“Humans are nice because they were selected to be nice”—non-mechanistic.
“Humans are nice because their contextually activated heuristics were formed by past reinforcement by reward circuits A, B, C; this convergently occurs during childhood because of experiences D, E, F; credit assignment worked appropriately at that time because their abstraction-learning had been mostly taken care of by self-supervised predictive learning, as evidenced by developmental psychology timelines in G, H, I, and also possibly natural abstractions.”—mechanistic (although I can only fill in parts of this story for now)
Although I’m not a widely-read scholar on what theories people have for human values, of those which I have read, most (but not all) are more like the first story than the second.
“Humans are nice because they were selected to be nice”—non-mechanistic.
“Humans are nice because their contextually activated heuristics were formed by past reinforcement by reward circuits A, B, C; this convergently occurs during childhood because of experiences D, E, F; credit assignment worked appropriately at that time because their abstraction-learning had been mostly taken care of by self-supervised predictive learning, as evidenced by developmental psychology timelines in G, H, I, and also possibly natural abstractions.”—mechanistic (although I can only fill in parts of this story for now)
Although I’m not a widely-read scholar on what theories people have for human values, of those which I have read, most (but not all) are more like the first story than the second.