Deep Blue has many desires too. It knows that a knight is three times as desirable as a pawn—unless the pawn is well advanced. It knows about the value of the centre, and the importance of quiescence—and so on.
The important point to realise is that these desires all represent imperfections. They are not useful features—to be retained and deliberately implemented in future designs, but rather simple heuristics intended to deal with hardware and software limitations—and that in the future their preservation may well lead to mistakes, errors—and losses.
Also: nature gave us brains. Brains help organisms deal with a varying environment. Part of the purpose of the brain is, I claim, is to reassemble your desires into evolution’s intended “target”—a.k.a making grandchildren. The target itself cannot be built in directly—because of the limited space in the genome, and because of the varying nature of the environment.
The brain does this reassembly successfully in some individuals. They realise that high calorie foods are not good for them—because their environment is not the one their ancestors evolved in. They wake up to the idea that advertisers are trying to play the imperfections of their mind like an organ, for their own ends, and make efforts to compensate. And they understand the consequnces of the use of contraceptive devices. The in-built desires are subjugated in favour of higher level goals. If your brain has not managed such a reconstruction, you may want to consider the hypothesis that it is broken or malfunctioning—and thus to wonder if there is anything you can do to fix it.
Deep Blue has many desires too. It knows that a knight is three times as desirable as a pawn—unless the pawn is well advanced. It knows about the value of the centre, and the importance of quiescence—and so on.
The important point to realise is that these desires all represent imperfections. They are not useful features—to be retained and deliberately implemented in future designs, but rather simple heuristics intended to deal with hardware and software limitations—and that in the future their preservation may well lead to mistakes, errors—and losses.
Also: nature gave us brains. Brains help organisms deal with a varying environment. Part of the purpose of the brain is, I claim, is to reassemble your desires into evolution’s intended “target”—a.k.a making grandchildren. The target itself cannot be built in directly—because of the limited space in the genome, and because of the varying nature of the environment.
The brain does this reassembly successfully in some individuals. They realise that high calorie foods are not good for them—because their environment is not the one their ancestors evolved in. They wake up to the idea that advertisers are trying to play the imperfections of their mind like an organ, for their own ends, and make efforts to compensate. And they understand the consequnces of the use of contraceptive devices. The in-built desires are subjugated in favour of higher level goals. If your brain has not managed such a reconstruction, you may want to consider the hypothesis that it is broken or malfunctioning—and thus to wonder if there is anything you can do to fix it.