Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do humans derive values from fictitious imputed coherence?, published by TsviBT on March 5, 2023 on LessWrong.

[Metadata: crossposted from. First completed November 1, 2022. This essay is more like research notes than exposition, so context may be missing, the use of terms may change across essays, and the text may be revised later; only the versions at tsvibt.blogspot.com are definitely up to date.]

Humans are born with some elements of their minds, and without many other elements, some of which they'll acquire as their life unfolds. In particular, the elements that we pretheoretically call "values"--aesthetic preferences, goals, life goals, squad goals, aspirations, needs, wants, yearnings, drives, cravings, principles, morals, ethics, senses of importance, and so on--are for the most part acquired or at least unfolded, rather than being explicitly present in a newborn. How does this happen? What generates these mental elements?

Hypothesis: a human derives many of zer values by imputing coherent agency to zer past behavior, and then adopting the goals of that fictitious agency as actively influential criteria for future action.

Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for relevant conversations.

The FIAT hypothesis

As a shorthand: "the FIAT hypothesis" = "the Fictitious Imputed Adopted Telos hypothesis". ("Fiat" is Latin for "may it happen" or "may it be made", which has some resonance with the FIAT hypothesis in that they both talk about a free creation of goals.) FIAT goals are goals imputed to some behavior and then adopted as goals.

Human behavior is determined by many things: built-in behavior-determiners such as the instinctive ability to breath, socially learned behavior and values, convergent instrumental goals, and freely created autopoietic goals such as artistic goals. The FIAT hypothesis says that a major determiner of a human's behavior is the process of adopting goals based on interpreting zer past behavior as agentic.

Ze can be interpreted as asking the question: if my past behavior were the behavior of a coherent agent trying to do something, what would that something be? Then, whatever the answer was, ze adopts it as a goal--a target of more coherent behavior (more effective, more strategic, more orchestrated, more coordinated, more conscious, better resourced, more reflective, more univocal, more wasteless).

This hypothesis gives a possible answer to the question: how did evolution build something with some substantial level of agentic coherence, even though evolution can't directly program conscious concepts like "avoiding death" or "saving food" or "inclusive genetic fitness" for use as terms in a utility function for an organism to pursue?

This process could be continuous, with goals becoming gradually more coherent (and then potentially deprioritized, but usually not de-cohered). This process is iterative, starting with built-in behavior-determiners, then adopting new FIAT goals based on past behavior mainly generated by built-in determiners (and also maybe adopting new goals for other reasons), and then adopting new goals based on past behavior influenced by previously adopted goals, including previous FIAT goals, and so on. FIAT goals also come from not just imputing goals to zer own behavior, but also to the behavior of others, such as parents and leaders. Everything gets enshrined, but everything is open to criticism.

Note that calling this a hypothesis is maybe presumptuous; it's an idea, but since it's abstract and it's about a complex system, there's a lot of ambiguity between FIAT and other explanations or descriptions of behavior, and it's not necessarily obvious how to make different predictions according to the FIAT hypothesis.

Something left quite unspecified is how the FIAT process picks different possible interpretations of past behavior as servi...