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DanielLC comments on Does the Utility Function Halt? - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: OrphanWilde 28 January 2015 04:08AM

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Comment author: DanielLC 28 January 2015 07:57:48AM 2 points [-]

A utility function is a function, not a program. You could talk about whether or not it's computable. Since you can find a utility function by randomly putting the agent into various universes and seeing what happens, it's computable.

Comment author: solipsist 28 January 2015 03:30:25PM *  2 points [-]
  1. Some utility functions can be found by randomly putting agents into various universes and seeing what happens
  2. The universe is computable.
  3. Therefore, all utility functions are computable.

3 does not follow from 1 and 2.

Comment author: DanielLC 28 January 2015 08:27:04PM 0 points [-]

Some utility functions can be found by randomly putting agents into various universes and seeing what happens

Implicit utility functions can. Explicit utility functions could not be computable, in the sense that you can go around saying that you want to put rocks into piles of sizes corresponding to programs that never halt, but what you'll actually be doing is putting them into sizes corresponding to programs that you think will never halt (either ones that provably don't, or possibly ones that pass some heuristic).

Comment author: CalmCanary 28 January 2015 03:13:37PM 2 points [-]

OrphanWilde appears to be talking about morality, not decision theory. The moral Utility Function of utilitarianism is not necessarily the decision-theoretic utility function of any agent, unless you happen to have a morally perfect agent lying around, so your procedure would not work.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 January 2015 01:53:08PM 1 point [-]

Since you can find a utility function by randomly putting the agent into various universes and seeing what happens, it's computable.

Empirically determinable and computable are not the same thing. For example, consider the hypothetical of the Halting problem encoded in the digits of the fine structure constant.