Edit: You know what, while the above question is still interesting,
You’re right, that question does seem interesting. Let me see...
How would you represent the valuing of another agent’s values, using the VNM theorem? That is, let’s say I assign utility to (certain) other people having lots of utility. How would this be represented?
I only ever apply values to entire world histories[1]. ie. Consider the entire wavefunction of the universe, which includes all of space, all of time, all Everett branches[2] and so forth. Different possible configurations of that universe are preferred over others on a basis that is entirely arbitrary. It so happens that my preferences over world histories do depend somewhat on computations about how the state of certain other people’s brains at certain times compares to the rest of the configuration of that world history. This preference is not different in nature to the preferring histories which do not have lots of copies wedrifid tortured for billions of years.
It also applies whether or not the other people I have altruistic preferences about happen to have utility functions at all. That’d probably make the math easier and the preference-preferences easier to instantiate but it isn’t necessary. Mind you I don’t necessarily care about all components of what make up their ‘utility function’ equally. I could perhaps assign negative weight to or ignore certain aspects of it on the basis of what caused those preferences.
Translating how strongly I prefer one history over another into a utility function occurs by the normal mechanism (ie. “require ‘VNM’; wedrifid.preferences.to_utility_function”. The altruistic values issue is orthogonal to the having-a-utility-function issue.
Of course, in practice I rely on and discuss much simpler things but this is from the perspective of considering the simpler models to be approximations of and simplifications of world-history preferences.
Ignore the branches part if you don’t believe in those—the difference isn’t of direct importance to the immediate question even though it has tangential relevance to your overall position.
You’re right, that question does seem interesting. Let me see...
I only ever apply values to entire world histories[1]. ie. Consider the entire wavefunction of the universe, which includes all of space, all of time, all Everett branches[2] and so forth. Different possible configurations of that universe are preferred over others on a basis that is entirely arbitrary. It so happens that my preferences over world histories do depend somewhat on computations about how the state of certain other people’s brains at certain times compares to the rest of the configuration of that world history. This preference is not different in nature to the preferring histories which do not have lots of copies wedrifid tortured for billions of years.
It also applies whether or not the other people I have altruistic preferences about happen to have utility functions at all. That’d probably make the math easier and the preference-preferences easier to instantiate but it isn’t necessary. Mind you I don’t necessarily care about all components of what make up their ‘utility function’ equally. I could perhaps assign negative weight to or ignore certain aspects of it on the basis of what caused those preferences.
Translating how strongly I prefer one history over another into a utility function occurs by the normal mechanism (ie. “require ‘VNM’; wedrifid.preferences.to_utility_function”. The altruistic values issue is orthogonal to the having-a-utility-function issue.
Of course, in practice I rely on and discuss much simpler things but this is from the perspective of considering the simpler models to be approximations of and simplifications of world-history preferences.
Ignore the branches part if you don’t believe in those—the difference isn’t of direct importance to the immediate question even though it has tangential relevance to your overall position.