You homed in exactly on the point where I have theoretical doubts (I need to better think through predictive theories and what they really imply) but I can tell you where I stand as of now.
My current idea to resolve this (and I will amend the main text, either to commit to this or to at least avoid contradictory phrasing) is to invoke multiagent models of the mind:
An agent must indeed have immutable goals to function as an agent
Our mind, on the other hand, is probably better modelled not as an agent but an agora of agents with all sorts of different goals (the usual picture is a competition or a market, but why not cooperation and other interactions as well)
This agora needs to pretend that it is a single agent in order to actually act sometimes. Thus, mind-wide goals are immutable for the duration of an “agentic burst”, for as long as a given agent is singled out at the agora—which could be the duration of a single gesture for very low-level goals, or the typical time span of a coherent self-image for the most high-level ones.
The way that mind-wide goals are changed is not by modifying an agent, but by (1) adding another agent to the agora, typically a predictive model of other people in a certain setting, and (2) providing evidence that this one is a better model of “myself”, at least in the current situation.
As for biological drives, I’ll concede that the word “all” is probably untrue and I wil retract it, though I do mean “the overwhelming majority as soon as the cultural learning machine kicks in”. This may be overcorrection in response to sociobiology (which itself was overcorrection in response to blank slate cultural relativism), but I want to try to commit to this and see how far it goes!
As for biological drives, I’ll concede that the word “all” is probably untrue and I wil retract it, though I do mean “the overwhelming majority as soon as the cultural learning machine kicks in”. This may be overcorrection in response to sociobiology (which itself was overcorrection in response to blank slate cultural relativism), but I want to try to commit to this and see how far it goes!
As far as my own view on this is concerned, I do think the blank slate view of human nature is mostly correct, and that ev psych/sociobiology is drastically wrong here due to harsh limits on how much information can be encoded in a genetic prior.
You homed in exactly on the point where I have theoretical doubts (I need to better think through predictive theories and what they really imply) but I can tell you where I stand as of now.
My current idea to resolve this (and I will amend the main text, either to commit to this or to at least avoid contradictory phrasing) is to invoke multiagent models of the mind:
An agent must indeed have immutable goals to function as an agent
Our mind, on the other hand, is probably better modelled not as an agent but an agora of agents with all sorts of different goals (the usual picture is a competition or a market, but why not cooperation and other interactions as well)
This agora needs to pretend that it is a single agent in order to actually act sometimes. Thus, mind-wide goals are immutable for the duration of an “agentic burst”, for as long as a given agent is singled out at the agora—which could be the duration of a single gesture for very low-level goals, or the typical time span of a coherent self-image for the most high-level ones.
The way that mind-wide goals are changed is not by modifying an agent, but by (1) adding another agent to the agora, typically a predictive model of other people in a certain setting, and (2) providing evidence that this one is a better model of “myself”, at least in the current situation.
As for biological drives, I’ll concede that the word “all” is probably untrue and I wil retract it, though I do mean “the overwhelming majority as soon as the cultural learning machine kicks in”. This may be overcorrection in response to sociobiology (which itself was overcorrection in response to blank slate cultural relativism), but I want to try to commit to this and see how far it goes!
As far as my own view on this is concerned, I do think the blank slate view of human nature is mostly correct, and that ev psych/sociobiology is drastically wrong here due to harsh limits on how much information can be encoded in a genetic prior.