Ah Motiva 1: Words about values

1. Background

This is a first essay in what may or may not be a series of essays, under the title "A hermeneutic Movement of the idea of values". Some of these essays will be a mix of old notes and new meditations.

These essays are aimed at doing philosophical background work towards understanding values. This is in the context of addressing core issues of aligned AGI, especially the problem of what determines a mind's effects. Human values are subtle and multi-aspectual, partly in ways that don't much affect de novo mind design, but probably partly in ways that do affect that design challenge. Far from being a question of identifying endosystemic and explicit "things that we value", the question of values appears much more philosophically fraught. We seem to have barely even the foggiest notion of what sort of thing values are; what sort of mental contexts we ourselves employ to construct and bear out our own values; and how our own metavalues work. We don't know what sort of mental elements or mental systems there can be; we don't know what sort of mental elements in what sort of mental systems can be reflectively stable and therefore longitudinally meaningful, rather than being swept away by whatever wildfire might overtake a nascent strong mind.

The phrase "hermeneutic movement" refers to a hermeneutic net for agency, a hypothetical philosophical method for solving world-historically difficult problems in a short time. It probably wouldn't work, it's just my best guess. This essay (or series) is an aborted attempt to take some steps on that path. My hope in publishing is to gesture a bit more vigorously at the sort of investigation I mean to describe by "hermeneutic net". Since I think this problem is too difficult for us to address, I'm not planning on taking this investigation further (instead favoring plans to enable humans to be much smarter, as well as stopping AGI capabilities development). But, maybe the ideas are enriching anyway.

Note that many of the ideas presented here are meditations, in this sense: https://tsvibt.github.io/theory/pages/bl_24_09_23_02_27_14_589494.html

2. Explicating etymons

This essay meditates on words that touch on values. (Some are imported from "Control" and heavily modified. All etymons are taken from wiktionary.org and are often uncertain; discovered using radix and etymonline.com.)

Here are some of the explicit reasons I find this a valuable meditation:

  • Etymons in fact show something about how we use the words / morphemes and the ideas they relate to.
  • By connecting multiple words through shared etymons, we see metaphors that in fact were historically crossed, which are therefore interesting starting metaphors.
  • By meditating on many related words, we recover for ourselves a toolbox for covering many distinct aspects/dimensions of valuing. Two of the ways this covering-toolbox works:

3. Want

Cognate with "vacuum" (as in "having an emptiness, lacking something"). Also cognate with "vanish", "evanescence", "vacant", "vast", "void", "devastate", "waste". This suggests homeostatic pressure and satisficing. It also suggests a pursuit of something positive: there's a lack, and something positive is sought to fill the vacuum, the void.

Apparently there's no word W such that "I W blueberries." means "I have an undesired excess of blueberries.", grammatically analogous to how "I want blueberries." means "I have an undesired deficit of blueberries.". If only there were a shared craft of deliberate lexicogenesis. One could say "diswant" or "want-not" or "antiwant", but these feel like calling an overflowing cup a "very non-empty cup".

I'll say "overhave". "Overhave" is redundant with "want", in that "want X" means "overhave a lack of X" and "overhave X" means "want a lack of X". But phrasing X positively, as the positive Thing, is more natural. E.g. wanting your house to stand implies wanting the bulldozer to not fulfill its namesake—but not-bulldozing isn't a thing; rather, bulldozing is a thing. So you overhave the bulldozer bulldozing. It's a bit unfortunate that this sounds like "you already have some [house being bulldozed] and you want less". But "want" really has the same problem in reverse: even if you are already healthy, you still want to be healthy—there's no actual lack of health. Also, "I overhave my house to be bulldozed." can be understood as having some [possibility of my house being bulldozed], and wishing to have less of that (and likewise, even if you're healthy, you have a hypothetical undesirable lack of health in some possible worlds).

4. Try, attempt

"Try" from Old French "trier" ("to choose, test, verify").

"Attempt" = "ad-tent" ("towards-test") (analogous to "attend" ("towards-stretch"), compare "intend"; cognate with "tentative", "tense", "tend", "-tend", "-tain", "tight", "thin", "continuum" ("held together"), "dance", "tone", "tune"). Suggests experimenting to see what works, trial and error.

