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Manfred comments on Open thread, Aug. 03 - Aug. 09, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 03 August 2015 07:05AM

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Comment author: DataPacRat 04 August 2015 02:21:10AM 0 points [-]

Cardinal numbers for utilons?

I have a hunch.

Trying to add up utilons or hedons can quickly lead to all sorts of problems, which are probably already familiar to you. However, there are all sorts of wacky and wonderful branches of non-intuitive mathematics, which may prove of more use than elementary addition. I half-remember that regular math can be treated as part of set theory, and there are various branches of set theory which can have some, but not all, of the properties of regular math - for example, being able to say that X < Y, but not necessarily that X+Z > Y. A bit of Wikipedia digging has reminded me of Cardinal numbers, which seem at least a step in the right direction: If the elements of set X has a one-to-one correspondence with the elements of set Y, then they're equal, and if not, then they're not. This seems to be a closer approximation of utilons than the natural numbers, such as, say, if the elements of set X being the reasons that X is good.

But I could be wrong.

I'm already well past the part of math-stuff that I understand well; I'd need to do a good bit of reading just to get my feet back under me. Does anyone here, more mathematically-inclined than I, have a better intuition of why this approach may or may not be helpful?

(I'm asking because I'm considering throwing in someone who tries to follow a cardinal-utilon-based theory of ethics in something I'm writing, as a novel change from the more commonly-presented ethical theories. But to do that, I'd need to know at least a few of the consequences of this approach might end up being. Any help would be greatly appreciated.)

Comment author: Manfred 04 August 2015 04:14:15AM 2 points [-]

I think the most mathy (and thus, best :P) way to go about this is to think of the properties that these "utility" objects have, and just define them as objects with those properties.

For starters, you can compare them for size - The relationship is either bigger, or smaller, or the same. And you can do an operation to them that is a weighted sum - if you have two utilities that are different, you can do this operation to them and get a utility that's in between them, with a third parameter (the probability of one versus the other) distinguishing between different applications of this operation.

Actually, I think this sort of thing is pretty much what Savage did.