If I had some reason (say an impending mental reconfiguration to change my values) to expect my utility function to change soon and stay relatively constant for a comparatively long time after that, what does “maximizing my utility function now” look like? If I were about to be conditioned to highly-value eating babies, should I start a clone farm to make my future selves most happy or should I kill myself in accordance with my current function’s negative valuation to that action?
momothefiddler
Karma: 46
My utility function maximises (and think this is neither entirely nonsensical nor entirely trivial in the context) utilons. I want my future selves to be “happy”, which is ill-defined.
I don’t know how to say this precisely, but I want as many utilons as possible from as many future selves as possible. The problem arises when it appears that actively changing my future selves’ utility functions to match their worlds is the best way to do that, but my current self recoils from the proposition. If I shut up and multiply, I get the opposite result that Eliezer does and I tend to trust his calculations more than my own.
Thanks for pointing that out! The general questions still exist, but the particular situation produces much less anxiety with the knowledge that the two functions have some similarities.
I’m not sure what you’re asking, but it seems to be related to constancy.
A paperclip maximizer believes maximum utility is gained through maximum paperclips. I don’t expect that to change.
I have at various times believed:
Belief in (my particular incarnation of) the Christian God had higher value than lack thereof
Personal emplyment as a neurosurgeon would be preferable to personal employment as, say, a mathematics teacher
nothing at all was positively valued and the negative value of physical exertion significantly outweighed any other single value
Given the changes so far, I have no reason to believe my utility function won’t change in the future. My current utility function values most of my actions under previous functions negatively, meaning that per instantiation (per unit time, per approximate “me”, etc.) the result is negative. Surely this isn’t optimal?
I would not have considered utilons to have meaning without my ability to compare them in my utility function.
You’re saying utilons can be generated without your knowledge, but hedons cannot? Does that mean utilons are a measure of reality’s conformance to your utility function, while hedons are your reaction to your perception of reality’s conformance to your utility function?
The hedonic scores are identical and, as far as I can tell, the outcomes are identical. The only difference is if I know about the difference—if, for instance, I’m given a choice between the two. At that point, my consideration of 2 has more hedons than my consideration of 1. Is that different from saying 2 has more utilons than 1?
Is the distinction perhaps that hedons are about now while utilons are overall?
Hm. This is true. Perhaps it would be better to say “Perceiving states in opposite-to-conventional order would give us reason to assume probabilities entirely consistent with considering a causality in opposite-to-conventional order.”
Unless I’m missing something, the only reason to believe causality goes in the order that places our memory-direction before our non-memory direction is that we base our probabilities on our memory.
Well, Eliezer seems to be claiming in this article that the low-to-high is more valid than the high-to-low, but I don’t see how they’re anything but both internally consistent
I can only assume it wouldn’t accept. A paperclip maximizer, though, has much more reason than I do to assume its utility function would remain constant.
Delayed Gratification vs. a Time-Dependent Utility Function
I’ve read this again (along with the rest of the Sequence up to it) and I think I have a better understanding of what it’s claiming. Inverting the axis of causality would require inverting the probabilities, such that an egg reforming is more likely than an egg breaking. It would also imply that our brains contain information on the ‘future’ and none on the ‘past’, meaning all our anticipations are about what led to the current state, not where the current state will lead.
All of this is internally consistent, but I see no reason to believe it gives us a “real” direction of causality. As far as I can tell, it just tells us that the direction we calculate our probabilities is the direction we don’t know.
Going from a low-entropy universe to a high-entropy universe seems more natural, but only because we calculate our probabilities in the direction of low-to-high entropy. If we based our probabilities on the same evidence perceived the opposite direction, it would be low-to-high that seemed to need universes discarded and high-to-low that seemed natural.
...right?
The basic point of the article seems to be “Not all utilons are (reducible to) hedons”, which confuses me from the start. If happiness is not a generic term for “perception of a utilon-positive outcome”, what is it? I don’t think all utilons can be reduced to hedons, but that’s only because I see no difference between the two. I honestly don’t comprehend the difference between “State A makes me happier than state B” and “I value state A more than state B”. If hedons aren’t exactly equivalent to utilons, what are they?
An example might help: I was arguing with a classmate of mine recently. My claim was that every choice he made boiled down to the option which made him happiest. Looking back on it, I meant to say it was the option whose anticipation gave him the most happiness, since making choices based on the result of those choices breaks causality. Anyway, he argued that his choices were not based on happiness. He put forth the example that, while he didn’t enjoy his job, he still went because he needed to support his son. My response was that while his reaction to his job as an isolated experience was negative, his happiness from {job + son eating} was more than his happiness from {no job + son starving}.
I thought at the time that we were disagreeing about basic motivations, but this article and its responses have caused me to wonder if, perhaps, I don’t use the word ‘happiness’ in the standard sense.
Giving a hyperbolic thought excercise: If I could choose between all existing minds (except mine, to make the point about relative values) experiencing intense agony for a year and my own death, I think I’d be likely to choose my death. This is not because I expect to experience happiness after death, but because considering the state of the universe in the second scenario brings me more happiness than considering the state of the universe in the first. As far as I can tell, this is exactly what it means to place a higher value on the relative pleasure and continuing functionality of all-but-one mind than on my own continued existence.
To anyone who argues that utilons aren’t exactly equivalent to hedons (either that utilons aren’t hedons or that utilons are reducible to hedons), please explain to me what you (and my sudden realisation that you exist allows me to realise you seem amazingly common) think happiness is.
