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Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch — LessWrong

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(If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.) My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into Artificial General Intelligence safety) back in 2019. In this post I offer a hypothesis for what the solution might generally look like, at least in the big picture. I don’t have all the details pinned down, but I feel like this post is major progress. (Unless it’s all wrong! Like the last one was.[1] Very happy for feedback!) What is this grand problem? As described in Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety, I believe the following: I’ll start by going through the four algorithmic ingredients we need for my hypothesis, one by one, in each case describing what it is algorithmically, why it’s useful evolutionarily, and where in the brain we might go looking to find the

x Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch — LessWrong Evolutionary Psychology Neuroscience World Modeling Frontpage 88 Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch by Steven Byrnes 22nd Nov 2024 32 min read 11 88 (For a PDF version of this post, go to: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17953592 ) (Last update: May 2026. See changelog at the bottom.) (If you’re in a hurry, you can just read the “Background and summary” section, and skip the other 85%.) 0. Background and summary 0.1 Background: What’s the problem and why should we care? There’s a neuroscience problem which is centrally

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