Personally, I think a utilitarian approach is very useful for understanding behaviour. One can model most organisms pretty well as expected fitness maximisers with limited resources. That idea is the foundation of much evolutionary psychology.
The question isn’t whether the model is predictively useful with respect to most organisms, it’s whether it is predictively useful with respect to a hypothetical algorithm which replicates salient human powers such as epistemic hunger, model building, hierarchical goal seeking, and so on.
Say we’re looking to explain the process of inferring regularities (such as physical laws) by observing one’s environment—what does modeling this as “maximizing a utility function” buy us?
The main virtues of utility-based models are that they are general—and so allow comparisons across agents—and that they abstract goal-seeking behaviour away from the implementation details of finite memories, processing speed, etc—which helps if you are interested in focusing on either of those areas.
Personally, I think a utilitarian approach is very useful for understanding behaviour. One can model most organisms pretty well as expected fitness maximisers with limited resources. That idea is the foundation of much evolutionary psychology.
The question isn’t whether the model is predictively useful with respect to most organisms, it’s whether it is predictively useful with respect to a hypothetical algorithm which replicates salient human powers such as epistemic hunger, model building, hierarchical goal seeking, and so on.
Say we’re looking to explain the process of inferring regularities (such as physical laws) by observing one’s environment—what does modeling this as “maximizing a utility function” buy us?
In comparison with what?
The main virtues of utility-based models are that they are general—and so allow comparisons across agents—and that they abstract goal-seeking behaviour away from the implementation details of finite memories, processing speed, etc—which helps if you are interested in focusing on either of those areas.