Hi Martin, thanks a lot for reading and for your comment! I think what I was trying to express is actually quite similar to what you write here.
‘If we did they would still have different experiences, notably the experience of having a brain architecture ill-suited to operating their body.’ - I agree. If I understand shard theory right, it claims that underlying brain architecture doesn’t make much difference, and e.g. the experience of trying to walk in different ways, and failing at some but succeeding at others, would be enough to lead to success. However I’m pointing out that a dog’s brain would still be ill-suited to learning things such as walking in a human body (at least compared to a human’s brain), showing the importance of architecture.
My goal was to try to illustrate the importance of brain structure through an absurd thought experiment, not to create a coherent scenario—I’m sorry if that lead to confusion. The argument does not rest on the dog, the dog is meant to serve as an illustration of the argument.
At the end of the day, I think the authors of shard theory also concede that architecture is important in some cases—the difference seems to be more of a matter of scale. I’m merely suggesting that architecture may be a little more important than they consider it, and pointing to the variety of brain architectures and resulting values in different animals as an example.
Thanks for the response, Martin. I’d like to try to get to the heart of what we disagree on. Do you agree that, given a sufficiently different architecture—e.g. a human who had a dog’s brain implanted somehow—would grow to have different values in some respect? For example, you mention arguing persuasively. Argument is a pretty specific ability, but we can widen our field to language in general—the human brain has pretty specific circuitry for that. A dog’s brain that lacks the appropriate language centers would likely never learn to speak, leave alone argue persuasively.
I want to point out again that the disagreement is just a matter of scale. I do think relatively similar values can be learnt through similar experiences for basic RL agents; I just want to caution that for most human and animal examples, architecture may matter more than you might think.