What would be the properties of that function? Well, for one thing, an utility of a region of space would not generally be equal to sum of utilities of parts, for the obvious reason that your head has bigger utility when it haven’t been diced into perfect cubic blocks and then rearranged like a Rubik’s cube.
I’m not entirely sure what the point of this comment was, but in that case, surely the problem occurs when said chunks die? I mean, if they magically kept working the same way, linking telepathically with the other chunks and processing information perfecty well, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be just as valuable, albeit rather grisly looking.
Finding out that the chunks will die (given the laws of physics as they are) is something that the function in question got to do. Likewise, finding out that they won’t die with some magic, but would die if they weren’t rearranged and the magic was applied (portal-ing the blood all over the place).
You just keep jumping to making an utility that is computed from the labels you already assign to the world.
edit: one could also subdivide it into very small regions of space, and note that you can’t compute any kind of utility of the whole by going over every piece in isolation and then summing.
edit2: to be exact, I am counter-exampling the f(ab)=f(a)+f(b) (where “ab” is a concatenated with b) with f(ab)!=f(ba) and a+b=b+a .
More broadly, mathematics1 has been very useful in science, and so ethicists try to use mathematics2 . Where mathematics1 is a serious discipline where one states assumptions and progresses formally, and mathematics2 is “there must be arithmetical operations involved” or even “it is some kind of Elvish” . (while mathematics1 doesn’t get you very far because we can’t make many assumptions)
I’m not entirely sure what the point of this comment was, but in that case, surely the problem occurs when said chunks die? I mean, if they magically kept working the same way, linking telepathically with the other chunks and processing information perfecty well, I don’t see why they wouldn’t be just as valuable, albeit rather grisly looking.
Finding out that the chunks will die (given the laws of physics as they are) is something that the function in question got to do. Likewise, finding out that they won’t die with some magic, but would die if they weren’t rearranged and the magic was applied (portal-ing the blood all over the place).
You just keep jumping to making an utility that is computed from the labels you already assign to the world.
edit: one could also subdivide it into very small regions of space, and note that you can’t compute any kind of utility of the whole by going over every piece in isolation and then summing.
edit2: to be exact, I am counter-exampling the f(ab)=f(a)+f(b) (where “ab” is a concatenated with b) with f(ab)!=f(ba) and a+b=b+a .
More broadly, mathematics1 has been very useful in science, and so ethicists try to use mathematics2 . Where mathematics1 is a serious discipline where one states assumptions and progresses formally, and mathematics2 is “there must be arithmetical operations involved” or even “it is some kind of Elvish” . (while mathematics1 doesn’t get you very far because we can’t make many assumptions)