That does have quite a bit of intuitive appeal! However, when you look at a possible universe from the outside, there are no levers nor knobs you can turn, and all the value achieved by the time of heat death was already inherent in the configurations right after the big bang--
--so if you do not want “fraction of total achievable value” to be identically one for every possible universe, the definition of your utility function seems to get intertwined with how exactly you divvy up the world into “causal nodes” and “causal arrows”, in a way that does not seem to happen if you define it in terms of properties of the outcome, like how many fulfilling lifes lived. (Of course, being more complicated doesn’t imply being wrong, but it seems worth noting.)
And yes, I’m taking a timeful view for vividness of imagination, but I do not think the argument changes much if you don’t do that; the point is that it seems like number-of-fulfilling-lifes utility can be computed given only the universal wavefunction as input, whereas for fraction-of-achievable-fulfilling-lifes, knowing the actual wavefunction isn’t enough.
Could your proposal lead to conflicts between altruists who have the same values (e.g. number of fulfilling lifes), but different power to influence the world (and thus different total achievable value)?
That does have quite a bit of intuitive appeal! However, when you look at a possible universe from the outside, there are no levers nor knobs you can turn, and all the value achieved by the time of heat death was already inherent in the configurations right after the big bang--
--so if you do not want “fraction of total achievable value” to be identically one for every possible universe, the definition of your utility function seems to get intertwined with how exactly you divvy up the world into “causal nodes” and “causal arrows”, in a way that does not seem to happen if you define it in terms of properties of the outcome, like how many fulfilling lifes lived. (Of course, being more complicated doesn’t imply being wrong, but it seems worth noting.)
And yes, I’m taking a timeful view for vividness of imagination, but I do not think the argument changes much if you don’t do that; the point is that it seems like number-of-fulfilling-lifes utility can be computed given only the universal wavefunction as input, whereas for fraction-of-achievable-fulfilling-lifes, knowing the actual wavefunction isn’t enough.
Could your proposal lead to conflicts between altruists who have the same values (e.g. number of fulfilling lifes), but different power to influence the world (and thus different total achievable value)?