And from what did you learn about the idea of evolution, and whence observe anything connected to the abstraction ‘instinct’?
What I meant by ‘evolutionary prior’ is all information available to us that are not a result of the stimulation of sensory receptors. This can be genetically programmed memory or the architecture of the computational substrate. It doesn’t matter if we were shaped by evolution, even a Boltzmann brain will contain extrasensory information. The basic point I tried to make is that philosophy can partly be seen as an art that tries to fathom the possibilities and constraints of our minds by experiencing, i.e. computing, the human algorithm. I am not trying to argue that the way Yudkowsky wants to fathom human nature is wrong, it is indeed the superior way of gaining functional knowledge. But the behavior of the human algorithm is sufficiently complicated that it is not possible to work out the behavior by other means than performing the computation. In other words, the dynamic state sequence that can be evoked from the human machine by computing the algorithm is not merely complicated but complex, that is unpredictable. Philosophers are computing the algorithm to learn more about its behavior. Philosophers also study the behavior of systems of human algorithms by computing the interaction with other philosophers. Doing so philosophers are able to investigate the emergent phenomena of those systems. All those phenomena reduce entirely to the physical facts but physical systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Those properties can not be predicted in advance but only discovered by computing the system.
And from what did you learn about the idea of evolution, and whence observe anything connected to the abstraction ‘instinct’?
What I meant by ‘evolutionary prior’ is all information available to us that are not a result of the stimulation of sensory receptors. This can be genetically programmed memory or the architecture of the computational substrate. It doesn’t matter if we were shaped by evolution, even a Boltzmann brain will contain extrasensory information. The basic point I tried to make is that philosophy can partly be seen as an art that tries to fathom the possibilities and constraints of our minds by experiencing, i.e. computing, the human algorithm. I am not trying to argue that the way Yudkowsky wants to fathom human nature is wrong, it is indeed the superior way of gaining functional knowledge. But the behavior of the human algorithm is sufficiently complicated that it is not possible to work out the behavior by other means than performing the computation. In other words, the dynamic state sequence that can be evoked from the human machine by computing the algorithm is not merely complicated but complex, that is unpredictable. Philosophers are computing the algorithm to learn more about its behavior. Philosophers also study the behavior of systems of human algorithms by computing the interaction with other philosophers. Doing so philosophers are able to investigate the emergent phenomena of those systems. All those phenomena reduce entirely to the physical facts but physical systems can have properties that their parts alone do not. Those properties can not be predicted in advance but only discovered by computing the system.