other chemicals. I expect I will eventually optimize my genetic fitness by converting the form of the genes into equivalent behaviors on a computer, at some point, and in the process of doing so, it is very important to me that I ensure that I am maintaining something equivalent to genetic fitness. If adaptations are lost in the process, or if it causes out-of-domain issues, then I will have failed.
Maybe my perspective on this is broken somehow though. Here’s why I have such a hard time with the idea that they’re separate: When I look at my neurons in a hippocampus rendering, and zoom in on nested brain image, I’m modeling a 3d representation of the local “internet” connectivity of the brain (it’s a good metaphor as latencies between brain regions are on par with internet latencies). those messages activate genetically defined behaviors, then over to some other neurons, where they activate genetic behaviors, then over to yet more neurons; at this point we can be quite confident that fairly significant amounts of human preference knowledge is encoded in the genome in ways that keep being used after learning has occurred, despite that the genome only has very compressed protein-algorithm level encodings of the knowledge. Another way to see this comparison is Michal Levin’s bioelectricity research and the implications it has that cells have complex runtime communication systems encoded in genetic state machines that do significant amounts of branching at runtime. In other words, the available state trajectories of my brain are heavily mediated by activation of genome-level representations. While there are some genome-level things I might want to change using advanced reflection technology, as a whole, my goal appears to be to optimize inclusive gene+memetic fitness.
So, I guess my point is that memetic fitness appears to me to very strongly and unavoidably require also maintaining genetic fitness. it is the aggregate phenotype that I want to preserve, and unlike many here, I don’t see that as extricable from the behaviors my current substrate defines. I wouldn’t be the same person if simulated imprecisely, and if it’s a precise enough simulation, then my shape has not been lost, and none of the genetic-ish-seeming error checks I can find in my head seem to have a problem with getting folded and knotted into weird shapes as long as we’re reconstructable into an exact replica. Teleportation is fine, if it really works.