Evolutionary Psychology

This level confusion also seems to show up whenever people talk about "free will"- a computer was programmed by us, but its code can still do things that we never designed it for. Evolution sure as heck never designed people to make condoms and birth control pills, so why can't a computer do things we never designed it to do?

The part about the ontological distinctiveness between cognitive and evolutionary causes reminds me of my old English professor who mixed the two. While I knew it was wrong, I didn't have a label. He believed that nature had a kind of memory through natural selection.

You say "the neural circuitry of anger is a reproductive organ as surely as your liver" and "the evolutionary purpose of anger is to increase inclusive genetic fitness."

I don't believe you have enough evidence to assert these statements. All you know is that "angry ancestors had more kids" but you DON'T know that it's as a result of the anger. It could have happened that, say, the same ancestors that could run faster also happened to have the capacity for anger. As a result of their faster running, they reproduced/survived, and so did anger.

I liken this to classic studies on the effects of divorce on children. Of course, kids end up worse off with parents that divorce, but all else equal, divorce may very well be GOOD for the kid. Similarly, although here angry ancestors did have more kids, anger may very well be BAD for reproduction/survival. I'm sure there's also a good cynical example, too, like that the reason the dollar was the dominant currency through the 20th century was because it was green.

Oh, tsk tsk. But women with "creationist" brains just don't have the sort of one night stands implied by your story, at least not as often as the ones with "evolutionary" brains, :-).

OTOH, if they are creationists who have been reading too much Stephen Jay Gould, who knows what sorts of trouble they might get into. They might even tragically start selecting partners on multi-levels, while disobeying the correct equations, :-).

My name is Tiiba, and I approve of this post.

That said, I have a question. Your homepage says:

"Most of my old writing is horrifically obsolete. Essentially you should assume that anything from 2001 or earlier was written by a different person who also happens to be named "Eliezer Yudkowsky". 2002-2003 is an iffy call."

Well, as far as I can tell, most of your important writing on AI is "old". So what does this mean? What ideas have been invalidated? What replaced them? Are you secretly building a robot?

Tiiba, please re-ask on this month's Open Thread and I'll delete the comment here.

Tom McGabe: "Evolution sure as heck never designed people to make condoms and birth control pills, so why can't a computer do things we never designed it to do?"

That's merely unpredictability/non-determinism, which is not necessarily the same as free will.

"That's merely unpredictability/non-determinism, which is not necessarily the same as free will."

Prove it; at least give a reasonable definition of free will that doesn't include "unpredictability/non-determinism". For that matter, how about a definition of "unpredictability/non-determinism".

Free will and, usually, non-determinism are among the big ideas everyone talks about without having any idea what they're talking about.

"To reason correctly about evolutionary psychology you must simultaneously consider many complicated abstract facts that are strongly related yet importantly distinct, without a single mixup or conflation."

Sure, but after a while this just becomes a habit and I don't think it's more difficult than, say, organic chemistry. But without some practice or exposure, it is deeply counterintuitive. It's also probably encroaching on some sacred territory. You can subject some atrocious things like infanticide and homicidal rampages to evolutionary explanations. I don't think anyone's closed the book on any of these, but in all these cases I think EP has an interesting perspective. Generally, though, people don't even want to think about it. People probably resist thinking along these lines because of the perceived violation of their freedom or morality (which violation is, as you say, is an illusion).

I define free will as an ability to create and implement plans that move the world toward a goal. That seems to fit the way the term is used with regard to humans.

You can do something willfully (construct and implement a plan with a goal in mind), be coerced (construct and implement a plan that achieves something other than your own goals), be restrained (construct a plan that could achieve a goal, and then not implement it), or be manipulated (implement a plan that you did not construct, and whose goal you might not understand; you might or might not like the result).

Most programs implement plans that they did not create to achieve goals they don't understand in a world of which they don't know. But I think that if a machine can create and carry out plans, it has a degree of freedom.

billswift said: "Prove it."

