I’ll jump in this conversation here, because I was going to respond with something very similar. (I thought about my response, and then was reading through the comments to see if it had already been said.)
And, imagine what an agent could do without the limits of human hardware or software.
I sometimes imagine this, and what I imagine is that without the limits (constraints) of our hardware and software, we wouldn’t have any goals or desires.
Here on Less Wrong, when I assimilated the idea that there is no objective value, I expected I would spiral into a depression in which I realized nothing mattered, since all my goals and desires were finally arbitrary with no currency behind them. But that’s not what happened—I continued to care about my immediate physical comfort, interacting with people, and the well-being of the people I loved. I consider that my built-in biological hardware and software came to the rescue. There is no reason to value the things I do, but they are built into my organism. Since I believe that it was being an organism that saved me (and by this I mean the product of evolution), I do not believe the organism (and her messy goals) can be separated from me.
I feel like this experiment helped me identify which goals are built in and which are abstract and more fully ‘chosen’. For example, I believe I did lose some of my values, I guess the ones that are most cerebral. (I only doubt this because with a spiteful streak and some lingering anger about the nonexistence of objective values, I could be expressing this anger by rejecting values that seem least immediate). I imagine with a heightened ability to edit my own values, I would attenuate them all, especially wherever there were inconsistencies.
These thoughts apply to humans only (that is, me) but I also imagine (entirely baselessly) that any creature without hardware and software constraints would have a tough time valuing anything. For this, I am mainly drawing on intuition I developed that if a species was truly immortal, they would be hard pressed to think of anything to do, or any reason to do it. Maybe, some values of artistry or curiosity could be left over from an evolutionary past.
I’ll jump in this conversation here, because I was going to respond with something very similar. (I thought about my response, and then was reading through the comments to see if it had already been said.)
I sometimes imagine this, and what I imagine is that without the limits (constraints) of our hardware and software, we wouldn’t have any goals or desires.
Here on Less Wrong, when I assimilated the idea that there is no objective value, I expected I would spiral into a depression in which I realized nothing mattered, since all my goals and desires were finally arbitrary with no currency behind them. But that’s not what happened—I continued to care about my immediate physical comfort, interacting with people, and the well-being of the people I loved. I consider that my built-in biological hardware and software came to the rescue. There is no reason to value the things I do, but they are built into my organism. Since I believe that it was being an organism that saved me (and by this I mean the product of evolution), I do not believe the organism (and her messy goals) can be separated from me.
I feel like this experiment helped me identify which goals are built in and which are abstract and more fully ‘chosen’. For example, I believe I did lose some of my values, I guess the ones that are most cerebral. (I only doubt this because with a spiteful streak and some lingering anger about the nonexistence of objective values, I could be expressing this anger by rejecting values that seem least immediate). I imagine with a heightened ability to edit my own values, I would attenuate them all, especially wherever there were inconsistencies.
These thoughts apply to humans only (that is, me) but I also imagine (entirely baselessly) that any creature without hardware and software constraints would have a tough time valuing anything. For this, I am mainly drawing on intuition I developed that if a species was truly immortal, they would be hard pressed to think of anything to do, or any reason to do it. Maybe, some values of artistry or curiosity could be left over from an evolutionary past.