You could say that sunflowers are very similar to other good things in the past, e.g. Beautiful Calm Nature and Movies and Flowers As Something Good and Places That Are 100% Not School or Workplace or Busy City. And I think that Shard Theory is actually in trouble either way:
How does that reinforcement event history create a sunflower-timidity-shard?
I think such reinforcement history could create “Nature—timidity” shard and sunflowers (and flowers in general) could be a strong symbol of nature.
By the way, I would like if explanations of human behavior were discussed more in the post. E.g. if the post proposed a couple of shard based explanations and compared them to some non-shard based explanations. For example: (I realize that the explanation is just an example, it’s not final)
For example, perhaps there is a hardcoded reward circuit which is activated by a crude subcortical smile-detector and a hardcoded attentional bias towards objects with relatively large eyes. Then reinforcement events around making children happy would cause people to care about children. For example, an adult’s credit assignment might correctly credit decisions like “smiling at the child” and “helping them find their parents at a fair” as responsible for making the child smile. “Making the child happy” and “looking out for the child’s safety” are two reliable correlates of smiles, and so people probably reliably grow child-subshards around these correlates.
Does the theory say that a full-grown adult wouldn’t have enough mental machinery to care about children strong enough if she lacked “smile-detector” and “large eyes detector” or a couple of specific decisions in the past?
If you saw that someone vandalizes something important to your friend (e.g. her artworks), you probably would get a strong reaction to that just because you understand what’s happening. Or because of some more general shards (e.g. related to “effort” and to yourself and to your friend). Wouldn’t a drowning child activate much more shards and/or other things?
Caring about anything/anyone alive.
Seeing yourself in the child (empathy).
Caring about anyone who can care about the child.
Something bad happening. Emergency.
Fear of guilt/judgement.
Disgust about the possibilities.
Sorry if you already wrote about it, but does Shard Theory fall under the umbrella of behaviorism?
Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals.[1] It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, including especially reinforcement and punishment contingencies, together with the individual’s current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental events.
How does that reinforcement event history create a sunflower-timidity-shard?
I think such reinforcement history could create “Nature—timidity” shard and sunflowers (and flowers in general) could be a strong symbol of nature.
By the way, I would like if explanations of human behavior were discussed more in the post. E.g. if the post proposed a couple of shard based explanations and compared them to some non-shard based explanations. For example: (I realize that the explanation is just an example, it’s not final)
Does the theory say that a full-grown adult wouldn’t have enough mental machinery to care about children strong enough if she lacked “smile-detector” and “large eyes detector” or a couple of specific decisions in the past?
If you saw that someone vandalizes something important to your friend (e.g. her artworks), you probably would get a strong reaction to that just because you understand what’s happening. Or because of some more general shards (e.g. related to “effort” and to yourself and to your friend). Wouldn’t a drowning child activate much more shards and/or other things?
Caring about anything/anyone alive.
Seeing yourself in the child (empathy).
Caring about anyone who can care about the child.
Something bad happening. Emergency.
Fear of guilt/judgement.
Disgust about the possibilities.
Sorry if you already wrote about it, but does Shard Theory fall under the umbrella of behaviorism?