Being rational isn’t about your values, you can rationally pursue practially any goal. Epistemic rationality is a bit different—but I mosly ignore that as being unbiological.
Being moral isn’t really much of a constraint at all. Morality—and right and wrong—are normally with respect to a moral system—and unless a moral system is clearly specified, you can often argue all day about what is moral and what isn’t. Maybe some types of morality are more common than others—due to being favoured by the universe, or something like that—but any such context would need to be made plain in the discussion.
So, it seems (relatively) easy to make a temporal discounting agent that really values the present over the future—just stick a term for that in its ultimate values.
Are there any animals with ultimate temporal discounting? That is tricky, but it isn’t difficult to imagine natural selection hacking together animals that way. So: probably, yes.
Do I use ultimate temporal discounting? Not noticably—as far as I can tell. I care about the present more than the future, but my temporal discounting all looks instrumental to me. I don’t go in much for thinking about saving distant galaxies, though! I hope that further clarifies.
I should probably review around about now. Instead of that: IIRC, you want to wire temporal discounting into machines, so their preferences better match your own—whereas I tend to think that would be giving them your own nasty hangover.
Thx for the correction. It appears I need to strengthen my claim.
Not all discounting by rational, moral agents is instrumental.
Are we back in disagreement now? :)
No, we aren’t. In my book:
Being rational isn’t about your values, you can rationally pursue practially any goal. Epistemic rationality is a bit different—but I mosly ignore that as being unbiological.
Being moral isn’t really much of a constraint at all. Morality—and right and wrong—are normally with respect to a moral system—and unless a moral system is clearly specified, you can often argue all day about what is moral and what isn’t. Maybe some types of morality are more common than others—due to being favoured by the universe, or something like that—but any such context would need to be made plain in the discussion.
So, it seems (relatively) easy to make a temporal discounting agent that really values the present over the future—just stick a term for that in its ultimate values.
Are there any animals with ultimate temporal discounting? That is tricky, but it isn’t difficult to imagine natural selection hacking together animals that way. So: probably, yes.
Do I use ultimate temporal discounting? Not noticably—as far as I can tell. I care about the present more than the future, but my temporal discounting all looks instrumental to me. I don’t go in much for thinking about saving distant galaxies, though! I hope that further clarifies.
I should probably review around about now. Instead of that: IIRC, you want to wire temporal discounting into machines, so their preferences better match your own—whereas I tend to think that would be giving them your own nasty hangover.