Felicifia - Recent Comments

Re: hello

Alan Dawrst — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:15:11 GMT

Thanks for the introduction. It's true Felicifia has been quiet for a while, but I guess that just means the potential contributors are currently working on other projects they find more cost-effective. :) Still, more discussion would be interesting. Feel free to contribute yourself, if you have anything to share. Best wishes!

Two forms of utilitarianism

Benthamite — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:07:45 GMT

I am in full agreement with the two excellent comments above. I shall merely add that the problem of deciding when a life is not worth living arises only on some forms of utilitarianism. On what we may call person affecting variants of this view, good and bad experiences do not directly make outcomes better or worse, but rather make sentient beings better or worse off. It is the welfare of these beings that constitutes the goodness of outcomes. By contrast, impersonalist utilitarianism does not assign intrinsic significance to individual lives; it instead holds that good and bad experiences are themselves what make outcomes better or worse. On this variant, the relation that holds between good and bad experiences and the beings whose experiences they are parallels the relation that holds between individual people and the larger collectives to which these people belong. Such collections of individuals matter simply because their individual members do. Similarly, happy or miserable lives are morally significant only for the happiness and misery they contain. Since this is the form of utilitarianism I believe we should favour, we don't need to concern ourselves with the question 'When does a life become worth living?' Our focus should be confined to the experiences of happiness and suffering themselves. It is only the fact that these experiences feel intrinsically good or bad, rather than they feel this way to someone, that makes certain outcomes intrinsically morally better than others.

The Problem of Predation

davidpearce — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:24:24 GMT

If we saw a human toddler dying of thirst or hunger, or being eaten alive by a predator, we would be horrified. A photographer who chose to video the unfolding tragedy without "interfering" would be guilty of culpable neglect. So too would the dying toddler's caregiver. By contrast, when a functionally equivalent non-human animal is dying of thirst or hunger, or is about to be eaten alive by a predator, we regard intervention as unethical - or at least "sentimental". We are permitted to photograph our stricken fellow creatures, but we're not expected to "interfere" and rescue them. Non-intervention in the rest of the living world is enshrined in law in many of our existing wildlife parks.

Does our diametrically opposite response to equivalent scenarios across different species reflect a principled ethical distinction? Or is it arbitrary anthropocentric prejudice? [Perhaps it's worth recalling that many 20th century Social Darwinists believed that we shouldn't "interfere" to help "unfit" human beings i.e. it was "unnatural" to protect the weak, the sick, and the vulnerable.]

IMO exactly the same degree of horror - and active intervention - is appropriate when a functionally equivalent non-human animal is about to suffer the same fate as the human toddler in the example above. Utilitarians believe that compassion should be systematized. So we should attempt comprehensively to prevent such horrors as soon as we have the technical means to do so - just as we are now trying systematically to reduce (human) infant disease and mortality across the world. Of course any such prospect for non-humans strikes most people today as utterly fanciful. However, we are living in what is (probably) the last century of "wildlife" in the traditional sense. Habitat destruction and human population growth means that the larger terrestrial vertebrates, at least, aren't likely to survive much longer outside our managed nature reserves. Ecosystem redesign, depot contraception and genetic modification are likely to become the norm. Admittedly, a "welfare state" for non-human animals is currently politically unrealistic even if it's technically feasible. I'm sure most people, pre-reflectively, would like to perpetuate the sociopathic killing machines we know as lions - the romanticised "king of the beasts" - even if lions become extinct in the wild. Yet when we witness the cruelty of what of truly lion-like behaviour entails, we typically recoil - in the same way that if slaughterhouses had glass walls, most of us would be vegetarians. For example, one of the most watched videos on Youtube last year was filmed in the Kruger National Park: a conflict between wildebeest vs lions vs crocodiles. A terrified young wildebeest near a river is attacked by lions, which begin to asphyxiate it. The wildebeest is snatched from the lions by crocodiles. Finally the traumatized youngster is rescued by members of the returning wildebeest herd.

