The master in your story is evolution, the slave is the brain. Both want different things. We normally identify with the brain, though all identities are basically social signals.
Also, pleasure and pain are no different from the other goals of the slave. The master definitely can’t step in and decide not to impose pain on a particular occasion just because doing so would increase status or otherwise serve the master’s values. If it could, torture wouldn’t cause pain.
Also, math is an implausible goal for a status/sex/power seeking master to instill in slave. Much more plausibly, math and all the diverse human obsessions are misfirings of mechanisms built by evolution for some other purpose. I would suggest maladaptive consequences of fairly general systems for responding to societal encouragement with obsession because societies encourage sustained attention to lots of different unnatural tasks, whether digging dirt or hunting whales or whatever in order to cultivate skill and also to get the tasks themselves done. We need a general purpose attention allocator which obeys social signals in order to develop skills that contribute critically to survival in any of the vast number of habitats that even stone-age humans occupied.
Since we are the slave and we are designing the AI, ultimately, whatever we choose to do IS extracting our preferences, though it’s very possible that our preferences give consideration to the master’s preferences, or even that we help him despite not wanting to for some game theoretical reason along the lines of Vinge’s meta-golden rule.
Why the objection to randomness? If we want something for its own sake and the object of our desire was determined somewhat randomly we want it all the same and generally do so reflectively. This is particularly clear regarding romantic relationships.
Once again game-theory may remove the randomness via trade between agents following the same decision procedure in different Everett branches or regions of a big world.
I read this as postulating a part of our unconscious minds that is the master, able to watch and react to the behavior and thoughts of the conscious mind.
In the first mention, game theoretical interaction with an idealized agent with consistent goals extracted from the creation of a best-fit to the behavior of either human evolution or evolution more generally. It’s wild speculation, not a best guess, but yeah, I naively intuit that I can imagine it vaguely as a possibility. OTOH, I don’t trust such intuitions and I’m quite clearly aware of the difficulties that genetic, and I think also memetic evolution face with playing games due to the inability to anticipate and to respond to information, so its probably a silly idea.
The latter speculation, trade between possible entities, seems much more likely.
Evolution is the game in this context, our conscious minds are players, and the results of the games determine “evolutionary success,” which is to say which minds end up playing the next round.
Also, math is an implausible goal for a status/sex/power seeking master to instill in slave.
Not really; there are plenty of environments in which you get status by being really good at math. Didn’t Isaac Newton end up with an awful lot of status? ;)
Not enough people get status by being good at math to remotely justify the number of people and level of talent that has gone into getting good at math.
The master in your story is evolution, the slave is the brain. Both want different things. We normally identify with the brain, though all identities are basically social signals.
Also, pleasure and pain are no different from the other goals of the slave. The master definitely can’t step in and decide not to impose pain on a particular occasion just because doing so would increase status or otherwise serve the master’s values. If it could, torture wouldn’t cause pain.
Also, math is an implausible goal for a status/sex/power seeking master to instill in slave. Much more plausibly, math and all the diverse human obsessions are misfirings of mechanisms built by evolution for some other purpose. I would suggest maladaptive consequences of fairly general systems for responding to societal encouragement with obsession because societies encourage sustained attention to lots of different unnatural tasks, whether digging dirt or hunting whales or whatever in order to cultivate skill and also to get the tasks themselves done. We need a general purpose attention allocator which obeys social signals in order to develop skills that contribute critically to survival in any of the vast number of habitats that even stone-age humans occupied.
Since we are the slave and we are designing the AI, ultimately, whatever we choose to do IS extracting our preferences, though it’s very possible that our preferences give consideration to the master’s preferences, or even that we help him despite not wanting to for some game theoretical reason along the lines of Vinge’s meta-golden rule.
Why the objection to randomness? If we want something for its own sake and the object of our desire was determined somewhat randomly we want it all the same and generally do so reflectively. This is particularly clear regarding romantic relationships.
Once again game-theory may remove the randomness via trade between agents following the same decision procedure in different Everett branches or regions of a big world.
I read this as postulating a part of our unconscious minds that is the master, able to watch and react to the behavior and thoughts of the conscious mind.
Er… did I read that right? Game-theoretic interaction with evolution?
In the first mention, game theoretical interaction with an idealized agent with consistent goals extracted from the creation of a best-fit to the behavior of either human evolution or evolution more generally. It’s wild speculation, not a best guess, but yeah, I naively intuit that I can imagine it vaguely as a possibility. OTOH, I don’t trust such intuitions and I’m quite clearly aware of the difficulties that genetic, and I think also memetic evolution face with playing games due to the inability to anticipate and to respond to information, so its probably a silly idea.
The latter speculation, trade between possible entities, seems much more likely.
Evolution is the game in this context, our conscious minds are players, and the results of the games determine “evolutionary success,” which is to say which minds end up playing the next round.
Assuming I’ve read this correctly of course.
Not really; there are plenty of environments in which you get status by being really good at math. Didn’t Isaac Newton end up with an awful lot of status? ;)
Not enough people get status by being good at math to remotely justify the number of people and level of talent that has gone into getting good at math.
Math also has instrumental value in many fields. But yeah, I guess your point stands.
And yet, no women or children.
Newton never reproduced.