Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences - Less Wrong
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If we are going to have a serious discussion about these matters, at some point we must face the fact that the physical description of the world contains no such thing as a preference or a want - or a utility function. So the difficulty of such extractions or extrapolations is twofold. Not only is the act of extraction or extrapolation itself conditional upon a value system (i.e. normative metamorality is just as "relative" as is basic morality), but there is nothing in the physical description to tell us what the existing preferences of an agent are. Given the physical ontology we have, the ascription of preferences to a physical system is always a matter of interpretation or imputation, just as is the ascription of semantic or representational content to its states.
It's easy to miss this in a decision-theoretic discussion, because decision theory already assumes some concept like "goal" or "utility", always. Decision theory is the rigorous theory of decision-making, but it does not tell you what a decision is. It may even be possible to create a rigorous "reflective decision theory" which tells you how a decision architecture should choose among possible alterations to itself, or a rigorous theory of normative metamorality, the general theory of what preferences agents should have towards decision-architecture-modifying changes in other agents. But meta-decision theory will not bring you any closer to finding "decisions" in an ontology that doesn't already have them.
But to what extent does the result depend on the initial "seed" of interpretation? Maybe, very little. For example, prediction of behavior of a given physical system strictly speaking rests on the problem of induction, but that doesn't exactly say that anything goes or that what will actually happen is to any reasonable extent ambiguous.