I've no doubt many viewers regard this spectacle as "entertaining" (cf the Roman colosseum). But most of us also feel pity for the victim - and joy when the young wildebeest escapes. OK, that's just one example. But when events in our future wildlife parks have the same visual immediacy as this scene, I reckon "natural" traumas and tragedies will (eventually) come to seem as morally unacceptable as would, say, allowing lions to feed on live wildebeest in zoos today. With power comes complicity; and absolute power brings absolute complicity. Hence my tentative prediction that the world's master species is (ultimately) going to get rid of suffering altogether.

Re: wild animals

Alan Dawrst — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:45:32 GMT

Thanks for the thoughtful question. Indeed this is an important issue and one that has actually come up before.

Back in 1973, just after he had published an essay on "Animal Liberation" in the New York Review of Books, Peter Singer was asked whether humans should interfere in nature to stop animals from eating each other. He replied:

As for wild animals, for practical purposes I am fairly sure, judging from man's past record of attempts to mold nature to his own aims, that we would be more likely to increase the net amount of animal suffering if we interfered with wildlife, than to decrease it. Lions play a role in the ecology of their habitat, and we cannot be sure what the long-term consequences would be if we were to prevent them from killing gazelles. [...]
The remaining question is purely hypothetical, and perhaps it would be politic to refuse to answer it. Nevertheless, philosophers are supposed to answer hypothetical questions, so I will risk it. If, in some way, we could be reasonably certain that interfering with wildlife in a particular way would, in the long run, greatly reduce the amount of killing and suffering in the animal world, it would, I think, be right to interfere.

I agree with the second paragraph, but the first seems like something of a cop-out stance (though perhaps an expedient choice in the situation -- when you're trying just to persuade people of vegetarianism, suggesting an obligation to intervene in nature might only serve to allow them to dismiss your position as absurd). Tyler Cowen, in section III.1 of "Policing Nature," gives some good examples of where Singer's defense about the danger of disrupting ecology probably wouldn't hold up.

But more fundamental is the point you raise: What if the lion-gazelle ecology that we're preserving by not interfering is itself a source of net suffering? This piece suggests that may indeed be the case. It concludes, "As serious as animal pain due to experiments and agriculture may be, the number of wild animals that suffer in preventable ways is probably far higher. It seems that there ought to be a cost-effective way of relieving at least some of this suffering" (p. 27). Another page on the site makes the same point (see the section "Finite Suffering--Animals").

David Pearce has similarly raised concerns about wild-animal suffering and has made suggestions in another Felicifia post regarding re-engineering nature.

Of course, as you hint, some might take this as a reductio against utilitarian concern for animals (and in fact, I think this is not uncommon among people who try to defend eating meat by suggesting where that line of thinking might lead). However, I personally don't find it counterintuitive to maintain that people might have an obligation to prevent massive amounts of needless suffering in nature, especially in cases where it would cost little to do so.

$311 per metric ton CO2 instead $311 per US ton CO2

stevesandrio — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:24:41 GMT

Meanwhile, Stern recommends a carbon tax of $311 per ton CO2; Nordhaus, $17, which is $2.74 or $0.15 per gallon.

According to my calculation based on Carbon Tax Calculator this "ton" means metric ton (known also as tonne = 1.102 US ton)

Conference Report in New York Times

davidpearce — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:33:47 GMT

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes....

Re: preferences about preferences

Alan Dawrst — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:49:09 GMT

I would like to ask what weight utilitarianism assigns to people's preferences about what they want to prefer, think, and feel, and whether hedonistic and preference utilitarianism differs on this point.

Hedonistic utilitarianism doesn't assign any direct weight to these preferences; indeed, it doesn't assign direct weight to any preferences, only to the happiness that might come from their fulfillment. Preferences about preferences are still preferences, so preference utilitarians would care directly about fulfillment of these preferences, in proportion to their relative strength.

