Intuitively, I feel like I have various competing desires/preferences floating around in my head that I process further in order to decide what to do. They’re actually physically encoded, but that’s just asserting that they exist for real.
Some salient desires of mine right now are:
The desire to eat (I want my breakfast)
The desire to finish this comment
The desire to scratch my stomach
The desire to look up when graduation rehearsal is
As you can see, many of these are contradictory, so you can’t infer all of them from my actions.
Some of these desires are fairly basic, like the one to eat. Neural circuitry controlling hunger has been found.
Others are far more complicated, like the one about finishing this comment. I think that that is probably aggregated from various smaller desires, like “explain myself clearly”, “get karma points”, or “contribute to Less Wrong”.
I think that desires might be packaged by my unconscious mind so that my conscious mind can figure out how to accomplish them, without me needing to think through what I should want before doing anything.
The word preference/desire probably refers to multiple things.
For many of my preferences, you could infer them by changing the world to fulfill them, and then seeing if I’m happier. Normally I will be happier/more satisfied (a physical arrangement of my brain) as a result of my preferences being fulfilled.
Other preferences like “speak in English” or “always be nice to people” seem to be more like imperatives that I should follow for coordination or signalling purposes. But they still feel pretty much the same as my normal preferences.
But it’s all still physically encoded in my brain, and does refer to the world-as-is, even if it doesn’t feel like it does.
Intuitively, I feel like I have various competing desires/preferences floating around in my head that I process further in order to decide what to do. They’re actually physically encoded, but that’s just asserting that they exist for real.
Some salient desires of mine right now are:
The desire to eat (I want my breakfast)
The desire to finish this comment
The desire to scratch my stomach
The desire to look up when graduation rehearsal is
As you can see, many of these are contradictory, so you can’t infer all of them from my actions.
Some of these desires are fairly basic, like the one to eat. Neural circuitry controlling hunger has been found.
Others are far more complicated, like the one about finishing this comment. I think that that is probably aggregated from various smaller desires, like “explain myself clearly”, “get karma points”, or “contribute to Less Wrong”.
I think that desires might be packaged by my unconscious mind so that my conscious mind can figure out how to accomplish them, without me needing to think through what I should want before doing anything.
The word preference/desire probably refers to multiple things.
For many of my preferences, you could infer them by changing the world to fulfill them, and then seeing if I’m happier. Normally I will be happier/more satisfied (a physical arrangement of my brain) as a result of my preferences being fulfilled.
Other preferences like “speak in English” or “always be nice to people” seem to be more like imperatives that I should follow for coordination or signalling purposes. But they still feel pretty much the same as my normal preferences.
But it’s all still physically encoded in my brain, and does refer to the world-as-is, even if it doesn’t feel like it does.
Do you contribute to charity? Do you make explicit long-term plans about how you will help the world? (Or other, similar things)