Like, why would I care so much whether experiences are instantiated in this piece of universe over here or that piece of universe over there, if there’s no real sense in which there is more of the experience if it is instantiated in one place than if it is instantiated in the other?
Under Tegmark’s MUH, there’s an infinite number of pieces of universe and each piece of universe is has infinite copies embedded in infinitely many other pieces of universe. It seems literally impossible to care about all pieces of universe equally, so something like a measure seems required in order to have preferences at all. If we move away from Linear Utility Hypothesis perhaps that opens up other alternatives, but what are they? If utility shouldn’t be the integral of some local utility function with respect to a measure, what should it be instead? Do you have any suggestions?
Human value is complicated. I can’t give any abstract constraints on what utility functions should look like that are anywhere near as restrictive as the linear utility hypothesis, and I expect anything along those lines that anyone can come up with will be wrong.
Under Tegmark’s MUH, there’s an infinite number of pieces of universe and each piece of universe is has infinite copies embedded in infinitely many other pieces of universe. It seems literally impossible to care about all pieces of universe equally, so something like a measure seems required in order to have preferences at all. If we move away from Linear Utility Hypothesis perhaps that opens up other alternatives, but what are they? If utility shouldn’t be the integral of some local utility function with respect to a measure, what should it be instead? Do you have any suggestions?
Human value is complicated. I can’t give any abstract constraints on what utility functions should look like that are anywhere near as restrictive as the linear utility hypothesis, and I expect anything along those lines that anyone can come up with will be wrong.