All animals except for humans had no explicit notion of maximizing the number of children they had, or looking after their own long-term health. In humans, it seems evolution got close to building a consequentialist agent...
Clarification: evolution did not build human brains from scratch. Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers. The key difference is that thanks to highly developed frontal lobes, humans can predict the future more powerfully than other animals. Those predictions are handled by adaptation-executing parts of the brain in the same way as immediate sense input.
For example, consider the act of eating bacon. A human can extrapolate from the bacon to a pattern of bacon-eating to a future of obesity, health risks, and reduced social status (including greater difficulty finding a mate). This explains why humans can dither over whether to eat bacon, while a dog just scarfs it down—dogs can’t predict the future that way. (The frontal lobes also distinguish between bad/good/better/best actions—hence the vegetarian’s decision to abstain from bacon on moral grounds.)
Eliezer’s body of writing on evolutionary psychology and P.J. Eby’s writing on PCT and personal effectiveness seem to be regarded as incompatible by some commenters here (and I don’t want to hijack this thread into yet another PCT debate), but they both support the proposition that akrasia and other “sub-optimal” mental states result from a brain processing future-predictions with systems that evolved to handle data from proximate environmental inputs and memory.
Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers.
well, being a consequentialist is a particular adaptation you can execute. “Consequentialist” is a subset of “Adaption Excecuter”
Humans certainly come much closer to pure consequentialism—of explicitly representing a goal and calculating optimal actions based upon the environment you observe to achieve that goal—than any other creature does.
I agree. My comment was meant as a clarification, not a correction, because the paragraph I quoted and the subsequent one could be misinterpreted to suggest that humans and animals use entirely different methods of cognition—”excecut[ing] certain adaptions without really understanding how or why they worked” versus an “explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm.” I expect we both agree that human cognition is a subsequent modification of animal cognition rather than a different system evolved in parallel.
I’m not sure I agree that humans are closer to pure consequentialism than animals; if anything, the imperfect match between prediction and decision faculties makes us less consequentialist. Eating or not eating one strip of bacon won’t have an appreciable impact on your social status! Rather, I would say that future-prediction allows us to have more complicated and (to us) interesting goals, and to form more complicated action paths.
Clarification: evolution did not build human brains from scratch. Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers. The key difference is that thanks to highly developed frontal lobes, humans can predict the future more powerfully than other animals. Those predictions are handled by adaptation-executing parts of the brain in the same way as immediate sense input.
For example, consider the act of eating bacon. A human can extrapolate from the bacon to a pattern of bacon-eating to a future of obesity, health risks, and reduced social status (including greater difficulty finding a mate). This explains why humans can dither over whether to eat bacon, while a dog just scarfs it down—dogs can’t predict the future that way. (The frontal lobes also distinguish between bad/good/better/best actions—hence the vegetarian’s decision to abstain from bacon on moral grounds.)
Eliezer’s body of writing on evolutionary psychology and P.J. Eby’s writing on PCT and personal effectiveness seem to be regarded as incompatible by some commenters here (and I don’t want to hijack this thread into yet another PCT debate), but they both support the proposition that akrasia and other “sub-optimal” mental states result from a brain processing future-predictions with systems that evolved to handle data from proximate environmental inputs and memory.
well, being a consequentialist is a particular adaptation you can execute. “Consequentialist” is a subset of “Adaption Excecuter”
Humans certainly come much closer to pure consequentialism—of explicitly representing a goal and calculating optimal actions based upon the environment you observe to achieve that goal—than any other creature does.
I agree. My comment was meant as a clarification, not a correction, because the paragraph I quoted and the subsequent one could be misinterpreted to suggest that humans and animals use entirely different methods of cognition—”excecut[ing] certain adaptions without really understanding how or why they worked” versus an “explicit goal-driven propositional system with a dumb pattern recognition algorithm.” I expect we both agree that human cognition is a subsequent modification of animal cognition rather than a different system evolved in parallel.
I’m not sure I agree that humans are closer to pure consequentialism than animals; if anything, the imperfect match between prediction and decision faculties makes us less consequentialist. Eating or not eating one strip of bacon won’t have an appreciable impact on your social status! Rather, I would say that future-prediction allows us to have more complicated and (to us) interesting goals, and to form more complicated action paths.
agreed
Dogs don’t know it’s not bacon.