I don't know more than you about the experience machine, so I'll leave those questions to others...

superficial happiness and the experience machine

Kletta — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:48:58 GMT

I also think that the strength of a desire not only doesn't have to be proportional to the hedonistic consequences of that desire being realized, it doesn't have to be proportional to the frequency, length or intensity with which one thinks about that desire, either. I believe it's possible to feel happy while one considers one's life to be very bad, maybe not worth living, but doesn't think about that. In other words, happiness may contradict not only a preference to hold certain preferences--perhaps those one considers the most important part of one's life--but also a preference to actively think about the preferences one does hold. I would like to ask what weight utilitarianism assigns to people's preferences about what they want to prefer, think, and feel, and whether hedonistic and preference utilitarianism differs on this point. Many thanks in advance!

I'd also like to ask if I understand right that the experience machine is not limited by the knowledge of the individual in it, so that he can choose to have experiences that are completely unfamiliar to him when he chooses them; and that he can remember a different past than his real one. Is it similar to the scenario in Animorphs: The Ellimist Chronicles by K.A. Applegate, where an organism could present more realistic portrayals of specific people whose brains he had access to than of others; in other words, would it be up to individuals to choose how vividly they wanted to appear in others' experiences? Anyway, I think that simply planning in great detail what one wants to experience within the machine might take much time and energy outside it, though some of that might be spared if one wants to experience a world where he knows that many or all of his wishes, including ones that change the past, come true as he wishes them.

i don't think so

conchis — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:10:51 GMT

I not sure I understand why you'd think that virtue ethics and deontology can't support the idea of intrinsic value. As Sumner (1996) notes, both deontology and virtues ethics are actually compatible with welfarism (i.e. the view that welfare is the only intrinsic value).

Sure, they're both typically more pluralist than this, but that's a separate matter, (and consequentialists need not be monists about value either).

Background

Alan Dawrst — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:20:43 GMT

I think the Wikipedia article on utilitarianism does a pretty good job introducing philosophical issues related to this subject, though many of the posts here add to that discussion.

As far as "way of life" topics, here are some posts from this blog that may be relevant (see the comments as well as the main article):

Donate vs. Invest?
Subjective Estimation
Expected Investment Returns
Returns to Entrepreneurship (includes a general discussion of career choice)

voting

hanyo66 — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:59:48 GMT

chyeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh Utilitarians FTW!

Is voting cost-effective?

Alan Dawrst — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:55:42 GMT

Steven Landsburg has argued that individuals shouldn't vote because the probability of casting a tie-breaking ballot is too small. For instance,

[In 2000], about 6.5 million votes were cast for major party candidates in New York state and 63 percent of them went to Al Gore. Assuming an electorate of similar size with a similar bias, my chance of casting the deciding vote in New York is about one in 10 to the 200,708th power. I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election's outcome.

I think our subjective odds of casting a tie-breaking vote are not this bad, even in New York. Landsburg's formula assumes that the number of votes for a particular candidate in a two-way race follows a binomial distribution with number of trials equal to the (assumed even) number of voters in the state and success probability p. It's not obvious to me that this is the right model to use, but even if it is, we shouldn't assume a single value for p (e.g., saying p = 0.63 as he did for New York); rather, we should come up with a subjective probability density over p and integrate with respect to that density the probability of changing the election given a particular p over the possible values of p. In the region p ~= 0.5, our probability of impact will be large (for p=0.5 the probability of casting the tie vote is 1 in 3070), and this may make the resulting integral much larger than Lansburg's calculations show.

There appear to be copious publications on this topic (see, e.g., this discussion of various approaches to "pivotal probabilities"), and I'm sure other people who are familiar with the literature could say a lot more.

Even if the probability of a vote influencing the outcome of an election is high, it remains to be seen whether one should actually vote. Perhaps instead of taking a hour to drive to the voting booth, you could work for an hour getting out the vote in areas very likely to vote for your chosen candidates. Or maybe you could spend the hour working and earn money to donate toward similar efforts.

