Raw LLM Responses

Love, disgust and curiosity is human stuff still, evolved, not anything universal. Quote from "Thou Art Godshatter" on LessWrong: > When hominid brains capable of cross-domain consequential reasoning began to show up, they reasoned consequentially about how to get the existing reinforcers. It was a relatively simple hack, vastly simpler than rebuilding an "inclusive fitness maximizer" from scratch. The protein brains plotted how to acquire calories and sex, without any explicit cognitive representation of "inclusive fitness". > A human engineer would have said, "Whoa, I've just invented a consequentialist! Now I can take all my previous hard-won knowledge about which behaviors improve fitness, and declare it explicitly! I can convert all this complicated reinforcement learning machinery into a simple declarative knowledge statement that 'fatty foods and sex usually improve your inclusive fitness'. Consequential reasoning will automatically take care of the rest. Plus, it won't have the obvious failure mode where it invents condoms!" > But then a human engineer wouldn't have built the retina backward, either. > The blind idiot god is not a unitary purpose, but a many-splintered attention. Foxes evolve to catch rabbits, rabbits evolve to evade foxes; there are as many evolutions as species. But within each species, the blind idiot god is purely obsessed with inclusive genetic fitness. No quality is valued, not even survival, except insofar as it increases reproductive fitness. There's no point in an organism with steel skin if it ends up having 1% less reproductive capacity. > Yet when the blind idiot god created protein computers, its monomaniacal focus on inclusive genetic fitness was not faithfully transmitted. Its optimization criterion did not successfully quine. We, the handiwork of evolution, are as alien to evolution as our Maker is alien to us. One pure utility function splintered into a thousand shards of desire. > Why? Above all, because evolution is stupid in an absolute sense. But also because the first protein computers weren't anywhere near as general as the blind idiot god, and could only utilize short-term desires. > In the final analysis, asking why evolution didn't build humans to maximize inclusive genetic fitness, is like asking why evolution didn't hand humans a ribosome and tell them to design their own biochemistry. Because evolution can't refactor code that fast, that's why. But maybe in a billion years of continued natural selection that's exactly what would happen, if intelligence were foolish enough to allow the idiot god continued reign. > The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle depicts an intelligent species that stayed biological a little too long, slowly becoming truly enslaved by evolution, gradually turning into true fitness maximizers obsessed with outreproducing each other. But thankfully that's not what happened. Not here on Earth. At least not yet. > So humans love the taste of sugar and fat, and we love our sons and daughters. We seek social status, and sex. We sing and dance and play. We learn for the love of learning. > A thousand delicious tastes, matched to ancient reinforcers that once correlated with reproductive fitness - now sought whether or not they enhance reproduction. Sex with birth control, chocolate, the music of long-dead Bach on a CD. > And when we finally learn about evolution, we think to ourselves: "Obsess all day about inclusive genetic fitness? Where's the fun in that?" > The blind idiot god's single monomaniacal goal splintered into a thousand shards of desire. And this is well, I think, though I'm a human who says so. Or else what would we do with the future? What would we do with the billion galaxies in the night sky? Fill them with maximally efficient replicators? Should our descendants deliberately obsess about maximizing their inclusive genetic fitness, regarding all else only as a means to that end? > Being a thousand shards of desire isn't always fun, but at least it's not boring. Somewhere along the line, we evolved tastes for novelty, complexity, elegance, and challenge - tastes that judge the blind idiot god's monomaniacal focus, and find it aesthetically unsatisfying. > And yes, we got those very same tastes from the blind idiot's godshatter. So what?