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Perplexed comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong
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Comments (163)
I think that it is possible for me to have unbounded utility, yet still to assign a rather small utility to every outcome in any world in which TimFreeman is God (and I am not).
The same applies to Omega. If I do, in fact, live in a universe in which an omnipotent maniac performs psychological experiments, then much of my joy in living is lost.
There is an implicit assumption in all of these mugging scenarios that the existence of an all-powerful mugger who can intervene at any time has no effect on relative cardinal utilities of outcomes. That assumption seems unjustified.
Taken care of in the OP's stipulations: as God he will change the universe to one in which he need not be. LCPW applies.
Ah! I missed that. Thx. But I'm really not all that happy living in a world where TimFreeman was God, either. I suppose that means that I am not a real consequentialist.
A consequentialist whose utility function's domain is world-histories instead of world-states is still a consequentialist...
That leaves me curious as to what extraneous information a non-consequentialist sneaks into the utility function's domain. The world's state and the history of that state strike me as all there is.
I think non-consequentialists as Wei Dai uses the term don't use utility functions.
Ah, yes. That works. Thanks.
They could focus on different information. A consequentialist discards information about virtue, a virtue theorist discards consequences.
Ok, but it seems to me that a virtue theorist must believe that information about virtue is a part of information about the state of the world. So does the consequentialist deny that all this virtue information is real information - information that can "pay rent" by generating correct anticipation of future experiences?
Odd, a few hours ago I thought I knew what a consequentialist was. But now I can't seem to understand the concept regardless of whether I accept or reject Wei_Dai's claim.
But if he was a god, you choice to not give him money wouldn't change it. To be immune to his argument means that the restriction of a generally unbounded utility to a subset of states with TF being a god is bounded, which is strange, although probably consistent.