Thus "try" talks about an inner loop of goal-pursuit, not the whole goal-pursuit. It describes one attempt among many. Trying to get to the South Pole using such and such supplies and crew and dogs isn't the whole of the desire to reach the South Pole—if it fails, there can be (for those who are nonfrozen) other tries toward the same goal. Trying relates to the whole goal G by describing the particular instance of goal-pursuit-behavior as being a try towards G. "Alice is trying to reach the South Pole." means "Alice has an overarching goal of reaching the South Pole; this behavior is one attempt, one plan that she is currently executing that she thinks might achieve the goal; if the attempt fails, she may go on pursuing the goal via some other strategy.".

5. Plan

From Latin planus ("flat"), as in a map of an area. Cognate with "plain" and "plane" (both "flat" as a noun), more distantly "field".

Suggests a blueprint—a comprehensive set of actions, already laid out, which will mostly work as pre-stated, assuming that the area is rightly understood.

Thus a plan is similar to a try, in that it's a crystallized action-package, which is subordinate to a goal and is somewhat cut off from the goal. If the try or plan fails, one might return to the goal-pursuit, perhaps discarding some or all of the try or plan.

A plan or a try is therefore less alive than a wholesome goal-pursuit. In a wholesome goal-pursuit, everything is provisional, perhaps even the goal itself (including both the telopheme and the telotect).

6. Intent, interest

"Intent" from Latin intendo ("into-stretch", "draw into"). Cognate with "attempt" and so on, see above. Suggests an internal organizing force that rearranges mental elements towards some other region. Where is the mind drawn into by an intent? "Interest" from Latin inter-esse ("between-be", "be among/amidst"). Suggests a preliminary orientation that comes before pursuits: interest is the mind being somewhere. By being there with its full self, the mind makes ready [the elements in itself that would lead to pursuits when applied to elements, in the context of the full mind] to [apply to elements and thus lead to pursuits].

Thus interest and intent feed each other: an intent draws a mind further into a region, increasing the mind's being among what's in that region, while interest makes a mind ready to create intents by providing to the mind some of the coordinates referenced by the intent (the coordinates referenced in the direction of drawing-into).

This idea of "intent" overlaps the usual meaning. The usual meaning is: a state of mind that will in some future context create a goal-pursuit. This is a drawing-into: it draws the mind into goal-pursuit.

What's a word for an element of a state of mind, an element that will in some future context draw the mind into a goal-pursuit? It's a sort of "armed trigger" that will fire off in the right context. It's a stance or disposition. It's an inactive drive, protected by a vessel from the changes in the mind, to be activated later. It's a paused goal-pursuit.

This describes "intention", as in "It is my intention to high-five her.", but is that the same as "intent"? An intention is like a plan—it's a somewhat decided-upon plan, to be executed in some future context. The "underlying intent" of an action (or more generally, of (possibly internal) activity, including e.g. doing math) is the goal-pursuit that motivated the action. In this case, the drawing-into has already happened; the mind was drawn into the action, the activity.

Intent, intention, and interest all embed goal-pursuit implicitly. But, they don't necessarily do so in an already-decided way, or in an explicit way. For example, being interested in something can be a kind of non-specific goal-pursuit, without an already-spoken telopheme. This is similar to play and curiosity as non-specific practice. They say "there's something valuey / goal-pursuity here" without saying what, or in what direction. This is similar to how attention embeds value. ("Attend", "towards-stretch" / "towards-strive", like "intend". The self (the telophore) is blooped into the new region, ready to make telophemes, not necessarily carrying a pre-written telopheme.)

7. Matter

Cognate with "mother", "material", "matrix" (meaning "substrate").

This is the complement of "interest", "intent". Matter is what-is-of-concern; Mattering is [involvement in goal-pursuit as being worthy of interest and even care, without differentiating between "instrumental" and "terminal" goal-pursuit]. Matter is received, in a sense. It is received by the agent from the agent's past, including the context that birthed the agent—the mother.

8. Desire

Latin "de-sidus" ("from the stars"), cognate with "sidereal" ("of the stars").

Suggests transcendence, universality, wide scope; hope, things out of reach.

