Hello all!
I think that ‘fitness for some anthropobiologically advantageous purpose’ should always be front and center of any effort to develop “non neural generally intelligent machines”.
I claim this because (AFAIK and can see) the emergence of our verbal (symbolic language capable) neural “actention” selection serving systems (≈brains) involved not so many but momentously pleiotropic “ambiadvantageous” mutations, the phenotypic results of which were naturally selected;
Not selected purely by luck but because the individuals who pioneered them outcompeted mating rivals who lacked them.
This outcompeting occurred in our ancestors extended-family group, and, after a few generations a selective sweep was completed there. What typically then followed was usurpings of (combined with occasional bride-stealing from) neighboring human family groups who lacked such a back then most recent momentously “ambiadvantageous” mutation.
How these our common protohuman or early human mutation-pioneering ancestors became reproductively successful involved their unique capacity to not merely adaptively sequester or block the excitatory and otherwise distress-motivating neural messages (originally and post-traumatically generated at the core of any Conditioned-in kept Unconscious Reverberating State Effecting Symptoms or CURSES) but their additional capacity to via sprouting of new neural connexions reroute the spiking at the core of CURSES; A rerouting toward it being used as internal unconscious co-motivation for ambiadvantageously paid adaptively focused “actentions” (behaviors or preoccupations).
What I most simply refer to as “ambiadvantageous coping” is that CURSES can in the case of us humans be securely enough sequestered while their excitatory core is ‘siphoned off’ as co-motivational fuel for taking (exploiting) more or less directly procreation promoting opportunities.
Almost everything we humans are uniquely doing, or are exceptionally good at doing, suits (does IMO) being referred to as “EAVASIVE” (my most pragmatically pieced together ÆPT acronym).
Let’s not ignore the fact that ‘one thing’ that our by language functions leveraged cognitive functions have endowed us with is a capacity not just to motivate or demotivate but to deceive ourselves as well as others.
P.S. Although it brings this comment off topic, I’d like to mention that what puts any (and all) genuine CURSES (same spelling in plural) is an instinctively sensed circumstantial threat of Specific ‘Hibernation’ imploring (SHI) threat — i.e., more precisely, a correspondingly genuine “threat of SHI type”.
Who needs the tacky Freudian terminology‽