Even if it would be more cost-effective to pursue one of these latter options than to vote yourself, you might still vote personally just to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy. And perhaps if your actions have a large influence on the actions of others (e.g., if you're a rock star), then you would want to vote to encourage others to do the same--since nearly all of those other people wouldn't otherwise be doing something more cost-effective with their time.

i am a female

kimberlyvanwormer — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:03:53 GMT

and I am a utilitarian. Although I do not know why other women would not be.

Re: So?

Alan Dawrst — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 03:17:06 GMT

Violate time symmetry, then. Is there any reason for it?

I'm not a physicist, but I would guess the widespread belief in time symmetry is based on aesthetics and a preference for simpler hypotheses. However, it does seem intuitively reasonable to violate time symmetry here.

Still, a Bayesian will maintain some probability mass on the possibility that time is always symmetric, in which case the problem persists. Whether this probability mass is big enough to worry about in making decisions is another question.

So?

DanielLC — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 01:56:58 GMT

Violate time symmetry, then. Is there any reason for it?

In any case, if you are a Boltzmann brain, you will die in an instant. Thus, any choices you make involving the future (i.e. any choices whatsoever) should assume you aren't a Boltzmann brain.

Low entropy

Alan Dawrst — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 03:15:54 GMT

Thanks for the reply. As I understand it, Boltzmann-brain scenarios refer to a situation in which the universe starts out in an unorganized, high-entropy state. The puzzle, then is how our current universe came to have such low entropy. I don't think evolution helps here, because evolution doesn't contradict the second law of thermodynamics. (Of course, "evolution" in the sense of, say, cosmic inflation may help.)

Why can't we just assume the universe started out at low entropy and continually runs toward higher entropy? We can, I guess, but according to this article, doing so would violate time symmetry:

The microscopic definition explained why entropy would tend to increase, but didn't offer any insight into why it was so low in the first place. Suddenly, a thermodynamics problem became a puzzle for cosmology: why did the early universe have such a low entropy? [...] The real puzzle is why there is such a change - why are conditions at one end of time so dramatically different from those at the other? If we do not assume temporal asymmetry a priori, it is impossible in principle to answer this question by suggesting why a certain initial condition is "natural" - without temporal aymmetry, the same condition would be equally natural at late times.

Ask a biologist

philgoetz — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 02:21:40 GMT

It makes no sense to compare the chance that our universe would suddenly arise randomly, to the chance that a "Boltzman brain" would suddenly arise randomly.

The Boltzman brain needs to arise all at once. The world we believe in can evolve a little piece at a time. It isn't expected to arise all at once.

I've noticed that creationists draw almost all of their quotes of scientists doubting evolution from cosmologists. Perhaps there is something about studying the cosmos - a large, complex system that is said to evolve, but does not - that systematically leads people to underestimate or misunderstand evolution.

Szilárd, Benatar

davidpearce — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 13:37:00 GMT

One of the first scientists to discuss existential risk was the brilliant Hungarian- American physicist Leó Szilárd - in a 1950 US radio program. Szilárd hypothesized a nuclear doomsday machine - a cobalt-clad thermonuclear bomb that would lethally pollute the atmosphere with radioactivity and sterilize the Earth. P.D. Smith's disturbing "Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon" (2007) gives more of the background.

Perhaps global catastrophic risks are more immediately troubling than existential risks. But if you disagree with David Benatar ("Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence", OUP, 2006) then presumably it makes sense to campaign for the urgent development of self-sustaining bases on the Moon and Mars. Their establishment in the next few decades will significantly lengthen odds against human extinction.

Overemphasizing precedent

DanielLC — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:21:30 GMT

Based on your example on voting, it seems that a precedent utilitarian would assume everyone will do exactly what you will do. Precedents aren't that strong. The fact that one person decided not to vote won't make another 10000 agree with him. If you mean to imply everyone else will follow the same logic as you and thus do the same thing, may I point out that the vast majority of them aren't precedent utilitarians, or even utilitarians of any kind?
Also, I'd counter the idea that anything incredibly counterintuitive must be wrong with a few paradoxes. The Monty Hall problem is a good example.

