1. I think level-4 simulacrum morality is VERY old and has existed for a long time in uncomfortable confused competition with the other kinds.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.
One (potential?) disagreement is that I think it’s quite plausible that level-4-simulacrums are in fact the original morality, or co-evolved with level-1 morality. I think it actually took work to get morality to a point where it made any “sense” in a principled way. (At least, with principles that LWers are likely to endorse)
My current best guess is that morality is rooted in two things:
1) the need to coordinate political factions (who has enough friends that they could beat someone and take their stuff, or avoid having themselves beaten-up-and-stuff-taken). Notions of ‘fairness’ (which come from the anger module), getting filtered through “what can a group of people agree is fair?”, as a coordination mechanism.
2) something something repurposing our disgust module (from diseased individuals) to dislike people that seemed dangerous to have around. (So low status, powerless people often produce a disgust reaction. If you hang around a diseased person you might get sick. If you hang around powerless people you might get stuck with a spear).
The oldest simulacrum-level-1 morality I can imagine would have involved coordinating hunters and maybe building shelters (where it matters how skilled people are). But I’d expect the same time period to already involve maintaining your position within a political tribe, and I’d expect higher-level-simulacra morality to already be at work in that context.
(I’m not sure whether it makes sense to think of levels 1-through-4 as distinct stages)
I’d expect the explicit level 1-4 transition to become relevant after we moved to hierarchical agricultural societies, but for that to be happening alongside levels 2-4 already existing in some form.
Coevolution seems plausible to me, but preexisting doesn’t. Forager-typical fairness norms seem like a coherent shared social agenda, which is I think all that’s required to be at simulacra level 1. The anger “module” is fundamentally social and seems to be object-level. Plenty of social animals not smart enough to be Machiavellian experience anger, a sense of fairness, etc.