Despite feeling that there are some really key points in Jacob’s ‘it all boils down to empowerment’ point of view (which is supported by the paper I linked in my other comment), I still find myself more in agreement with Steven’s points about innate drives.
(A) Most humans do X because they have an innate drive to do X; (e.g. having sex, breathing)
(B) Most humans do X because they have done X in the past and have learned from experience that doing X will eventually lead to good things (e.g. checking the weather forecast before going out)
(C) Most humans do X because they have indirectly figured out that doing X will eventually lead to good things—via either social / cultural learning, or via explicit means-end reasoning (e.g. avoiding prison, for people who have never been in prison)
So, I think a missing piece here is that ‘empowerment’ is perhaps better described as ‘ability to reach desired states’ where the desire stems from innate drives. This is very different sense of ‘empowerment’ than a more neutral ‘ability to reach any state’ or ‘ability to reach as many states as possible’.
If I had available to me a button which, when I pressed it, would give me 100 unique new ways in which it was possible for me to choose to be tortured and the ability to activate any of those tortures at will… I wouldn’t press that button!
If there was another button that would give me 100 unique new ways to experience pleasure and the ability to activate those pleasures at will, I would be strongly tempted to press it.
Seems like my avoiding the ‘new types of torture’ button is me declining reachability / empowerment / optionality. This illustrates why I don’t think a non-valenced empowerment seeking is an accurate description of human/animal behavior.
Of course, we can learn to associate innate-drive-neutral things, like money, with innate-drive-valenced empowerment. Or even innate-drive-negative things, so long as the benefit sufficiently outweighs the cost.
And once you’ve gotten as far as ‘valenced empowerment with ability to bridge locally negative states’, then you start getting into decision making about various plans over the various conceptual directions in valenced state space (with the valence originating from, but now abstracted away from, innate drives), and this to me is very much what Shard Theory is about.
Despite feeling that there are some really key points in Jacob’s ‘it all boils down to empowerment’ point of view (which is supported by the paper I linked in my other comment), I still find myself more in agreement with Steven’s points about innate drives.
So, I think a missing piece here is that ‘empowerment’ is perhaps better described as ‘ability to reach desired states’ where the desire stems from innate drives. This is very different sense of ‘empowerment’ than a more neutral ‘ability to reach any state’ or ‘ability to reach as many states as possible’.
If I had available to me a button which, when I pressed it, would give me 100 unique new ways in which it was possible for me to choose to be tortured and the ability to activate any of those tortures at will… I wouldn’t press that button!
If there was another button that would give me 100 unique new ways to experience pleasure and the ability to activate those pleasures at will, I would be strongly tempted to press it.
Seems like my avoiding the ‘new types of torture’ button is me declining reachability / empowerment / optionality. This illustrates why I don’t think a non-valenced empowerment seeking is an accurate description of human/animal behavior.
Of course, we can learn to associate innate-drive-neutral things, like money, with innate-drive-valenced empowerment. Or even innate-drive-negative things, so long as the benefit sufficiently outweighs the cost.
And once you’ve gotten as far as ‘valenced empowerment with ability to bridge locally negative states’, then you start getting into decision making about various plans over the various conceptual directions in valenced state space (with the valence originating from, but now abstracted away from, innate drives), and this to me is very much what Shard Theory is about.