I think humans do value-inference in both directions. Our “terminal” values are in part grown out of which high-level things correlate with low-level things. An example is John Wentworth—who seems to lack the circuits for feeling (companionate) love—saying he thinks relationships and kids are lame compared to his goals of saving the world, to the point where he would prefer not to be modified to be able to feel love, and says he would view a drug which enabled him to feel love similarly to a syringe of heroin. Clearly, his brain has built up terminal values V(saving world) > V(wife and kids) out of his lower-level instincts.
Sexuality seems to be another case of this; it is interesting just how variable it can be. Just take a look at the amount of variance in how attracted monosexual people are trans people of the gender (and conversely not the assigned-at-birth sex) that they’re attracted to. Some people’s values infer the “right” gender cues and ignore the mechanical ones, some just don’t. (though I will admit I’m going off of zeitgeist here and have basically no experience in this domain)
My best guess is that the brain is re-using its epistemic inference circuits (which are good at taking in information, gestalting it, and penalizing by complexity) and running a kind of “What are my values?” inference, which seeks a relatively non-contradictory, relatively simple value system, then doing it’s own equivalent of backpropagation to smooth all the conflicting lower-level drives towards that, similarly to how it can smooth over conflicting predictive circuits to make its own models more consistent, just by thinking (i.e. without external input).
I think humans do value-inference in both directions. Our “terminal” values are in part grown out of which high-level things correlate with low-level things. An example is John Wentworth—who seems to lack the circuits for feeling (companionate) love—saying he thinks relationships and kids are lame compared to his goals of saving the world, to the point where he would prefer not to be modified to be able to feel love, and says he would view a drug which enabled him to feel love similarly to a syringe of heroin. Clearly, his brain has built up terminal values V(saving world) > V(wife and kids) out of his lower-level instincts.
Sexuality seems to be another case of this; it is interesting just how variable it can be. Just take a look at the amount of variance in how attracted monosexual people are trans people of the gender (and conversely not the assigned-at-birth sex) that they’re attracted to. Some people’s values infer the “right” gender cues and ignore the mechanical ones, some just don’t. (though I will admit I’m going off of zeitgeist here and have basically no experience in this domain)
My best guess is that the brain is re-using its epistemic inference circuits (which are good at taking in information, gestalting it, and penalizing by complexity) and running a kind of “What are my values?” inference, which seeks a relatively non-contradictory, relatively simple value system, then doing it’s own equivalent of backpropagation to smooth all the conflicting lower-level drives towards that, similarly to how it can smooth over conflicting predictive circuits to make its own models more consistent, just by thinking (i.e. without external input).