Many worlds

Alan Dawrst — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:04:04 GMT

This is a good question. Even if moral decisions aren't quantum events (is there reason to think they are or aren't?), MWI as a physical theory may have implications for what moral actions we decide to take (though it's not immediately clear what those might be).

Utility monster

Alan Dawrst — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:56:12 GMT

Your question is redolent of Nozick's utility monster. I don't see anything intuitively troubling about it, though in practice it seems unlikely.

Utilitiy Curves

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:17:06 GMT

You drew a utility curve of an ordinary person's life, which depicts the utility experienced by that person.

I'd like to see another curve - the utility caused by the person.

On average it takes the first 25 years of a person's life for them to become social, self-sufficient, educated and able to stand up for what they think is right - to become a net contributor to society, with a bit of grace and a backbone, and possibly a positive net equity.

It takes on average another 25 years for them to go through the whole process of raising and releasing their own children - to achieve wisdom, greatness of spirit, charity, compassion and giving. 50 is the start of the peak of a person's secular power and political influence, although this changes from country to country.

And, on current biology, many of the last years are taken up dealing with decrepitude, depression and fears about the afterlife.

Cutting down the fraction of a person's life taken up with the first 50 years looks a good win for utility.

Large Scale Structures

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:01:32 GMT

Mass is more of a limiting factor than space. The challenge is to get the maximum utility per kilo, rather than per meter cubed.

That's going to depend on the definition of utility. A lot of people reject Benthamite definitions because they could be achieved without dignity through drugs or virtual reality.

If you want maximum biological entity inhabitable space per kilo, you need to build really large scale structures like
Dyson Bubbles

Question: What if it turned out the way to maximise utility were to have only a few beings, use all the resources to give them the illusion of godlike powers, and genetically engineer those beings to have godlike capacity to experience and appreciate pleasure, fulfillment and happiness?

Occam

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:31:55 GMT

There has been some work done on the mathematical basis for trusting Occam's razor at:

http://www.toothycat.net/wiki/...

Game Theory

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:25:32 GMT

From a games theory point of view, Pareto optimisation is more about the stability of a solution than about ethics.

Consider the problems of two competitors selling ice-cream on a beach:
http://www.economy-point.org/i...

Thoughts

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:11:22 GMT

That pdf does not, alas, display for me.

But here are my thoughts on the topic anyway...

Infinities are tricky things. In quantum electrodynamics infinities can be cancelled to give finite answers. In mathematics the Banach-Tarski paradox claims that a solid sphere (such as an orange) could be cut into a finite number of solid pieces which could then be fitted together in such a way as to create two oranges (if you had a perfect fractal knife and a lot of patience).

In Utilitarianism, while it might look initially like one needs to think about the knock on effect of an action for the next 20 billion years or so, we can narrow that down.

Firstly, Drake's equation has a factor, which is the expected lifetime of an intelligent species after it first sends a radio message. In absence of other information, the best guess at this is the same duration up to that point. Human kind has been around at most for 1.5 million years.

Secondly, once humankind leaves this planet, very little that happened on it will matter much one way or the other. Time distances things. How many pieces of music composed before 1000 ad do you listen to? How much of the biology and medicine from 2000 years ago do you use? How many of the religions of 3000 years ago are still now believed or even remembered?

Beyond a certain time horizon it becomes impossible to tell whether an action that, in the short term has clearly good or bad effects, will seem the same in retrospect. Vlad III, ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s, was famed for impaling his opponents on stakes. A century later, Elizabeth Báthory, a countess in Hungary, bathed in human blood. Neither of these things seemed good at the time. 500 years on, and millions of people have fun pretending to be Vampires or reading fiction about them.

