I definitely think that the human brain has innate evolved mechanisms related to social behavior in general, and to caring about (certain) other people’s welfare in particular.
And I agree that the evolutionary pressure explaining why those mechanisms exist are generally related to the kinds of things that Robert Trivers and other evolutionary psychologists talk about.
This post isn’t about that. Instead it’s about what those evolved mechanisms are, i.e. how they work in the brain.
Does that help?
…But I do want to push back against a strain of thought within evolutionary psychology where they say “there was an evolutionary pressure for the human brain to do X, and therefore the human brain does X”. I think this fails to appreciate the nature of the constraints that the brain operates under. There can be evolutionary pressure for the brain to do something, but there’s no way for the brain to do it, so it doesn’t happen, or the brain does something kinda like that but with incidental side-effects or whatever.
As an example, imagine if I said: “Here’s the source code for training an image-classifier ConvNet from random initialization using uncontrolled external training data. Can you please edit this source code so that the trained model winds up confused about the shape of Toyota Camry tires specifically?” The answer is: “Nope. Sorry. There is no possible edit I can make to this PyTorch source code such that that will happen.” You see what I mean? I think this kind of thing happens in the brain a lot. I talk about it more specifically here. More of my opinions about evolutionary psychology here and here.
Thanks, it does clarify, both on separating the instantiation of an empathy mechanism in the human brain vs in AI and on considering instantiation separately from the (evolutionary or training) process that leads to it.
I definitely think that the human brain has innate evolved mechanisms related to social behavior in general, and to caring about (certain) other people’s welfare in particular.
And I agree that the evolutionary pressure explaining why those mechanisms exist are generally related to the kinds of things that Robert Trivers and other evolutionary psychologists talk about.
This post isn’t about that. Instead it’s about what those evolved mechanisms are, i.e. how they work in the brain.
Does that help?
…But I do want to push back against a strain of thought within evolutionary psychology where they say “there was an evolutionary pressure for the human brain to do X, and therefore the human brain does X”. I think this fails to appreciate the nature of the constraints that the brain operates under. There can be evolutionary pressure for the brain to do something, but there’s no way for the brain to do it, so it doesn’t happen, or the brain does something kinda like that but with incidental side-effects or whatever.
As an example, imagine if I said: “Here’s the source code for training an image-classifier ConvNet from random initialization using uncontrolled external training data. Can you please edit this source code so that the trained model winds up confused about the shape of Toyota Camry tires specifically?” The answer is: “Nope. Sorry. There is no possible edit I can make to this PyTorch source code such that that will happen.” You see what I mean? I think this kind of thing happens in the brain a lot. I talk about it more specifically here. More of my opinions about evolutionary psychology here and here.
Thanks, it does clarify, both on separating the instantiation of an empathy mechanism in the human brain vs in AI and on considering instantiation separately from the (evolutionary or training) process that leads to it.