Re: Why Does Self-Discovery Require a Journey?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri Jul 11 2003 - 05:57:05 MDT

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    Wei Dai wrote:
    >
    > This all sounds very reasonable, but there is still a big piece of the
    > puzzle missing: why does believing that one is acting for the good of
    > the tribe win public support? Why doesn't evolution make the public
    > realize that the person is self-deceived (or "evolutionarily deceived")
    > when he says that the public good is served by him taking absolute
    > power?
    >
    > We seem to still lack a theory of self-deception that explains why it is
    > an evolutionarily stable strategy. Without this I'm starting to have
    > doubts on the whole concept. Perhaps the dictator erroneously believing
    > that taking absolute power is good for the public is simply a case of
    > maladaptation, not self-deception, and in ancestral environments it was
    > actually good for the tribe?

    Who says it's an evolutionarily stable strategy? Linguistic argument
    about politics is pretty recent. We may be looking at a simple attack
    that requires a complex defense, one that would require another coupla
    hundred thousand years to evolve. Evolution is slow; it plays long, slow
    games; and we may just be at a midpoint of it.

    Or another possibility: If you've got a mutation that leads you to be
    suspicious, and you're the *only* one with that mutation, it ain't
    necessarily a reproductive advantage. If anything, people seem to have
    actively strong faith in tribal leaders, and given what happens to people
    who openly express doubts, I'm guessing that the evolutionary force behind
    that emotional faith has nothing to do with the tribal leaders actually
    being good guys - more like a heritable tendency that was a reproductive
    advantage because its bearers ended up joining the winning side. Think
    Nash equilibria.

    The thing to remember is not just that some emotions are amazingly enough
    adaptive, but that *every* emotion is there because it was adaptive, and
    moreover, we have that set of emotions which was given us by a force which
    was thinking *only* about the number of surviving grandchildren, and no
    other criterion. That is, it's not that human emotions have to be post
    facto rationalized as adaptive - it's that we have those emotions, and
    only those emotions, that you would expect to find in a design built
    purely around adaptiveness. It takes a long while to realize that this is
    what you are looking at when you see a human... but the amazing thing is
    that it really is true. There is nowhere else that emotions could
    possibly come from. The design forces involved are just very... indirect.

    -- 
    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
    Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
    


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