Where his shards once just passively dealt with the consequences effected by other shards via their shared motor output channel, they are now intelligent enough to plan scheme at the other shards. Say that you’re considering whether to go off to big-law school, and are concerned about that environment exacerbating the egoistic streak you see and dislike in yourself. You don’t want to grow up to be more of an egotist, so you choose to avoid going to your top-ranked big-law-school offer, even though the compensation from practicing prestigious big-shot law would further your other goals. [...]
There are some human phenomena that shard theory doesn’t have a tidy story about. The largest is probably the apparent phenomenon of credit assignment improving over a lifetime. When you’re older and wiser, you’re better at noticing which of your past actions were bad and learning from your mistakes. Possibly, this happens a long time after the fact, without any anti-reinforcement event occurring. But an improved conceptual understanding ought to be inaccessible to your subcortical reinforcement circuitry—on shard theory, being wiser shouldn’t mean your shards are reinforced or anti-reinforced any differently.
How does the mechanism in these two examples differ from each other? You seem to be suggesting that the first one is explainable by shard theory, while the second one is mysterious. But aren’t they both cases of the shards having some kind of a conceptual model of the world and the consequences of different actions, where the conceptual model improves even in cases where it doesn’t lead to immediate consequences with regard to the valued thing and thus can’t be directly reinforced?
In the second case, I’m suggesting that your shards actually do strengthen or weaken right then, due to cognition alone, in the absence of a reinforcement event. That’s the putatively mysterious phenomenon.
If the second thing is the same phenomenon as the first thing—just shards avoiding actions they expect to lead to rival shards gaining strength—then there’s no mystery for shard theory. Maybe I should deny the evidence and just claim that people cannot actually uproot their held values simply by sitting and reflecting—for now, I’m unsure.
How does the mechanism in these two examples differ from each other? You seem to be suggesting that the first one is explainable by shard theory, while the second one is mysterious. But aren’t they both cases of the shards having some kind of a conceptual model of the world and the consequences of different actions, where the conceptual model improves even in cases where it doesn’t lead to immediate consequences with regard to the valued thing and thus can’t be directly reinforced?
In the second case, I’m suggesting that your shards actually do strengthen or weaken right then, due to cognition alone, in the absence of a reinforcement event. That’s the putatively mysterious phenomenon.
If the second thing is the same phenomenon as the first thing—just shards avoiding actions they expect to lead to rival shards gaining strength—then there’s no mystery for shard theory. Maybe I should deny the evidence and just claim that people cannot actually uproot their held values simply by sitting and reflecting—for now, I’m unsure.