Running with this maybe-fanciful interpretation of the etymon: to desire is to see something; not know what it is; but know that it is seen by everyone in the world; and so believe it to be very real, very much a Thing that can be stepped into, understood deeply, with further investigation; and so the goal-pursuit is pointed at something preliminary grasped (twinkling, up there, for anyone to see but for no one to understand), but still pointed truly—so that it pursues whatever that Thing is. So desire is goal-pursuit which is proleptic, but strong due to a strong indication of a Thingly Thing that can be pursued and is what-is-to-be-pursued.

9. Care

From Proto-Germanic *karō ("care, sorrow, cry"), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵeh₂r- ("voice, exclamation"); distantly cognate with "garrulous" ("talkative"). Note that German "Sorge" ("care, concern") is cognate with English "sorrow". Suggests depth, relations to other agents; negative reinforcement, turning homeostatic pressure into strategic preservation by projecting negative reinforcement into the world and the future, using imagination, on the (intra- or inter-personal) coordination substrate of the cry—the audible voice (the music of shared intention).

Thus "care" names wanting-complete wanting, or rather, goal-pursuit-complete overhaving. Wanting-complete wanting means: goal-pursuit that, among other pursuits, pursues pursuit. That is, it jerks itself out of its ignorance and unmovedness; it writhes and struggles to pull itself together out of nothing; so that it can get itself onto a trajectory that will take it to unbounded understanding and unboundedly ambitious unboundedly general pursuit of (perhaps unboundedly provisional) goals.

Overhaving—that is, homeostatically pursuing not having something. E.g., avoiding pain. Overhaving is the mental state that motivates avoidance or getting rid of something, like wanting is the mental state that motivates pursuit or acquiring something. Care of One for an Other being seems to naturally sit in a background of overhaving: the Other already has its self-constituting pursuits, so the Other may or may not want for the One's wanting—but there is always a background threat of damage or death to the Other from the world, so the One always overhas that threat from the world.

Evasion of threat (preservation) is the constant background condition, so overhaving is the constant background stance. To go from homeostatic overhaving to strategic overhaving, takes Care. Care cries out for itself to hear, to tell itself that the threat is there, and that the threat of the threat is still there.

In other words, care is what says: I have to care that I don't yet know how to care enough.

10. Pursue, control

Pursue. From Latin "prō-sequor" ("forward-follow"), "sequor" as in "sequence" and "second" ("the following one"). This says, the agent is following after something definite. The agent isn't plotting to head off the pursued thing, skating to where the puck is going to be—the agent is following after what it can see. This suggests using a definite, evaluatable metric of success as the grounding signal to search for effective means. That can be useful either because the evaluatable metric is good enough that reaching a high score will get what is "really wanted", or because the pursuit will be dropped after some means have been invented, and those means will be generally useful for other pursuits. Pursuit is behavior selected to bring about something specific. Pursuit risks goodharting.

Control. "Contra-rotulus" ("against a little wheel"; "a register used to verify accounts"). Suggests tracking, registration, feedback cycles. Control suggests a relation, where the controller doesn't deeply understand what's being controlled, but just enforces something about what's being controlled, something measurable.

Control is more fixed than pursuit. Pursuit, "following after", can change its measurement. When what's being followed-after changes or reveals itself more (in other words, when the mind follows through the thingness of what's being followed), the novel aspects can now be taken as targets. Control is narrower; it has a fixed measure.

11. Will, volition, wield, value

"Will" and "volition" both from PIE *welh₁- ("to choose, want"), cognate with "voluntary" and German "wollen" ("to want") and "wählen" ("to select").

"Wield" and "value" (cognate with "valor" and "valid") both come from PIE *h₂welh₁- ("to rule, to be strong"), which might come from PIE *welh₁- again!

The Will intuitively has a lot of ʒuʒ. The ʒuʒ is that the Will pushes. It intends, it has drive, it moves. It strikes at the world. This relates to choosing and selecting like so: the Will metonymically refers to the telophore (or maybe the telotect) by talking about the selection. The Will is what can select in the ultimate sense: it can select a possibility to make real forever out of other possibilities. Selecting something for a mind to then put its efforts toward making real, is the most selecty sort of selection—it is the most distinguished you can make something. The Will wields the mind, the agent, the unboundedly ambitious unboundedly general pursuits.

