“Experienced utility” sounds to me like a category error. Utilities are equivalent to preferences, and you prefer A over B iff you are disposed (given what your mind is like, or what it would be like with extra knowledge, or whatever) to choose A over B. You can’t experience a disposition.
Rolf Nelson put it better (modulo his correction); note also that you can substitute 53% and 52% for 100% and 50% in his example above, to avoid certainty effects.
That’s a different intuition than the “declining to have more fun” one, and IMHO not nearly as obvious. An intuition in the opposite direction (which I think Rolf agrees with) is that once you reach giant tentacled squillions of units of fun, specifying when/where it happens takes just as much algorithmic complexity as making up a mind from scratch (or interpreting it from a rock).
As a human, I can’t introspect and look at my utility function, so I don’t really know if it’s bounded or not. If I’m not absolutely certain that it’s bounded, should I just assume it’s unbounded, since there is much more at stake in this case?
I don’t know, but it feels wrong. Similar issue: is anyone here more than (1 − 1/avogadro) certain that atoms don’t experience joy and suffering?
“Experienced utility” sounds to me like a category error. Utilities are equivalent to preferences, and you prefer A over B iff you are disposed (given what your mind is like, or what it would be like with extra knowledge, or whatever) to choose A over B. You can’t experience a disposition.
Rolf Nelson put it better (modulo his correction); note also that you can substitute 53% and 52% for 100% and 50% in his example above, to avoid certainty effects.
That’s a different intuition than the “declining to have more fun” one, and IMHO not nearly as obvious. An intuition in the opposite direction (which I think Rolf agrees with) is that once you reach giant tentacled squillions of units of fun, specifying when/where it happens takes just as much algorithmic complexity as making up a mind from scratch (or interpreting it from a rock).
As a human, I can’t introspect and look at my utility function, so I don’t really know if it’s bounded or not. If I’m not absolutely certain that it’s bounded, should I just assume it’s unbounded, since there is much more at stake in this case?
I don’t know, but it feels wrong. Similar issue: is anyone here more than (1 − 1/avogadro) certain that atoms don’t experience joy and suffering?