condoms aren’t a failure of reproductive fitness, they’re a success—planned children fare better [citation needed, please search]. more generally, evolution favors total maximum-term inclusive fitness, and the fact that I want to have no kids for a long time, and instead preserve my DNA within my own cells by not dying, does not feel like I’ve dismissed my built-in objectives, quite the opposite in fact. the only constraint that defines fitness in evolution is “does your pattern of physical interaction survive enough to maintain its existence indefinitely”.
evolution is not reliably consistent about finding solutions to this constraint, and certainly not ones that never change, but it’s quite rare for humans to be catastrophically misaligned with reproducing their own patterns. I know of very few humans who want none of [genetic reproduction, immortality, altruism-for-sibling, upload-to-documentation, bulk-altruism], all of which are attempts to maintain a subset of the being’s patterns of interaction, plausibly in descending order of pattern-completeness.
certainly humans do sometimes decide that the important pattern that identifies their reproduceable traits isn’t genetic but rather memetic, which may be considered a failure of alignment in some metrics, but I don’t clearly see how, given evolution’s fitness function is only definable in terms of which chemical/energy processes replicate their own behaviors reliably. and indeed, our species’ success is heavily dependent on accumulation of knowledge from people in the past who “uploaded” small fragments of their own insights in various ways, like books. “living on through your influence” is actually meaningful, in that encoding your ideas into language that can be read and processed does meaningfully reproduce your pattern as long as the language will be read by creatures similar enough to yourself. memes are in effect additional genes that can be output at any time, and sturdy memes like math survive to be appended to the brains of all those whose genes-and-available-resources cause them to end up being able to use those useful memes.
so I guess, I claim, “minimize death and data loss” is a fully general solution to evolution that generalizes by maximizing the area of space considered “self”. this is in no way at all a solution to the safety problem, just a rephrase of the question to point out that a solution almost cannot be contrary to fitness and that alignment to evolution is the only way it could have gone, best as I can tell, because evolution only exists in terms of how much further forward in time your patterns maintain identity. it doesn’t care if you fork or merge, as long as the net sum of your patterns exists in self-maintaining form. life is an energy gradient that maintains itself.
condoms aren’t a failure of reproductive fitness, they’re a success—planned children fare better [citation needed, please search]. more generally, evolution favors total maximum-term inclusive fitness, and the fact that I want to have no kids for a long time, and instead preserve my DNA within my own cells by not dying, does not feel like I’ve dismissed my built-in objectives, quite the opposite in fact. the only constraint that defines fitness in evolution is “does your pattern of physical interaction survive enough to maintain its existence indefinitely”.
evolution is not reliably consistent about finding solutions to this constraint, and certainly not ones that never change, but it’s quite rare for humans to be catastrophically misaligned with reproducing their own patterns. I know of very few humans who want none of [genetic reproduction, immortality, altruism-for-sibling, upload-to-documentation, bulk-altruism], all of which are attempts to maintain a subset of the being’s patterns of interaction, plausibly in descending order of pattern-completeness.
certainly humans do sometimes decide that the important pattern that identifies their reproduceable traits isn’t genetic but rather memetic, which may be considered a failure of alignment in some metrics, but I don’t clearly see how, given evolution’s fitness function is only definable in terms of which chemical/energy processes replicate their own behaviors reliably. and indeed, our species’ success is heavily dependent on accumulation of knowledge from people in the past who “uploaded” small fragments of their own insights in various ways, like books. “living on through your influence” is actually meaningful, in that encoding your ideas into language that can be read and processed does meaningfully reproduce your pattern as long as the language will be read by creatures similar enough to yourself. memes are in effect additional genes that can be output at any time, and sturdy memes like math survive to be appended to the brains of all those whose genes-and-available-resources cause them to end up being able to use those useful memes.
so I guess, I claim, “minimize death and data loss” is a fully general solution to evolution that generalizes by maximizing the area of space considered “self”. this is in no way at all a solution to the safety problem, just a rephrase of the question to point out that a solution almost cannot be contrary to fitness and that alignment to evolution is the only way it could have gone, best as I can tell, because evolution only exists in terms of how much further forward in time your patterns maintain identity. it doesn’t care if you fork or merge, as long as the net sum of your patterns exists in self-maintaining form. life is an energy gradient that maintains itself.