I don’t know of any set of axioms that imply that you should take expected utilities when considering infinite sets of possible outcomes that do not also imply that the utility function is bounded. If we think that our utility functions are unbounded and we want to use the Solomonoff prior, why are we still taking expectations?
(I suppose because we don’t know how else to aggregate the utilities over possible worlds. Last week, I tried to see how far I could get if I weakened a few of the usual assumptions. I couldn’t really get anywhere interesting because my axioms weren’t strong enough to tell you how to decide in many cases, even when the generalized probabilities and generalized utilities are known.)
I don’t know of any set of axioms that imply that you should take expected utilities when considering infinite sets of possible outcomes that do not also imply that the utility function is bounded. If we think that our utility functions are unbounded and we want to use the Solomonoff prior, why are we still taking expectations?
(I suppose because we don’t know how else to aggregate the utilities over possible worlds. Last week, I tried to see how far I could get if I weakened a few of the usual assumptions. I couldn’t really get anywhere interesting because my axioms weren’t strong enough to tell you how to decide in many cases, even when the generalized probabilities and generalized utilities are known.)