Presumably other people will see and enjoy that artwork, so aesthetics in that case might be a form of morality (you care about other people enjoying art, even if you never see that art yourself).
On the other hand, if you desire the existence of an aesthetically beautiful* natural rock formation, even if it was on a lifeless planet that no one would ever visit, that might count as NN utility.
*Technically the rock formation wouldn’t be beautiful since something’s beauty is a property of the mind beholding it, not a property of the object. But then you could just steel man that statement to say you desire the existence of a rock formation that would be found beautiful by a mind beholding it, even if no mind ever beholds it.
Actually, my aesthetics seem to be based as much on very powerful and possibly baseless intuitions of “completeness” as they do about beauty.
Omega offers to create a dead universe containing a printout of all possible chess games, and a printout of all possible chess games minus n randomly selected ones; my absurdly strong preference for the former is unaffected by his stipulation that no agent will ever interact with said universe and that I myself will immediately forget the conversation. And I don’t even like chess.
Presumably other people will see and enjoy that artwork, so aesthetics in that case might be a form of morality (you care about other people enjoying art, even if you never see that art yourself).
On the other hand, if you desire the existence of an aesthetically beautiful* natural rock formation, even if it was on a lifeless planet that no one would ever visit, that might count as NN utility.
*Technically the rock formation wouldn’t be beautiful since something’s beauty is a property of the mind beholding it, not a property of the object. But then you could just steel man that statement to say you desire the existence of a rock formation that would be found beautiful by a mind beholding it, even if no mind ever beholds it.
Actually, my aesthetics seem to be based as much on very powerful and possibly baseless intuitions of “completeness” as they do about beauty.
Omega offers to create a dead universe containing a printout of all possible chess games, and a printout of all possible chess games minus n randomly selected ones; my absurdly strong preference for the former is unaffected by his stipulation that no agent will ever interact with said universe and that I myself will immediately forget the conversation. And I don’t even like chess.