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conchis comments on Post Your Utility Function - Less Wrong
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It's possible that the confusion here is (yet again) due to people using the word utility to mean different things. If PJ is using utility to refer to, e.g. an emotional or cognitive state, then he's right that our utility cannot respond directly to the territory. But broader notions of utility, well-being, and preference are possible, and nothing PJ has said is especially relevant to whether they are coherent or not.
Ah, right. Good call.
Right. I don't dabble in discussing those broader notions, though, since they can't be empirically grounded. How can you test a concept of utility that's not grounded in human perception and emotion? What good can it ever do you if you can't connect it back to actual living people?
I consider such discussions to be much more irrational than, say, talk of "The Secret", which at least offers an empirical procedure that can be tested. ;-)
(In fairness, I do consider such discussions here on LW to be far less annoying than most discussions of the Secret and suchlike!)
These notions are about what it means for something to be good for "actual living people". They're difficult, if not impossible to "test" (about the best testing procedures we've come up with is thought experiments, which as discussed elsewhere are riddled with all sorts of problems). But it's not like you can "test" the idea that positive emotions are good for you either.
I thought this was well established scientifically, if by "good for you", you mean health, persistence, or success in general. (see e.g. Seligman)
The argument is precisely about what "good for you" means, so this would be assuming the conclusion that needs to be established.
Ow. That makes my head hurt. (See, that's why I try not to get into these discussions!)
(I'm hard pressed, though, to conceive of a moral philosophy where improved health would not be considered "good for you".)
Preference utilitarianism applied to someone who thinks that it is only through suffering that life can achieve meaning.
To be clear, I don't subscribe to such a view myself, but it's conceivable. I agree with you that health is good for people. My point is just that this agreement owes more to shared intuition than conclusive empirical testing.
Yes, but now we're back to concrete feelings of actual people again. ;-)
Right, which is one reason why, when we're talking about this particular tiny (but important) domain (that at least partially overlaps with Eliezer's notion of Fun Theory), conclusive empirical testing is a bit of a red herring, since the matter is subjective from the get-go. We can objectively predict certain classes of subjective events, but the subjectivity itself seems to be beyond that. At some point, you have to make an essentially arbitrary decision of what to value.