Bob comes to agree that Alice likes ballet—likes it a lot. Alice comes to agree that Bob prefers nature to art. They don’t come to agree that art is better than nature, nor that nature is better than art. Because neither is true! “Better than” is a three-place predicate (taking an agent id as an argument). And the two agree on the propositions Better(Alice, ballet, Audubon) and Better(Bob, Audubon, ballet).
...if you assume that humans are actually compounds of elementary utility functions trying to reach some sort of equilibrium, how much of the usual heuristics, created for unified rational agents, are then effectively applicable to humans?
Assume that individual humans are compounds? That is not what I am suggesting in the above comment. I’m talking about real compound agents created either by bargaining among humans or by FAI engineers.
But the notion that the well-known less-than-perfect rationality of real humans might be usefully modeled by assuming they have a bunch of competing and collaborating agents within their heads is an interesting one which has not escaped my attention. And, if pressed, I can even provide an evolutionary psychology just-so-story explaining why natural selection might prefer to place multiple agents into a single head.
Bob comes to agree that Alice likes ballet—likes it a lot. Alice comes to agree that Bob prefers nature to art. They don’t come to agree that art is better than nature, nor that nature is better than art. Because neither is true! “Better than” is a three-place predicate (taking an agent id as an argument). And the two agree on the propositions Better(Alice, ballet, Audubon) and Better(Bob, Audubon, ballet).
Assume that individual humans are compounds? That is not what I am suggesting in the above comment. I’m talking about real compound agents created either by bargaining among humans or by FAI engineers.
But the notion that the well-known less-than-perfect rationality of real humans might be usefully modeled by assuming they have a bunch of competing and collaborating agents within their heads is an interesting one which has not escaped my attention. And, if pressed, I can even provide an evolutionary psychology just-so-story explaining why natural selection might prefer to place multiple agents into a single head.