I’m new here so please forgive me if I’m a bit naive on how the comment section works, but I have one simple question: are there some falsifiable predictions that you could come up with for this theory? In this way, one could create an experiment and test them, e.g. in the bias or moral decision-making fields.
Thanks for leaving a comment. I think the theory is best falsified via its assumptions. If the brain didn’t do RL, that would seem sufficient to discount the reasoning presented in this post. If evolved modularity were broadly true, then probably shard-like dynamics don’t tell most of the story of human values. The trouble with experiments for shard theory writ large, is that current shards should be sensitively dependent on the person’s past reinforcement events (IIRC you can see this kind of dynamic reflected in conditional reinforcer events, where the effect of reward changes depending on beliefs—“Why did I get the banana?”). You can get lots of arrangements of shards (of values) given appropriate historical reinforcement events and epistemic states. So it’s not like shard theory is ruling out wide swaths of values or actions (nor should it, since people do seem to have a wide range of values).
I’m new here so please forgive me if I’m a bit naive on how the comment section works, but I have one simple question: are there some falsifiable predictions that you could come up with for this theory? In this way, one could create an experiment and test them, e.g. in the bias or moral decision-making fields.
Thanks for leaving a comment. I think the theory is best falsified via its assumptions. If the brain didn’t do RL, that would seem sufficient to discount the reasoning presented in this post. If evolved modularity were broadly true, then probably shard-like dynamics don’t tell most of the story of human values. The trouble with experiments for shard theory writ large, is that current shards should be sensitively dependent on the person’s past reinforcement events (IIRC you can see this kind of dynamic reflected in conditional reinforcer events, where the effect of reward changes depending on beliefs—“Why did I get the banana?”). You can get lots of arrangements of shards (of values) given appropriate historical reinforcement events and epistemic states. So it’s not like shard theory is ruling out wide swaths of values or actions (nor should it, since people do seem to have a wide range of values).