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timtyler comments on Against Discount Rates - Less Wrong
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To recap, I objected: "your brain can't handle those numbers". To avoid the huge numbers, they were replaced with "n" - and a bizarre story about an all-knowing being. If you go back to the numbers, we are back to the first objection again - there are some numbers that are too big for unmodified humans to handle. No, I can't tell you which numbers - but they are out there.
The grandparent is a reductio of your assertion (and thus, if you agree that "not-so-much-death is not so bad", a disproof). You seem to be questioning the validity of algebra rather than retracting the claim. Do you have a counterargument?
I'd suggest that you may be able to argue that the brain does not explicitly implement a utility function as such, which makes sense because utility functions are monstrously complex. Instead, the brain likely implements a bunch of heuristics and other methods of approximating / instantiating a set of desires that could hypothetically be modeled by a utility function (that is unbounded).
"your brain can't handle those numbers" wasn't "questioning the validity of algebra". It was questioning whether the human brain can represent - or even receive - the large numbers in question.
What you said was:
as though this were somehow an indictment of the argument.
Anyway, the important thing is: several people have already explained how a finite system can express an unbounded utility function without having to explicitly express numbers of unbounded size.
Dragging in Omega to represent the huge quantities for the human seems to have been a desperate move.
Well, that's OK - but the issue is what shape the human utility function is. You can't just extrapolate out to infinity from a small number of samples near to the origin!
I think there are limits to human happiness and pain - and whatever else you care to invoke as part of the human utility function - so there's actually a finite representation with bounded utility - and I think that it is the best approximation to what the brain is actually doing.