I’m pretty confused by your comment. Surely there are arguments other than wastefulness for not having cycles in one’s terminal/intrinsic values? Like if I prefer to tile the universe with qualia A more than qualia B, and prefer B to C, and C to A, how do I actually make the decision of what qualia to tile the universe with?
Like if I prefer to tile the universe with qualia A more than qualia B, and prefer B to C, and C to A, how do I actually make the decision of what qualia to tile the universe with?
I’m not sure what “prefer” means here. If it means “often, when having A, I then choose to go to B”, then what I’m saying is that this could be a valid terminal values: You could want to cycle around between the 3 qualia. My guess is that on further reflection (which I haven’t done fully), this won’t just seem like a nitpick, but will seem pretty fundamentally important to understand about values. I’m also saying something like, (some of?) the axioms in the VNM theorem are only compelling if you assume that you shouldn’t be wasteful in certain ways, but that if you allow certain kinds of “waste” to be a valid utility function, then the axioms are less compelling.
I’m pretty confused by your comment. Surely there are arguments other than wastefulness for not having cycles in one’s terminal/intrinsic values? Like if I prefer to tile the universe with qualia A more than qualia B, and prefer B to C, and C to A, how do I actually make the decision of what qualia to tile the universe with?
I’m not sure what “prefer” means here. If it means “often, when having A, I then choose to go to B”, then what I’m saying is that this could be a valid terminal values: You could want to cycle around between the 3 qualia. My guess is that on further reflection (which I haven’t done fully), this won’t just seem like a nitpick, but will seem pretty fundamentally important to understand about values. I’m also saying something like, (some of?) the axioms in the VNM theorem are only compelling if you assume that you shouldn’t be wasteful in certain ways, but that if you allow certain kinds of “waste” to be a valid utility function, then the axioms are less compelling.
(Maybe cf. https://tsvibt.blogspot.com/2022/12/ultimate-ends-may-be-easily-hidable.html though I forget if there’s actually a connection.)