To me, the most obvious hypothesis for the “seeing spiders” case would be that immediate sensory processing is more immune to this than more abstract planning procedures for some reason.
Yeah, it would make sense for evolution to make the brain system that does predicting sensory data have independent reward from the brain system that evaluates how well your day or life is going at the moment.
Your comment made me (vaguely) remember that Scott Alexander (maybe?) wondered something similar in his review of the book Surfing Uncertainty and/or his post Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression. (I haven’t re-read the posts lately, so I’m not confident that they contain relevant information or speculation.)
Yeah, it would make sense for evolution to make the brain system that does predicting sensory data have independent reward from the brain system that evaluates how well your day or life is going at the moment.
Your comment made me (vaguely) remember that Scott Alexander (maybe?) wondered something similar in his review of the book Surfing Uncertainty and/or his post Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression. (I haven’t re-read the posts lately, so I’m not confident that they contain relevant information or speculation.)