is
Gunnar_Zarncke
Karma: 7,316
I have found a source of some more plausible mechanisms tied to common emotions here: Dares, costly signals, and psychopaths (which references The Psychopath Code, see raw text on Github). These sources are focused on psychopaths but give extremely well-suited descriptions of the following classes of emotions:
The predator emotions help us hunt and capture prey.
The defense emotions prepare us to detect and deal with predators and competitors.
The sexual emotions drive us to find sexual partners.
The family emotions let us talk to our parents and care for our offspring.
The group emotions let us form small social groups.
The social emotions let us form looser and larger social groups.
Some examples:
Hunger [...] Your digestion slows. Your vision and hearing gets sharper and you focus on distinguishing prey from threats. You feel the need to move, yet you are careful to stay invisible. You walk without haste, and keep your posture relaxed. Your breathing is regular, slow.
Euphoria [...] Your hearing switches off and your vision tunnels in on your target. Your breathing and heartbeat accelerate. Blood flows to your muscles, and glucose feeds into your blood. Your eyes widen, your mouth opens, and you bare your teeth.
Surprise [...] “startle response.” You flinch away from the threat, and raise your arms in self-defense. You lift your eyebrows and open your eyes wide to see better. Your hearing gets sharp. You exhale hard to clear your lungs of carbon dioxide. Your heart accelerates and you breathe in deep to oxygenate your body for action.
Love - [...] We establish “closeness” by mutual physical contact. The kinds of contact depend on the relationship. The closer you are to another person the more you feel the emotion. Your eyebrows rise, your pupils widen, you smile and laugh and feel happy. You use open and dominant body language. You are more childlike: playful and uninhibited. You seek more contact. You need less sleep.
All of the descriptions are like this, and I think an excellent source when looking for mechanisms that facilitate the recognition of the more abstract patterns.
I fully second this approach. It is very close to what we do and has worked very well. The oldest of our four boys is now 18, they have three parents, two homes and probably a dozen contexts from parents, grand parents, friends to school that they are comfortable in.
I’m not sure which section I like better but I definitely like that there are these two. They complement.
I liked your “Making sure that the balanced life is prioritized.” I’m also FindingTheMiddleWay.
I like the flow of the post though it didn’t tell me much now—but that’s more because I’m an old magician. It may be good for apprentices.
There could be more about a sparkling way of being. I only found clothing-for-men which goes a bit in this direction.
Related: Gene for upright walk in humans discovered: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jun/02/genetics.medicalresearch
The visual system wouldn’t detect the abstract concept of height, and that would be the brain’s job to figure out by being primed on when the thing triggers and what else correlates with it.
I imagine the visual system would detect visual depth from binocular vision. Babies learn this in the first few months. It is one of the things that cause them distress when it gets activated in the brain. I don’t know the research papers, but these might be starting pointers:
https://www.beltz.de/fileadmin/beltz/leseproben/978-3-621-27926-0.pdf (picture 2.2, German)
https://www.thewonderweeks.com/babys-mental-leaps-first-year/ (week 26)
So visual depth you have without much learning—or with other priming steps ahead of that; I understand these are well researched). What is left is the vertical component, and I guess that it comes from the vestibular system. Looking down + visual depths = height trigger.
It is funny that you mention the need to grasp something, and maybe that is the hard-wired cue: Close the hand.
Other things that are candidates:
Fear of height could work like the spider thing: The visual system detecting “height” based on depth information and a downward look and respond like in fear of spider thing with increased heart-rate and attention.
What we find beautiful could come from a heart-rate increase and or other positively valued responses to low-complexity visual cues like
the smoothness of visual features or easy to predict patterns (“clear forms”) - at least easy to predict for shallow neuronal networks
Same for sound patterns—or maybe a spectrum with many small peaks as in surf or wind sounds or cafe conversation.
The visual cues for sexual attraction are relatively well-known. Obviously, the strength of the endocrine response is high. It is plausible that the high number of different fetishes can be explained by the brain learning to associate anything with such a strong signal. Not just a single specific thing as in the spider response.
Then this one might also be relevant: Inner Alignment in Salt-Starved Rats
This reminds me of this post about the encoding of “fear” of snakes: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bgqmv8YF6HA3mvrPM/attention-to-snakes-not-fear-of-snakes-evolution-encoding
Das this fit? Do you have other examples?
Get in touch with me via direct message. The data is scanned but in German and not exactly easy to analyze, but I might be able to answer some questions, or we figure something out.
The key point for me is the Value of Information of waiting some more. Many people will get Omicron soon and we will have more data.
At age 4, we started with the first tries for street crossing too. I remember the turning-the-head-left-and-right phase, and it required some practice to figure out when they detected moving cars reliably. One advantage that we had was that there is no pass-thru traffic on our local road and it is used by local residents only. Also, my sister, with her daughters, lives across the street so the benefit was higher. Overall, the steps described by Jeff are close to what we did. And as Jeff explains, if things don’t work yet, you have to wait. All children are different, and as Jane writes, e.g., shortsightedness can make things difficult.
I completed the translation of the steps for roaming in the Google Sheet of our child development plan (see tab “Roaming.”
lightbulb: surprise
exclamation mark: Skepticism or Hits the Mark
question mark: Seeks Truth
trend (up/down): Up/Down—if indicated by the OP to be used that way—though I agree that messes with the karma system
checkmark: missing
Reflecting a bit more on it, I think my original excitement must have clouded my judgment: I no longer think that the mapping is obvious or even halfway clear.
Who can make this advice into a Calibrated Proverb? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NYH8kjdpLCTXcit8C/calibration-proverbs
[Linkpost] [Fun] CDC To Send Pamphlet On Probabilistic Thinking
We would want the to learn to AI to maximise
Did you mean “We would want the AI to learn to maximize”?
How one specify it involves assumptions that already determines the answer.
That is the beauty of an operation specification. My motto is: If you can’t program it you don’t understand it. :-))
I have found it useful to replace all references to “I” or “you” in anthropic problems with specifications of instances of actors or robots running a decision procedure. This extends to treating, e.g., utility as a variable in these decision procedures.
I upvoted all comments in this thread for constructive criticism, response to it, and in the end even agreeing to review each other!
There are always some people who will troll you or give some fun answer—Lizardmen const. Though they will be able to answer if prodded.