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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Life Extension versus Replacement - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (98)
I'm not comfortable spending my time and mental resources on these utilitarian puzzles until I am shown a method (or even a good reason to believe there is such a method) for interpersonal utility comparison. If such a method has already been discussed on Less Wrong, I would appreciate a link to it. Otherwise, why engage in metaphysical speculation of this kind?
This is most obviously a problem for preference utilitarians. The same preference ordering can be represented by different utility functions, so it's not clear which one to pick.
But utilitarians needn't be preference utilitarians. They can instead maximize some other measure of quality of life. For example, lifetime hiccups would be easy to compare interpersonally.
And if utility can be any measure of quality of life, then interpersonal utility comparison isn't the sort of question you get to refuse to answer. Whenever you make a decision that affects multiple people, and you take their interests into account, you're implicitly doing an interpersonal utility comparison. It's not like you can tell reality it's philosophically mistaken in posing the dilemma.
I don't think this will work; it sweeps the difficult part under the rug. When you identify utility with a particular measure of welfare (for example, lifetime hiccups) there really is no good reason to think we all get the same amount of (dis)satisfaction for a single hiccup. Some would be extremely distressed by a hiccup, some would be only slightly bothered, and others will laugh because they think hiccups are funny.
If people actually do get different amount of (dis)satisfaction from the units of our chosen measure of welfare (which seems to me very likely), then even if we minimize (I'm assuming hiccups are supposed to be bad) the total (or average) number of lifetime hiccups between us, we still don't have very good reason to think that this state of affairs really provides the "the greatest amount of good for the greatest number" like Bentham and Mill were hoping for.
The assumption wasn't that minimizing hiccups maximizes satisfaction, but that it's hiccups rather than satisfaction that matters. Obviously we both agree this assumption is false. We seem to have some source of information telling us lifetime hiccups are the wrong utility function. Why not ask this source what is the right utility function?
We could settle this dispute on the basis of mere intuition if out intuitions didn't conflict so often. But they do, so we can't.
As a first rough approximation, one could compare fMRIs of people's pleasure or pain centers.
But no, I largely agree with you. If one chooses the numbers so that the average utility of both scenarios is the same, then I don't see any reason to prefer one to the other. If instead one is trying to make some practical claim, it seems clear that in the near future humanity overwhelmingly prefers making new life to researching life extension.
Hedons are not utilons. If they were, wireheading (or entering the experience machine) would be utility-maximizing.
Oh. Right.
In order for this to be true, it would have to be sustainable enough that the pleasure gain outweighs the potential pleasure loss from a possibly longer life without wireheading/experience machine.
For utilitarians, externalities of one person's wireheading affecting other lives would have to be considered as well.
Create an upload of Jayson Virissimo (for the purpose of getting more time to think).
Explain to him, in full detail, the mental states of two people.
Ask him how he would choose if he could either cause the first person to exist with probability p or the second person to exist with probability q, in terms of p and q.
At best, this is a meta-method, rather than a method for interpersonal utility comparisons, since I still don't know which method my uploaded-self would use when choosing between the alternatives.
At worst, this would only tell us how much utility my uploaded-self gets from (probably) causing a person to exist with a particular mental state and is not actually an interpersonal utility comparison between the two persons.
In some senses of "utility", your uploaded-self's utility rankings of "create person A" and "create person B" are strongly dependent on his estimates of how much A's life has utility for A, and B's has for B. At least if you have a typical level of empathy. But then, this just reinforces your meta-method point.
However ... dig deeper on empathy, and I think it will lead you to steven0461's point.
This is at least useful for creating thought experiments where different ideas have different observable consequences, showing that this isn't meaningless speculation.
We have reason to care about the definition of 'utility function' that is used to describe decisions, since those are, by definition, how we decide. Hedonic or preferential functions are only useful insofar as our decision utilities take them into account.