It’s better to think of future utility being an extrapolation of current utility—and current utility being basically the same thing as the position of the pleasure-pain axis. Otherwise there is a danger of pointlessly duplicating concepts.
The danger here is in inventing terminology that is at odds with normally used terminology, resulting in confusion when reading texts written in standard terminology. I would rather describe human behaviour as ‘learning agent’ as per Russell & Norvig 2003 . where the pain is part of ‘critic’. You can see a diagram on wikipedia:
Ultimately, the overly broad definitions become useless.
We also have a bit of ‘reflex agent’ where pain makes you flinch away or flail around or faint (though i’d dare a guess that most people don’t faint even when pain has saturated and can’t increase any further).
The danger here is in inventing terminology that is at odds with normally used terminology, resulting in confusion when reading texts written in standard terminology. I would rather describe human behaviour as ‘learning agent’ as per Russell & Norvig 2003 . where the pain is part of ‘critic’. You can see a diagram on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent
Ultimately, the overly broad definitions become useless.
We also have a bit of ‘reflex agent’ where pain makes you flinch away or flail around or faint (though i’d dare a guess that most people don’t faint even when pain has saturated and can’t increase any further).