Eliezer, you are right that my sense of moral approval or disapproval doesn’t rely as heavily on this distinction as yours, and so I’m less eager to make this distinction. But I agree that one can sensibly distinguish genetically-encoded evolution-computed strategies from consciously brain-computed strategies from unconsciously brain-computed strategies. And I agree it would be nice to have clean terms to distinguish these, and to use those terms when we intend to speak primarily about one of these categories.
Most actions we take, however, probably have substantial contributions from all three sources, and we will often want to talk about human strategies even when we don’t know much about these relative contributions. So surely we also want to have generic words that don’t make this distinction, and these would probably be the most commonly used words out of these four sets.
Eliezer, you are right that my sense of moral approval or disapproval doesn’t rely as heavily on this distinction as yours, and so I’m less eager to make this distinction. But I agree that one can sensibly distinguish genetically-encoded evolution-computed strategies from consciously brain-computed strategies from unconsciously brain-computed strategies. And I agree it would be nice to have clean terms to distinguish these, and to use those terms when we intend to speak primarily about one of these categories.
Most actions we take, however, probably have substantial contributions from all three sources, and we will often want to talk about human strategies even when we don’t know much about these relative contributions. So surely we also want to have generic words that don’t make this distinction, and these would probably be the most commonly used words out of these four sets.