A: A mundane answer could be: natural is a word describing a thing, situation, person, phenomenon etc that was experienced in the ancestral environment—whatever way you understand with this—I don’t necessarily mean people in caves. Instead of ancestral environment think ‘training set for the oldbrain / learned priors in the brain & human body’. Its counterpart is often used to describe things recently made by humans and their egregores like global capitalism.
Q: Why might this be a useful distinction?
A: In some sense humans, and human culture is ‘well-adapted’ to natural things/phenomena in a way it isn’t for ‘artificial’ phenomena.
It’s a Trap
Artificial things/environment/situations potentially contain more ‘traps’ - an important concept I learned from Vanessa . For example, it very well could be that some chemical we use nowadays will make us all infertile (even if in 99% cases it is overblown scaremongering). We ‘know’ that isn’t the case with ‘natural’ substances/ practices because we have the genetic & cultural memory of humans lasting over long time periods. From a learning-theoretic perspective one could say that sometimes correct beliefs can be obtained in a single episode reinforcement learning + model based computation (“rational reasoning”). In some situations, the world can’t efficiently be learned this way.
Simulacra
Artificial often has a stronger negative connotation than ‘just’ a potentially dangerous thing/phenomena not seen in the ancestral environment. Colloquially, being artificial implies being designed often with the goal of ‘simulating’ an original ‘natural thing’.
For reinforcement learning agents encountering artificial objects & phenomena is potentially dangerous: reinforcement learners use proxies . If those “natural” proxies get simulated by “artificial” substitutes this may lead to the reinforcement learner Goodhearting on the artificial subsitute proxy. In other words, the reward machinery gets ‘hacked’.
Animals on Drugs
A paradigmatical example is drug addicts. Rather than an ailment of modern society, habitual drug use and abuse is widespread thoughout human history, and even observed in animals. Other examples could be pornography, makeup and parent birds feedings cuckoo chicks.
Uncanny Valley Defense
Artificial can have an even stronger negative connotation: it is not just unnatural, it is not just ‘hacking the reward machinery’ by accident—since artificial objects are ‘designed’, they can be also designed adversarially.
The phenomena of artificial substitutes hacking ancient reward mechanisms is common now. I claim it is was a common enough problem in the past for humans & perhaps animals to have developed defenses against reward hacking. This might explain the uncanny valley effect in psychology. It might also explain why many humans & animals are actually surprisingly resistant to drug abuse.
Artificial/Natural
Q: Why do we call some things Natural—other things Artificial? Why do we associate ‘Natural’ with good, ‘Artificial’ with bad? Why do we react so vehemently to artificial objects/phenomena that are close to ‘natural’ objects/phenomena?
A: A mundane answer could be: natural is a word describing a thing, situation, person, phenomenon etc that was experienced in the ancestral environment—whatever way you understand with this—I don’t necessarily mean people in caves. Instead of ancestral environment think ‘training set for the oldbrain / learned priors in the brain & human body’. Its counterpart is often used to describe things recently made by humans and their egregores like global capitalism.
Q: Why might this be a useful distinction?
A: In some sense humans, and human culture is ‘well-adapted’ to natural things/phenomena in a way it isn’t for ‘artificial’ phenomena.
It’s a Trap
Artificial things/environment/situations potentially contain more ‘traps’ - an important concept I learned from Vanessa . For example, it very well could be that some chemical we use nowadays will make us all infertile (even if in 99% cases it is overblown scaremongering).
We ‘know’ that isn’t the case with ‘natural’ substances/ practices because we have the genetic & cultural memory of humans lasting over long time periods. From a learning-theoretic perspective one could say that sometimes correct beliefs can be obtained in a single episode reinforcement learning + model based computation (“rational reasoning”). In some situations, the world can’t efficiently be learned this way.
Simulacra
Artificial often has a stronger negative connotation than ‘just’ a potentially dangerous thing/phenomena not seen in the ancestral environment. Colloquially, being artificial implies being designed often with the goal of ‘simulating’ an original ‘natural thing’.
For reinforcement learning agents encountering artificial objects & phenomena is potentially dangerous: reinforcement learners use proxies . If those “natural” proxies get simulated by “artificial” substitutes this may lead to the reinforcement learner Goodhearting on the artificial subsitute proxy. In other words, the reward machinery gets ‘hacked’.
Animals on Drugs
A paradigmatical example is drug addicts. Rather than an ailment of modern society, habitual drug use and abuse is widespread thoughout human history, and even observed in animals. Other examples could be pornography, makeup and parent birds feedings cuckoo chicks.
Uncanny Valley Defense
Artificial can have an even stronger negative connotation: it is not just unnatural, it is not just ‘hacking the reward machinery’ by accident—since artificial objects are ‘designed’, they can be also designed adversarially.
The phenomena of artificial substitutes hacking ancient reward mechanisms is common now. I claim it is was a common enough problem in the past for humans & perhaps animals to have developed defenses against reward hacking. This might explain the uncanny valley effect in psychology. It might also explain why many humans & animals are actually surprisingly resistant to drug abuse.