Why can’t you increase your asymptote with new evidence? If, for instance, your utility was bounded at 2^160 utilons before the mugger opened the sky then just increase your bound according to that evidence and then shut up and multiply to decide whether to pay $5. You can’t update to a bound of 3^^^3 in one step since you can’t receive enough evidence at once, which is a handy feature for avoiding muggings, but your utility at a distant point in the future is essentially unbounded given enough evidential updates over time.
Useful utility bounds should be derivable from our knowledge of the universe. If we can theoretically create 10^80 unique, just-worth-living lives with the estimated matter and energy in the universe then that provides a minimum bound, although it’s probably desirable to choose the bound large enough that the 10^80th life is worth nearly as much as the 1st or 10^11th life. When we have evidence for a change in our estimate of the available matter and energy or a change in the efficiency of turning matter and energy into utility we scale the bound appropriately.
Why can’t you increase your asymptote with new evidence? If, for instance, your utility was bounded at 2^160 utilons before the mugger opened the sky then just increase your bound according to that evidence and then shut up and multiply to decide whether to pay $5. You can’t update to a bound of 3^^^3 in one step since you can’t receive enough evidence at once, which is a handy feature for avoiding muggings, but your utility at a distant point in the future is essentially unbounded given enough evidential updates over time.
Useful utility bounds should be derivable from our knowledge of the universe. If we can theoretically create 10^80 unique, just-worth-living lives with the estimated matter and energy in the universe then that provides a minimum bound, although it’s probably desirable to choose the bound large enough that the 10^80th life is worth nearly as much as the 1st or 10^11th life. When we have evidence for a change in our estimate of the available matter and energy or a change in the efficiency of turning matter and energy into utility we scale the bound appropriately.