Btw, there’s another simpler possible mechanism, though I don’t know the neuroscience and perhaps Steve’s hypothesis with separate valence assessors and involuntary attention control fits the neuroscience evidence much better and it may also fit observed motivated reasoning better.
But the obvious way to design a mind would be to make it just focus on whatever is most important, aka where most expected utility per necessary resources could be gained.
So we still have a learned value function which assigns how good/bad something would be, but we also have an estimator of how much the value would increase if we continue thinking (which might e.g. happen because one makes plans for making a somewhat bad situation better), and what gets attended on depends on this estimator, not the value function directly.
Btw, there’s another simpler possible mechanism, though I don’t know the neuroscience and perhaps Steve’s hypothesis with separate valence assessors and involuntary attention control fits the neuroscience evidence much better and it may also fit observed motivated reasoning better.
But the obvious way to design a mind would be to make it just focus on whatever is most important, aka where most expected utility per necessary resources could be gained.
So we still have a learned value function which assigns how good/bad something would be, but we also have an estimator of how much the value would increase if we continue thinking (which might e.g. happen because one makes plans for making a somewhat bad situation better), and what gets attended on depends on this estimator, not the value function directly.