Good post. IIUC this applies only to interpersonal aggregation, and so if you can have unboundedly high utility in one individual, your utility function is not truly bounded, right? I.e., it would get you out of Pascal’s muggings of the form, “Pay me five dollars and I will create 3^^^3 happy copies of Alice” but not of the form “Pay me five dollars and I will create one copy of Alice and give her 3^^^3 utils.” (If it took this copy a very long time to experience 3^^^3 utils, something similar to your point would apply in that her experiences would start to overlap with her own and those of other beings, but suppose we can dial up intensity such that arbitrarily high amounts of value can be experienced in short periods of time.)
The post on why my utility function is bounded is hopefully coming out later this week, and it is in fact an independent point from what this post is talking about. Neither of those muggings sound like they would work. Alas, I don’t have all my thoughts written out right here right now, so you shall have to wait.
Good post. IIUC this applies only to interpersonal aggregation, and so if you can have unboundedly high utility in one individual, your utility function is not truly bounded, right? I.e., it would get you out of Pascal’s muggings of the form, “Pay me five dollars and I will create 3^^^3 happy copies of Alice” but not of the form “Pay me five dollars and I will create one copy of Alice and give her 3^^^3 utils.” (If it took this copy a very long time to experience 3^^^3 utils, something similar to your point would apply in that her experiences would start to overlap with her own and those of other beings, but suppose we can dial up intensity such that arbitrarily high amounts of value can be experienced in short periods of time.)
Here is the post I mentioned which responds to the question of bounded utility functions in much more detail.
Nice, just in time to inform my own Pascal’s wager post.
The post on why my utility function is bounded is hopefully coming out later this week, and it is in fact an independent point from what this post is talking about. Neither of those muggings sound like they would work. Alas, I don’t have all my thoughts written out right here right now, so you shall have to wait.