Strawman position. They made up the position then refuted it.
The possibility being argued against is, as I understand it:
We remember the value of everything we’ve decided between as follows: every time we compare it in a choice against alternatives, we remember how strongly it beat the alternatives. And that’s all we remember. When we next evaluate that thing, if we have a memory of it, that’s all we use—that coded value of how much we (dis)preferred it against some alternatives (which we’ve forgotten).
This is very bad. It’s not even complete. Where does the first preference come from? Why even discuss such a thing? To fix the above, we can say that the preference is a weighted combination of choice-amnesiac-desirability (as if we have no memories of ever having (dis)preferred the thing to other things in the past), and all past choices pro/con that thing (without reference to the competitors’ values). This is now well defined, and perhaps worth ruling out by experiment.
Strawman position. They made up the position then refuted it.
The possibility being argued against is, as I understand it:
We remember the value of everything we’ve decided between as follows: every time we compare it in a choice against alternatives, we remember how strongly it beat the alternatives. And that’s all we remember. When we next evaluate that thing, if we have a memory of it, that’s all we use—that coded value of how much we (dis)preferred it against some alternatives (which we’ve forgotten).
This is very bad. It’s not even complete. Where does the first preference come from? Why even discuss such a thing? To fix the above, we can say that the preference is a weighted combination of choice-amnesiac-desirability (as if we have no memories of ever having (dis)preferred the thing to other things in the past), and all past choices pro/con that thing (without reference to the competitors’ values). This is now well defined, and perhaps worth ruling out by experiment.
I too am having trouble understanding what the “relative subjective value” hypothesis is supposed to be.