Under some interpretations of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of other universes. New universes spawn from this one every time a quantum state collapses. Does that matter to Utilitarianism? I'd say no. An ethical decision is not a quantum state. It is not doomed to go either way 50 % of the time, any more than if you make a bet that you can get 990 heads on tossing 1000 coins you get to win the bet 50 % of the time.

Following your conscience

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:31:08 GMT

One can reverse this, and look at intuiting and humility as being tools that can aid the Utilitarian decision making process.

People are not perfect. It would be possible for a misguided person, attempting to follow their understanding of Utilitarianism, to decide that the right course of action was to destroy Russia before Russia could develop nuclear weapons.

Among the risk factors a Utilitarian should take into account is the possibility that they have worked things out wrong. Intuition, and the humility to seek out the advice of other Utilitarians, are valid reasons not to follow dire reasoning through to its conclusion, because they are most likely to be activated in just those circumstances where a double check is a good idea.

Longevity

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:20:58 GMT

There is a good page summarising current theories of aging:
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/course...

If they are right about the link between calorie intake and lifespan (reduce calories by 40% to increase lifespan by 40%) then if someone who is active for more of the day burns up more energy and so has to eat more, one would expect a balancing effect.

"Live fast, die young" as they say.

Utility of Sleep Deprivation

Douglas.Reay — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:12:24 GMT

Rather than sleep deprivation, why not go for Polyphasic sleep?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

This can reputedly let you live on 3 hours sleep a day, without feeling tired.

The Russian Electrosone-50 sleep induction machine might also be worth looking into.

Predictions

Carl Shulman — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:31:06 GMT

Most of those 'exotic' predictions aren't very.

Depending on the measurement of human capacity, we may already have computers more powerful than human brains, although they are very expensive. This is very different from talking about generally intelligent computer programs.

Talk of brain-computer interfaces refers to the current tech, which is already used to control cursors for the disabled and in military applications.

Desktop biological and molecular manufacturing is an important statement.

"However, the report did not seem to be putting all the pieces together, such as how the "exotics" affect climate change."
Almost no futurism even aims at this sort of integrative thinking. For one thing, automated and flexible manufacturing should mean very cheap production of solar cells and energy storage devices. That cheap energy could in turn be used to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

simplification

Alan Dawrst — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:32:12 GMT

The final expression above can be written as

[sum_k Q_k max_i EU(i,k)] - [sum_k Q_k EU(argmax_i EU(i),k)].

However,

sum_k Q_k EU(argmax_i EU(i),k) = EU(argmax_i EU(i)) = max_i EU(i),

because the average expected utility over all potential future knowledge discoveries should equal our current expected utility. Thus, the formula can be simplified to

[sum_k Q_k max_i EU(i,k)] - [max_i EU(i)].

Nobel Speeches

Seth Baum — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:28:48 GMT

Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. About two-thirds of the way down, starting at "There was for a long time great doubt...", the connection between climate change and peace/security is made.

R K Pachauri, IPCC Chairman. Includes discussion of "equity" and cost-benefit analysis that seems unfortunately in units of GDP.

Al Gore. Seems to support cap-and-trade and stringent regulations on coal power.

Both Mjøs and Gore call China a leading emitter. However, while the global climate change negotiations are between countries (as opposed to, say, religious or language communities), to cluster emissions by country seems inappropriate. More important are per capita emissions, and China's present and historical per capita emissions are both relatively low. Historical emissions factor in because present individuals benefit from some of the causes of the emissions (i.e. general development). Either way, I'd focus on where emissions reductions cause the least quality of life loss, which is clearly in the high-income countries. I would like to see China on board in the post-Kyoto treaty(-ies) but would not be very demanding of it.