12. Select, decide

"Se-lect". From:

  • Latin "se" ("away", as in "seduce" ("lead away"), "seclude" ("shut away"), "secede" ("go apart"))
  • and "lect" from PIE *leǵ- ("gather", cognate with λόγος ("word") and "-lect" like "dialect").

Suggests taking something from one context where it is of the same kind as other things in that context, gathering it together and naming it, and then using that handle to put it into another context.

"De-cide". From Latin dē ("away, down from") + caedō ("cut"), from PIE *kh₂eyd- ("to cut, hew"). Cognate with "-cise" ("to cut") as in "incision", "-cide" ("kill") as in "homicide", and "hit".

So, the Will selects (gathers out and away) the possibility to make real, and decides (strikes, cuts away) against the other possibilities.

13. Choose, taste, aesthetic

Choose. From PIE *ǵews- ("to taste, try"), from which also "disgust", "gustatory".

A choice is a decision made by applying taste—by applying criteria whose reasons are inexplicit. E.g., rules learned or evolved by searching for code that does well, without also trying hard to factor the code so that it's explicit.

Aesthetic. From:

  • Ancient Greek αἰσθάνομαι ("feel, perceive"), from:
    • [+ *dʰeh₁- ("do, put"), whence "do", "thesis"]
    • PIE *h₂ew- ("to perceive, see, to be aware of"), from which also:
      • "aural",
      • "audio" ["seeably-do", "render clear"; from *h₂ewis ("clearly") + *dʰh₁-ye/o- ("render", whence "do")],
      • "ear",
      • "acoustic", "hear", "hark" [these three all from PIE *h₂eḱ- ("sharp", whence "acute" and "edge") + *h₂ṓws ("ear", from *h₂ew-)],
      • "obey", and possibly "omen".

Aesthetic is then a sort of taste that applies to perception. It applies to sensing what is there to be sensed. It is taste about objective, external things.

Taste. Via reconstructed Vulgar Latin *taxitare ("to touch, to feel"), from Latin "taxāre" ("to touch sharply"), from which also "task" and "tax"; from PIE *teh₂g- ("to touch"), whence "tactile", "contact", "tangent", "tangible", and via the construction "un-touched" also "integer", "integrate", and "entire".

Taste is getting a sense of something by touching it sharply, by trying it out.

So among questions decided by inexplicit criteria, there's a spectrum from external to internal: aesthetics, taste, choice. Choice is gustatory; it's a question of what to incorporate into oneself. Taste is liminal, a question of what to interface with, e.g. what to use as a tool. Aesthetics is a question of what external things are considered suitable.

14. Drive, motive

Drive. From PIE *dʰreybʰ- ("to drive, push"), from which also "drift". That etymon might come from PIE *dʰer- ("to support, hold"), from which also "dare", "firm", and "dharma" (Sanskrit, "that which upholds or supports"), and possibly "throne", "force", and "fortify".

A "drive" pushes, or supports, something. What does a drive support? It supports the actor (pursuer, controller, willer, chooser, trier, carer). It supports the actor by pushing the actor. The actor is called into existence by being pushed. The drive is what's created already in motion.

Motive. Cognate with "motif", "remote", "mobile", "mob", "mutiny", "move", "motion", "motor". The motive is what moves the actor.

The motive is the answer to the question: Why are you doing this? It's not a cause, and so the answer isn't of the form "such and such electrical signals formed such and such pattern, which causes such and such subsequent electrical patterns". It's not a value, not a terminal value, so the answer isn't "in order to...". The "in order to..." requires as a precondition that there's a dynamic that goes from {the fact that this action will bring about that outcome, and the preference in favor of that outcome} to actually taking the action. That dynamic is the motive, the motor, the motion that was there at creation, what creates motion, the root of movement in the mind.

