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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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No. I'm software. My preferences stand even if you hypothetically implement me in silico.
No. Geez, can we drop the "utility functions" and all the other consequentialism debris for like a week sometime? It would be a welcome respite.
It's a terminal value. We have a convention of not having to answer "why" about those.
Utility functions describe your preferences. Their existence doesn't presuppose consequentialism, I don't think.
Utility functions are actually an extreme of consequentialism; they state that your actions should not just be based on consequences, but a weighted probability distribution over outcomes.
In that case, how could you be said to have preferences about outcomes without being a consequentialist?
Hmm... I think Eliezer might have overstated his case a little (for the lay audience). If you take a utility function to be normative with respect to your actions, it's not merely descriptive of your preferences, for some meanings of "preference" - not including, I would think, the definition Eliezer would use.
Using more ordinary language, a Kantian might have preferences about the outcomes of his actions, but doesn't think such preferences are the primary concern in what one ought to do.
Oh. Well, that's not a distinction that seems terribly important to me. I'm happy to talk about "preferences" as being (necessarily) causally related to one's actions.