There seems to be some genetic mechanism for at least things like sexual preferences. It is clearly able to locate concepts in neural circuitry, although with some noise around it (hence, fetishes). Similarly for being instinctively scared of certain things (also with noise, hence fobias).
Agreed, modulo Quintin's reply. But I want to be careful in drawing conclusions about which things we are instinctively scared of—surely some things, but which?
2Quintin Pope
The post isn't saying that there's no way for the genome to influence your preferences / behavior. More like, "the genome faces similar inaccessibility issues as us wrt to learned world models", meaning it needs to use roundabout methods of influencing a person's learned behavior / cognition / values. E.g., the genome can specify some hard-coded rewards for experiential correlates of engaging in sexual activity. Future posts will go into more details on how some of those roundabout ways might work.
There seems to be some genetic mechanism for at least things like sexual preferences. It is clearly able to locate concepts in neural circuitry, although with some noise around it (hence, fetishes). Similarly for being instinctively scared of certain things (also with noise, hence fobias).