The blind worm. Imagine, hypothetically, a blind, senseless worm. Since the worm is blind and senseless, it doesn't do anything like computing which behavior patterns to follow by processing sense data. Is there then no role for neurons? If there's no sense-input→motor-output map being computed, then is there nothing that computationally efficient cells would be useful for? Actually there's still something useful for neurons to do: coordinated behavior patterns. Suppose the worm has two lines of muscles, one on each side. A neural circuit that generates complementary sinusoidal contraction-relaxation waves going down the two lines of muscles in the worm's body would be useful for the worm. That coordinated pattern of action, even if it's not conditioned on anything about the environment, still makes the worm go faster compared to locally governed patterns. Going faster, even blindly, might e.g. better avoid simple predators, or collect more food. (This behavior pattern might be so simple that it could be done without neurons, but consider e.g. walking or curious play.) The motive is like this: it doesn't have to be about the world, it's a push from out of nowhere.

The motive isn't there only at the beginning. It's also what's essentially there as an agent grows. E.g. it's what moves the mind to an ontological crisis.

15. Moral

From Latin "mos" (meaning something like manner of habitual behavior), whence also "more" (as in a norm or custom). Maybe cognate with "mood" and "Muse". Maybe partly from PIE *med- ("to measure, to advise"), whence "mode", "module", "model", "must", "modify".

This suggests, simply, regularities in behavior, which includes rules, habits, customs, and repeatedly useful ways. More narrowly, it suggests taking past regularities in behavior as advice or an indication of what is good to do.

This further suggests orienting to past behavior as though one is participating in an ongoing tradition. One's behavior is informed by advice, and also one decides how to inform one's future behavior through advice modeled by current behavior. And, at the meta-level, one's [behavior, regarding one's behavior as precedent-setting] takes advice from past morality about how in general to inform future behavior through precedent-setting.

16. Free, proper

Free. From: PIE *priHós ("beloved", maybe with the sense of "beloved member of the clan and therefore not a slave"), whence also:

  • "afraid" ("ex-free", "out of peace/security/love"),
  • "proper", "appropriate", "property",
  • "friend" (via the PIE etymon *preyH- ("to please, love")).

Suggests a stake in co-creation of the world through the shared intentionality of the clan.

17. Yearn

From PIE *gʰer- ("yearn"), whence also "greedy" (as in hunger), "exhort" (urge on). (Also somehow "charisma" through an Ancient Greek word meaning "cheerful"—charisma as cheerfully yearning?)

This suggests a specific in-built want—lack of something, and being urged on to fill the lack; and it is in-built, like hunger; it may be incompetent, suggesting only clumsy pursuit, like greed; but sensitive to its failure, being urged onward through failure—like Care.

18. Wish

From PIE *wenh₁- ("to love"), whence also:

  • "wonder" (as in awe),
  • "win" (strive for, fight for),
  • "venom" (via Proto-Italic *weneznom ("lust, desire")).

Suggests an overpowering goal-pursuit-object, something which rewrites/hijacks/overtakes the agent and makes the agent do extreme things in pursuit, even to the agent's corruption.

A wish is dangerous, and is a place where the agent may open itself to value drift, or being consumed. The formation of shared intentionality, the way humans do it, proceeds by a mutual partial overwriting of mental elements. So it proceeds from wishes. Awe comes from large-scale shared intentionality; it's a overpowering, somewhat external wish, and the dread of being swept up in that.

19. Aim

  • Closely cognate with "esteem".
  • From "ad-" ("towards") + "estimate".
    • In turn, "estimate" is believed to be from "copper-cutter".
      • The second part is from PIE *temh₁- ("cut", as in "atom", "-ectomy", "anatomy", etc.).
      • This means "minter"—i.e. giving a valuation of something with currency.
    • Alternatively, "estimate" from PIE *h₂eys- ("to wish, request"), whence also "ask".

This is the element that connects a valuation with a goal-pursuit for purposes of refining an action-package to hit the target. That is, aim is the connection between:

  • the valuations of the different possible results of goal-pursuit;
  • and the tuning/design of possible action-packages based on their anticipated consequences.

Aim is for constructing action-plans, analogous to hypothesis generation; it communicates to the action-package-designer, during the design process, "hey this draft action-package doesn't point at the highly-valued thing in ways XYZ, keep tweaking".

20. Need

"Need" has a strange etymology—it's a "merger" between:

  • a PIE root *neh₂w- meaning "death, lack",
  • and an unrelated PIE root *new- meaning "nod, assent", meaning something like "the zeal that comes from an affirmation—a nod as an order or as a joyful pursuit".

This is a bit mysterious.