Could you clarify what you mean by values not being “hack after evolutionary hack”?
What this sounds like, but I think you don’t mean: “Human values are all emergent from a simple and highly general bit of our genetic blueprint, which was simple for evolution to find and has therefore been unchanged more or less since the invention of within-lifetime learning. Evolution never developed a lot of elaborate machinery to influence our values.”
What I think you do mean: “Human values are emergent from a simple and general bit of our genetic blueprint (our general learning algorithm), plus a bunch of evolutionary nudges (maybe slightly hackish) to guide this learning algorithm towards things like friendship, eating when hungry, avoiding disgusting things, etc. Some of these nudges generalize so well they’ve basically persisted across mammalian evolution, while some of them humans only share with social primates, but the point is that even though we have really different values from chimpanzees, that’s more because our learning algorithm is scaled up and our environment is different, the nudges on the learning algorithm have barely had to change at all.”
What I think you intend to contrast this to: “Every detail of human values has to be specified in the genome—the complexity of the values and the complexity of the genome have to be closely related.”
This is an excellent guess and correct (AFAICT). Thanks for supplying so much interpretive labor!
What I think you intend to contrast this to: “Every detail of human values has to be specified in the genome—the complexity of the values and the complexity of the genome have to be closely related.”
I’d say our position contrasts with “A substantial portion of human value formation is genetically pre-determined in a complicated way, such that values are more like adaptations and less like exaptations—more like contextually-activated genetic machinery and influences than learned artifacts of simple learning-process-signals.”
Could you clarify what you mean by values not being “hack after evolutionary hack”?
What this sounds like, but I think you don’t mean: “Human values are all emergent from a simple and highly general bit of our genetic blueprint, which was simple for evolution to find and has therefore been unchanged more or less since the invention of within-lifetime learning. Evolution never developed a lot of elaborate machinery to influence our values.”
What I think you do mean: “Human values are emergent from a simple and general bit of our genetic blueprint (our general learning algorithm), plus a bunch of evolutionary nudges (maybe slightly hackish) to guide this learning algorithm towards things like friendship, eating when hungry, avoiding disgusting things, etc. Some of these nudges generalize so well they’ve basically persisted across mammalian evolution, while some of them humans only share with social primates, but the point is that even though we have really different values from chimpanzees, that’s more because our learning algorithm is scaled up and our environment is different, the nudges on the learning algorithm have barely had to change at all.”
What I think you intend to contrast this to: “Every detail of human values has to be specified in the genome—the complexity of the values and the complexity of the genome have to be closely related.”
This is an excellent guess and correct (AFAICT). Thanks for supplying so much interpretive labor!
I’d say our position contrasts with “A substantial portion of human value formation is genetically pre-determined in a complicated way, such that values are more like adaptations and less like exaptations—more like contextually-activated genetic machinery and influences than learned artifacts of simple learning-process-signals.”
In terms of past literature, I disagree with the psychological nativism I’ve read thus far. I also have not yet read much evolutionary psychology, but expect to deem most of it implausible due to information inaccessibility of the learned world model.