Related: List of territorial disputes. This highlights the somewhat arbitrary nature of political boundaries.

empty comment

Seth Baum — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 19:44:28 GMT

Re Sleep

Seth Baum — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 13:30:28 GMT

I agree, perhaps we might benefit from erring on the side of sleeping less. What I don't know is how this affects longevity. However, the other (and often more important) factor is how much sleep will maximize our productivity, i.e. our ability to increase utility in others (and in our future selves). That's going to vary a lot from person to person. Unfortunately, I've never been one to do well on little sleep.

Re: alephs

Alan Dawrst — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:17:32 GMT

if I didn't do something like this, couldn't it be argued that I shouldn't try to go for any given infinite utility, such as aleph null QALYs (the amount of happiness if you had positive happiness forever, among other possibilities), because its nothing compared to aleph one?

It's true that aleph numbers are problematic in this regard because they result in an "arms race" to bigger and bigger infinities. One solution is just to declare a "highest" infinity and optimize probabilities of attaining it--e.g., maximize P(+highest infinity), minimize P(-highest infinity), or do some mix of both.

Cardinal, not ordinal

DanielLC — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:28:31 GMT

Were not dealing with ordinal numbers here. 1+1+1+1+1+...=1+1+2+2+2+...=?₀. This could be modified to 1+1+1+1+1+...=?₀ vs 1+1+?₁+?₁+?₁+...=?₁, but it says finite sacrifice, and going from ?₁ to ?₀ is not finite.

re Different Idea

DanielLC — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:10:40 GMT

I seem to have not mentioned an important point. Any possible universe can have its utility added to or multiplied to get an equally likely universe. The added to part is not a problem, as it will make no difference in the final choice of action. The multiplied part, however, is. Here is an example:
...
{
u1cA: +X
u1cB: -X
u2cA: -X
u2cB: +X
}
{
u3cA: +2X
u3cB: -2X
u4cA: -2X
u4cB: +2X
}
...
Grouped like that, E[A] and E[B] look equal, but it could be changed to
...
u1cA: +X
u1cB: -X
}
{
u2cA: -X
u2cB: +X
u3cA: +2X
u3cB: -2X
}
{
u4cA: -2X
u4cB: +2X
...
in which case, it looks like E[A] is twice as good as E[B]. This sort of thing could be used to make any choice look any amount better than any other choice. Using my method, doing what I just showed would be impossible.

Another thought: if I didn't do something like this, couldn't it be argued that I shouldn't try to go for any given infinite utility, such as aleph null QALYs (the amount of happiness if you had positive happiness forever, among other possibilities), because its nothing compared to aleph one?

Clarification

DanielLC — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:14:27 GMT

I think I can explain this a bit better. If there was a random sequence of zeroes and ones, with no specific length, if every string was just as likely as every other, the probability of the string being under any given length, such as a googolplex bits, is infintessimal. The same would apply even if every successive bit halved the probability. It would therefore have to decrease even faster than that for the result to be of finite length. I figure the way morallity works, the correct theory of everything, and everything else would have to follow that same basic principle.

Occam's razor

DanielLC — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:54:05 GMT

I can't figure out how to put it into words, but I managed to do a sort of mathematical proof for something similar to Occam's razor. p=probability, c=possibility with a given complexity in bits, f(x)=o(g(x)) (big O notation) means that, with sufficiently high a, the limit of a*f(x)>g(x) as x increases without limit. p(c)=o(2^-c). Unfortunately, the last step in making this into Occam's razor, the idea that it works when the complexity is lower than a googolplex bits, requires Occam's razor. Assuming that last step is taken, that means that a possibility with one more bit of complexity is less than half as likely to be correct.

As for the part about wellbeing, there are many preference utilitarians: those who define utility based on what people prefer. I personally define it based on what you'd learn to prefer as you do it. I define happiness generally as the emotion that makes you want to do whatever you're doing more.

Re: RSS

Alan Dawrst — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 16:45:49 GMT

In the right-hand corner of your URL browser on the main page, there should be an RSS symbol (an orange box in Firefox, a blue box in Safari). Clicking on it shows that the URL appears to be

http://www.felicifia.com/rss/r...