I think that you can keep up the utility function a bit longer if you add the costs of thinking to it—required time and energy, and maybe aversion of thinking about it.
“I could compare these two items in the supermarket for 30 minutes and finally find out which product is better—or I could just ignore the new option and take the same thing as last time”.
It can be the perfectly rational option to just stick with something which worked before.
It is also rational to decide how much time you invest to decide something (and if there is a lot of money involved, this is usually done). If the time for a decision is not enough to build and use a model, you fall back to more “primitive” methods. In fact, most of the everyday decisions have to be done like that. Each second, you have several options available, and no possibility to re-think about all of them every time.
We need all 3 systems for our life. The interesting thing is just to decide which system is useful for which decision and which time it should get.
Look at it from a higher perspective, and you can get a well-defined utility function for a brain which has access to these systems to evaluate things.
I think that you can keep up the utility function a bit longer if you add the costs of thinking to it—required time and energy, and maybe aversion of thinking about it. “I could compare these two items in the supermarket for 30 minutes and finally find out which product is better—or I could just ignore the new option and take the same thing as last time”. It can be the perfectly rational option to just stick with something which worked before.
It is also rational to decide how much time you invest to decide something (and if there is a lot of money involved, this is usually done). If the time for a decision is not enough to build and use a model, you fall back to more “primitive” methods. In fact, most of the everyday decisions have to be done like that. Each second, you have several options available, and no possibility to re-think about all of them every time.
We need all 3 systems for our life. The interesting thing is just to decide which system is useful for which decision and which time it should get. Look at it from a higher perspective, and you can get a well-defined utility function for a brain which has access to these systems to evaluate things.