Neel_Krishnaswami comments on Torture vs. Dust Specks - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 October 2007 02:50AM

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Comment author: Neel_Krishnaswami 31 October 2007 07:04:00PM 2 points [-]

Eliezer, both you and Robin are assuming the additivity of utility. This is not justifiable, because it is false for any computationally feasible rational agent.

If you have a bounded amount of computation to make a decision, we can see that the number of distinctions a utility function can make is in turn bounded. Concretely, if you have N bits of memory, a utility function using that much memory can distinguish at most 2^N states. Obviously, this is not compatible with additivity of disutility, because by picking enough people you can identify more distinct states than the 2^N distinctions your computational process can make.

Now, the reason for adopting additivity comes from the intuition that 1) hurting two people is at least as bad as hurting one, and 2) that people are morally equal, so that it doesn't matter which people are hurt. Note that these intuitions mathematically only require that harm should be monotone in the number of people with dust specks in their eyes. Furthermore, this requirement is compatible with the finite computation requrements -- it implies that there is a finite number of specks beyond which disutility does not increase.

If we want to generalize away from the specific number N of bits we have available, we can take an order-theoretic viewpoint, and simply require that all increasing chains of utilities have limits. (As an aside, this idea lies at the heart of the denotational semantics of programming languages.) This forms a natural restriction on the domain of utility functions, corresponding to the idea that utility functions are bounded.