It certainly doesn’t have to be. In fact the mathematical treatment of utility in decision theory and game theory tends to define utility functions over all possible outcomes, not all possible instants of time, so each possible future gets a single utility value over the whole thing, not integration required.
You could easily set up a utility function defined over moments if you wanted to, and then integrate it to get a second function over outcomes, but such an approach is perhaps not ideal since your second function may end up outputting infinity some of the time.
It certainly doesn’t have to be. In fact the mathematical treatment of utility in decision theory and game theory tends to define utility functions over all possible outcomes, not all possible instants of time, so each possible future gets a single utility value over the whole thing, not integration required.
You could easily set up a utility function defined over moments if you wanted to, and then integrate it to get a second function over outcomes, but such an approach is perhaps not ideal since your second function may end up outputting infinity some of the time.
Cool, thanks for the explanation.