I don’t see why you need to count the proportional number of Eliezers at all. I’m guessing the reason you expect an ordered future isn’t because of the relation of {number of Boltzmann Eliezers}/{number of Earth Eliezers} to 1. It seems to me you expect an orderly future because you (all instances of you and thus all instances of anything that is similar enough to you to be considered ‘an Eliezer’) have memories of an orderly past. These memories could have sprung into being when you did a moment ago, yes, but that doesn’t give you any other valid way to consider things. Claiming you’re probabilistically not a Boltzmann Eliezer because you can count the Boltzmann Eliezers assumes you have some sort of valid data in the first place, which means you’re already assuming you’re not a Boltzmann Eliezer.
You anticipate experiencing the future of Earth Eliezer because it’s the only future out of unconsiderably-many that has enough definition for ‘anticipation’ to have any meaning. If sprouting wings and flying away, not sprouting wings but still flying away, sprouting wings and crashing, and not sprouting wings and teleporting to the moon are all options with no evidence to recommend one over another, what does it even mean to expect one of them? Then add to that a very large number of others—I don’t know how many different experiences are possible given a human brain (and there’s no reason to assume a Boltzmann brain that perceives itself as you do now necessarily has a human-brain number of experiences) - and you have no meaningful choice but to anticipate Earth Eliezer’s future.
Unless I’m missing some important part of your argument, it doesn’t seem that an absolute count of Eliezers is necessary. Can’t you just assume a future consistent with the memories available to the complex set of thought-threads you call you?
I realise I’m getting to (and thus getting through) this stuff a lot later than most commenters. Having looked, though, I can’t find any information on post-interval etiquette or any better place to attempt discussion of the ideas each post/comment produces and, as far as I can tell, the posts are still relevant. If I’m flaunting site policy or something with my various years-late comments, I’m sorry and please let me know so I know to stop.
The issue with polling 3^^^3 people is that once they are all aware of the situation, it’s no longer purely (3^^^3 dust specks) vs (50yrs torture). It becomes (3^^^3 dust specks plus 3^^^3 feelings of altruistically having saved a life) vs (50yrs torture). The reason most of the people polled would accept the dust speck is not because their utility of a speck is more than 1/3^^^3 their utility of torture. It’s because their utility of (a speck plus feeling like a lifesaver) is more than their utility of (no speck plus feeling like a murderer).
I may misunderstand your meaning of “warm fuzzies”, but I find I obtain significant emotional satisfaction from mathematics, music, and my social interactions with certain people. I see no reason to believe that people receive some important thing from the fundamental aspects of religion that cannot be obtained in less detrimental ways.
I acknowledge the legitimacy of demanding I google the phrase before requesting another link and will attempt to increase the frequency with which that’s part of my response to such an occasion, but maintain the general usefulness of pointing out a broken link in a post, especially one that’s part of a Sequence.
The Jesus Camp link is broken. Does anyone have an alternative? I don’t know what Eliezer is referencing there.
The ideal point of a police system (and, by extension, a police officer) is to choose force in such a way as to “minimize the total sum of death”.
It appears that you believe that the current police system is nothing like that, while Eliezer seems to believe it is at least somewhat like that. While I don’t have sufficient information to form a realistic opinion, it seems to me highly improbable that 95% of police actions are initiations of force or that every police officer chooses every day to minimize total sum of death.
The largest issue here is that Eliezer is focusing on “force chosen to minimize death” and you’re focusing on “people in blue uniforms”. While both are related to the ideal police system, they are not sufficiently similar to each other for an argument between them to make much sense.
I’m not sure I understand, but are you saying there’s a reason to view a progression of configurations in one direction over another? I’d always (or at least for a long time) essentially considered time a series of states (I believe I once defined passage of time as a measurement of change), basically like a more complicated version of, say, the graph of y=ln(x). Inverting the x-axis (taking the mirror image of the graph) would basically give you the same series of points in reverse, but all the basic rules would be maintained—the height above the x-axis would always be the natural log of the x-value. Similarly, inverting the progression of configurations would maintain all physical laws. This seems to me fit all your posts on time up until this one.
This one, though, differs. Are you claiming in this post that one could invert the t-axis (or invert the progression of configurations in the timeless view) and obtain different physical laws (or at least violations of the ones in our given progression)? If so, I see a reason to consider a certain order to things. Otherwise, it seems that, while we can say y=ln(x) is “increasing” or describe a derivative at a point, we’re merely describing how the points relate to each other if we order them in increasing x-values, rather than claiming that the value of ln(5) depends somehow on the value of ln(4.98) as opposed to both merely depending on the definition of the function. We can use derivatives to determine the temporally local configurations just as we can use derivatives to approximate x-local function values, but as far as I can tell it is, in the end, a configuration A that happens to define brains that contain some information on another configuration B that defined brains that contained information on some configuration C, so we say C happened, then B, then A, just like in the analogy we have a set of points that has no inherent order so we read it in order of increasing x-values (which we generally place left-to-right) but it’s not inherently that—it’s just a set of y-values that depend on their respective x-values.
Short version: Are you saying there’s a physical reason to order the configurations C->B->A other than that A contains memories of B containing memories of C?
And if I’m “best at” creating dissonance, hindering scientific research, or some other negatively-valued thing? If I should do the thing at which I’m most effective, regardless of how it fits my utility function...
I don’t know where that’s going. I don’t feel that’s a positive thing, but that’s inherent in the proposition that it doesn’t fit my utility function.
I guess I’m trying to say that “wasting my life” has a negative value with a lower absolute value than “persuading humanity to destroy itself”—though oratory is definitely not my best skill, so it’s not a perfect example.