So I have a conundrum. Imagine that Omega comes to you and offers you two choices:
First choice: You get a moment of moderate pain, let’s say a slap and then another slap, so that your face hurts for a couple of minutes with some anguish. Now after that pain has faded and you still have the memory of it, Omega measures your discomfort and gives you exactly the amount of money that gives enough joy to compensate the pain and then a cent. By construction, the utility of this choice is one cent.
Second choice: Omega inflicts on you hell for a finite amount of time. Your worst fears all come true, you are unable to distinguish between reality and this hell, the most painful sensations you will experience. After this finite amount of time is over, Omega deletes all memory of it and gives you essentially unlimited monetary funds but still, this experience does not quite compensate for the previously experienced hell if you would remember it. By construction, the expected value of this choice is negative.[1]
If we go by expected value, the first choice is obviously better. Of course Omega forces you to take one choice or you will just get hell forever, we want our thought experiment to work. But if we go by the decision procedure to choose the option in which our future self will feel best, the second choice seems better. I have not yet found a satisfying solution to this apparent paradox. Essentially, how does a rational actor deal with discomfort to get to a pleasurable experience?
[1] I realize that this might be a weak point of my argument. Do we just simply add up positive and negative utilons to get our expected value? Or do we already take into consideration the process of forgetting the pain? Maybe therein lies a solution to this paradox.
Expected utility and utility after time
So I have a conundrum. Imagine that Omega comes to you and offers you two choices:
First choice: You get a moment of moderate pain, let’s say a slap and then another slap, so that your face hurts for a couple of minutes with some anguish. Now after that pain has faded and you still have the memory of it, Omega measures your discomfort and gives you exactly the amount of money that gives enough joy to compensate the pain and then a cent. By construction, the utility of this choice is one cent.
Second choice: Omega inflicts on you hell for a finite amount of time. Your worst fears all come true, you are unable to distinguish between reality and this hell, the most painful sensations you will experience. After this finite amount of time is over, Omega deletes all memory of it and gives you essentially unlimited monetary funds but still, this experience does not quite compensate for the previously experienced hell if you would remember it. By construction, the expected value of this choice is negative.[1]
If we go by expected value, the first choice is obviously better. Of course Omega forces you to take one choice or you will just get hell forever, we want our thought experiment to work. But if we go by the decision procedure to choose the option in which our future self will feel best, the second choice seems better. I have not yet found a satisfying solution to this apparent paradox. Essentially, how does a rational actor deal with discomfort to get to a pleasurable experience?
[1] I realize that this might be a weak point of my argument. Do we just simply add up positive and negative utilons to get our expected value? Or do we already take into consideration the process of forgetting the pain? Maybe therein lies a solution to this paradox.