Notice that the wording of each example involves beliefs about values. They’re not just saying “I used to feel urge X, but now I feel urge Y”. They’re saying “I thought I wanted X”—a belief about a value! Or “now I think that was more a social script than my own values”—again, a belief about my own values, and how those values relate to my (previous) behavior. Or “I endorsed the view that Z is the highest objective”—an explicit endorsement of a belief about values. That’s how we normally, instinctively reason about our own values. And sure, we could reword everything to avoid talking about our beliefs about values—“learning” is more general than “learning about”—but the fact that it makes sense to us to talk about our beliefs about values is strong evidence that something in our heads in fact works like beliefs about values, not just reinforcement-style “learning”.
Importantly, this isn’t the only way that people talk about their values.
Sometimes a person will say “I used to care deeply about X, but as I got older, I don’t care as much”, or “Y used to be the center of my life, but that was a long time ago”, etc.
In those cases the person isn’t claiming to have been mistaken about their values. Rather their verbiage expresses that they correctly ascertained their values, but their values themselves changed over time.
This could just be a matter of semantics, but these could also be distinct non-mutually exclusive phenomena. Sometimes we learn more about ourselves and our beliefs about our values change. Sometimes we change, not just our beliefs about ourselves and our values.
I would also hypothesize that, in practice, the way this usually happens is that some physiological or environmental shift results in different reward signals. Then, insofar as the brain is treating the reward-signal-stream as evidence of some coherent underlying values, it makes sense for the person to feel like their reward-signal-stream was reasonably-consistently pointed at one set of values during one time period, and a different set of values during a different time period.
Importantly, this isn’t the only way that people talk about their values.
Sometimes a person will say “I used to care deeply about X, but as I got older, I don’t care as much”, or “Y used to be the center of my life, but that was a long time ago”, etc.
In those cases the person isn’t claiming to have been mistaken about their values. Rather their verbiage expresses that they correctly ascertained their values, but their values themselves changed over time.
This could just be a matter of semantics, but these could also be distinct non-mutually exclusive phenomena. Sometimes we learn more about ourselves and our beliefs about our values change. Sometimes we change, not just our beliefs about ourselves and our values.
Agreed.
I would also hypothesize that, in practice, the way this usually happens is that some physiological or environmental shift results in different reward signals. Then, insofar as the brain is treating the reward-signal-stream as evidence of some coherent underlying values, it makes sense for the person to feel like their reward-signal-stream was reasonably-consistently pointed at one set of values during one time period, and a different set of values during a different time period.