I am just saying 'being unpredictable' isn't the same as free will, which I think is pretty intuitive (most complex systems are unpredictable, but presumably very few people will grant them all free will). As far as the relationship between randomness and free will, that's clearly a large discussion with a large literature, but again it's not clear what the relationship is, and there is room for a lot of strange explanations. For example some panpsychists might argue that 'free will' is the primitive notion, and randomness is just an effect, not the other way around.

"You can subject some atrocious things like infanticide and homicidal rampages to evolutionary explanations. I don't think anyone's closed the book on any of these, but in all these cases I think EP has an interesting perspective."

Huh? We know that group selection can lead to cannibalism, so analyzing infanticide and homicidal rampages would seem rather trivial. On the other hand, it's rather surprising that purely evolutionary mechanisms would lead to something as complex as our psychology and sense of morality. From a rational Bayesian perspective, how likely is it that an evolved adaptation executor would be able to formulate optimization criteria, while lacking an intuitive understanding of inclusive fitness?

What are you saying - that EP has closed the book on them?

My point about infanticide etc. was that EP has bigger problems for becoming generally accepted than how difficult it is to reason about - problems having to do with a perceived removal of agency from human beings.

Anyway, it doesn't strike me as surprising that purely evolutionary mechanisms led to our psychology, and especially not our sense of morality. Are these things much more complex than any other animal behavior we're happily willing to concede to evolution?

The neural circuitry of anger is a reproductive organ as surely as your liver. Anger exists in Homo sapiens because angry ancestors had more kids. thanks for this healpful information.

it wasn't evolution that did it. it was my daddy peace dudes, seeyas all soon chris-dawg taken from the right (hand-side)

Another part of the evolutionary psychology puzzle is the distinction of levels, or what Yudkowsky calls the hands vs fingers.

Its not that anger causes reproduction. Its the anger circuitry, or the ability to be angry, that causes better reproductive success. The former statement doesn't even make sense in terms of evolutionary psychology, while the latter is fairly obvious (namely, that lack of anger leads to not fighting from a reproductively hopeless situation. Anger circuitry forces action from reproductive dead-ends)

"Anger exists in Homo sapiens because angry ancestors had more kids. There's no other way it could have gotten there."

This is not entirely true - as Boris seems to have noticed. More generally; anything that purely helps survival is certainly more probable to propagate through a species. However, there are other traits that might propagate, such as any of those that are either: a) Not useful nor a burden b) A negative biproduct of something useful, without outweighing the useful

I don't understand the point of this post. I mean, I understand its points, but why is this post here? Is it trying to point out that: (a) intent and reality are not always -- and usually aren't -- entangled? (b) Reality happened and our little XML-style purpose tags are added post fact?

It seems odd to spend so much time saying, "Humans reproduced successfully. Anger exists in humans." If the anger part is correlated to the reproduction part it seems fair to ask, "Why did anger help reproduction?" This is a different question than, "What is the purpose of anger?" Is this difference what the article was pointing out?

To reason correctly about evolutionary psychology you must simultaneously consider many complicated abstract facts that are strongly related yet importantly distinct, without a single mixup or conflation.

How is this different from any other topic?

To reason correctly about computer science you must simultaneously consider many complicated abstract facts that are strongly related yet importantly distinct, without a single mixup or conflation.

To reason correctly about Starcraft II you must simultaneously consider many complicated abstract facts that are strongly related yet importantly distinct, without a single mixup or conflation.

The idea of special-casing evolutionary psychology is where I feel I am losing the plot.

The part where this gets difficult is understanding why we evolved to have conscious intentions in the first place. What purpose does it serve to make us actually want things, rather than simply act as if we wanted them? Why aren't we like toasters?

This also gets at one of the reasons why I think it's a fool's errand to try to make the singularity with a non-sentient AI. If it were possible to make that level of intelligence without consciousness (and do so efficiently and cheaply), surely natural selection would have done so? Instead it made us sentient; this suggests that sentience is a useful thing to have.

Like "IRC chat"

I don't think that aged well :)

I found a related article prior to this on this topic which seems to be expanding about the same thing.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691610393528