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saturn comments on Post Your Utility Function - Less Wrong
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In practice, your definition of what "liking and respecting me" means -- i.e., what evidence you expect to see in the world of that -- is part of the map, not the territory.
Suppose, for example, that your friends really and truly like and respect you... but they have to beat you up and call you names, for some other reason. Does that match what you actually value? It's out there in the territory, after all.
That is, is merely knowing that they "like and respect you" enough? Or is that phrase really just a shorthand in your map for a set of behaviors and non-behaviors that you actually value?
Note that if you argue that, "if they really liked and respected me, they wouldn't do that", then you are now back to talking about your map of what that phrase means, as opposed to what someone else's map is.
System 2 thinking is very tricky this way -- it's prone to manipulating symbols as if they were the things they're merely pointing at, as though the map were the territory... when the only things that exist in its perceptual sphere are the labels on the map.
Most of the time, when we think we're talking about the territory, we're talking about the shapes on the map, but words aren't even the shapes on the map!
Utility is about the territory in the same sense that the map is about the territory; the map tells us the way the territory is, utility tells us the way we want the territory to be. Us non-wireheaders want an accurate map because it's the territory we care about.
Supposing utility is not about the territory but about the map, we get people who want nothing more than to sabotage their own mapmaking capabilities. If the territory is not what we care about, maintaining the correspondence of map to territory would be a pointless waste of effort. Wireheading would look like an unambiguously good idea, not just to some people but to everyone.
Conchis' example of wanting his friends to really like and respect him is correct. He may have failed to explicitly point out that he also has an unrelated preference for not being beaten up. He's also in the unfortunate position of valuing something he can't know about without using long chains of messy inductive inferences. But his values are still about the territory, and he wants his map to accurately reflect the territory because it's the territory he cares about.
I am only saying that the entire stack of concepts you have just mentioned exists only in your map.
Permit me to translate: supposing utility is not about the (portion of map labeled) territory but about the (portion of map labeled) map, we get people who want nothing more than to sabotage their own mapmaking capabilities.
Does that make it any clearer what I'm saying?
This is a "does the tree make a sound" argument, and I'm on the, "no it doesn't" side, due to using a definition of "sound" that means "the representation of audio waves within a human nervous system". You are on the "of course it makes a sound" side, because your definition of sound is "pressure waves in the air."
Make sense?
As far as I can tell, you're saying that there is no territory, or that the territory is irrelevant. In other words, solipsism. You've overcome the naive map/territory confusion, but only to wind up with a more sophisticated form of confusion.
This isn't a "does the tree make a sound" argument. It's more like a "dude... how do we even really know reality is really real" argument. Rationality is entirely pointless if all we're doing is manipulating completely arbitrary map-symbols. But in that case, why not leave us poor, deluded believers in reality to define the words "map", "territory", and "utility" the way we have always done?
No, general semantics. There's a difference.
Can you point out the difference?
Even though "this is not a pipe", the form of a depiction of a pipe is nevertheless highly constrained by the physical properties of actual pipes. Do you deny that? If not, how do you explain it?
I've been trying to be on the "it depends on your definition and my definition sits within the realm of acceptable definitions" side. Unfortunately, whether this is what you intend or not, most of your comments come across as though you're on the "it depends on the definition, and my (PJ's) defintion is right and yours is wrong" side, which is what seems to be getting people's backs up.
This confusion is dissolved in the post Disputing Definitions.
Which confusion? I didn't think I was confused. Now I'm confused about whether I'm confused. ;)
You mentioned this confusion as possibly playing a role in you and Eby talking past each other, the ambiguous use of the word "utility".
OK, cool. Now, given that we've already identified that, what does Disputing Definitions tell us that we don't already know?