Hm...it sounds like we agree on far more than I thought, then.
What I am saying is that my utility function is bounded because it would be ridiculous to be Pascal's mugged, even in the hypothetical universe I created that disobeys komponisto's priors. Put another way, I am simply not willing to seriously consider events at probabilities of, say, 10^(-10^(100)), because such events don't happen. For this same reason, I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who claims to have an unbounded utility function, because they would then care about events that can't happen in a sense at least as strong as the sense that 1 is not equal to 2.
Would you object to anything in the above paragraph? Thanks for bearing with me on this, by the way.
P.S. Am I the only one who is always tempted to write "mugged by Pascal" before realizing that this is comically different from being "Pascal's mugged"?
Put another way, I am simply not willing to seriously consider events at probabilities of, say, 10^(-10^(100)), because such events don't happen.
As far as I know they do happen. To know that such a number cannot represent an altogether esoteric feature of the universe that can nevertheless be the legitimate subject of infinite value I would need to know the smallest number that can be assigned to a quantum state.
(This objection is purely tangential. See below for significant disagreement.)
...I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who claims to have
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?