Paul: It makes no sense to think of life as optimization of a utility function over three-dimensional slices that stays the same over all time, since there’s no end state we want and no fixed state we want the universe to be locked into; but we can talk about stable preferences over broad ranges of 3D states (e.g. ‘freedom good’), changing preferences over detailed 3D states (e.g. ‘I want to win this finite game’), or (most primitively, the way I like to think of it) stable (rather, timeless) preferences over detailed 4D histories of the universe.
Paul: It makes no sense to think of life as optimization of a utility function over three-dimensional slices that stays the same over all time, since there’s no end state we want and no fixed state we want the universe to be locked into; but we can talk about stable preferences over broad ranges of 3D states (e.g. ‘freedom good’), changing preferences over detailed 3D states (e.g. ‘I want to win this finite game’), or (most primitively, the way I like to think of it) stable (rather, timeless) preferences over detailed 4D histories of the universe.