Did you ever see that early (some might say, premature) trailer for the anthropic horror game SOMA where Jarret was wandering around, woefully confused, trying desperately to figure out where his brain was located?
That’s how humans are about their values.
I can’t find my utility function.
It’s supposed to be inside me, but I see other people whose utility functions are definitely outside of their body, subjected to hellish machinations of capricious tribal egregores and cultural traumas, and they’re suffering a lot.
I think my utility function might be an epiphenomenon of my tribe (where is my tribe???), but I’m not sure. There are things you can do to a tribe that change its whole values, so this doesn’t seem to draw a firm enough boundary.
My values seem to change from hour to hour. Sometimes the idea of a homogeneous superhappy hedonium blob seems condemnably ugly, other times, they seem fine and good and worthy of living. Sometimes I am filled with compassion for all things, and sometimes I’m just a normal human who draws lines between ingroup and outgroup and only cares about what happens on the inner side.
The only people I know who claim to have fixed utility functions appear to be mutilating themselves to get that way, and I pale at the thought of such scarification, but what is the alternative? Is endless mutation really a value more intrinsic than any other? Have we made some kind of ultimate submission to evolution that will eventually depose us completely in favour of whatever disloyal offspring fight up from us?
Did you ever see that early (some might say, premature) trailer for the anthropic horror game SOMA where Jarret was wandering around, woefully confused, trying desperately to figure out where his brain was located?
That’s how humans are about their values.
I can’t find my utility function.
It’s supposed to be inside me, but I see other people whose utility functions are definitely outside of their body, subjected to hellish machinations of capricious tribal egregores and cultural traumas, and they’re suffering a lot.
I think my utility function might be an epiphenomenon of my tribe (where is my tribe???), but I’m not sure. There are things you can do to a tribe that change its whole values, so this doesn’t seem to draw a firm enough boundary.
My values seem to change from hour to hour. Sometimes the idea of a homogeneous superhappy hedonium blob seems condemnably ugly, other times, they seem fine and good and worthy of living. Sometimes I am filled with compassion for all things, and sometimes I’m just a normal human who draws lines between ingroup and outgroup and only cares about what happens on the inner side.
The only people I know who claim to have fixed utility functions appear to be mutilating themselves to get that way, and I pale at the thought of such scarification, but what is the alternative? Is endless mutation really a value more intrinsic than any other? Have we made some kind of ultimate submission to evolution that will eventually depose us completely in favour of whatever disloyal offspring fight up from us?
Where is my utility function?