Humans are genes’ way of reproducing themselves. Human behavior implements a utility function all of whose terminal values are statements about gene allele frequencies. As humans were not even aware of allele frequencies until recently, anything a human thinks it values cannot be a terminal value of a human utility function.
I don’t find this obvious. Genes may have the goal of reproducing themselves and certain genes have adopted a strategy of using humans to do so. If we model human behavior by a utility function, it makes sense to assert that this would depend on the genes—if it didn’t, it’s unlikely humans would have evolved in the first place. So far, so good.
The question is whether the interactions of ~20,000 genes among themselves and with the environment doesn’t add anything extra. Figure that genes are really just elementary particles arranged in a certain configuration, yet the gene’s quest for reproduction does not have a clear origin from the elementary particles themselves. It’s worth asking whether scaling up from genes to humans has its own emergent phenomena, where a human has values that don’t obviously correspond to those of the genes.
I don’t find this obvious. Genes may have the goal of reproducing themselves and certain genes have adopted a strategy of using humans to do so. If we model human behavior by a utility function, it makes sense to assert that this would depend on the genes—if it didn’t, it’s unlikely humans would have evolved in the first place. So far, so good.
The question is whether the interactions of ~20,000 genes among themselves and with the environment doesn’t add anything extra. Figure that genes are really just elementary particles arranged in a certain configuration, yet the gene’s quest for reproduction does not have a clear origin from the elementary particles themselves. It’s worth asking whether scaling up from genes to humans has its own emergent phenomena, where a human has values that don’t obviously correspond to those of the genes.