Now, a system which doesn’t satisfy the coherence conditions could still maximize some other kind of utility function—e.g. utility over whole trajectories, or some kind of discounted sum of utility at each time-step, rather than utility over end states. But that’s not very interesting, in general; any old system can be interpreted as maximizing some utility function over whole trajectories (i.e. the utility function which assigns high score to whatever the system actually does, and low score to everything else).
It’s probably not intended, but I think this wording vaguely implies a false dichotomy between “a thing (approximately) coherently pursues a long-term goal” and “an uninteresting thing like a rock”. There are other options like “Bob wants to eventually get out of debt, but Bob also wants to always act with honor and integrity”. See my post Consequentialism & Corrigibility.
Relatedly, I don’t think memetics is the only reason humans don’t approximately-coherently pursue states of the world in the distant future. (You didn’t say it was, but sorta gave that vibe.) For one thing, something can be pleasant or unpleasant right now. For another thing, the value function is defined and updated in conjunction with a flawed and incomplete world-model, as in your Pointers Problem post.
It’s probably not intended, but I think this wording vaguely implies a false dichotomy between “a thing (approximately) coherently pursues a long-term goal” and “an uninteresting thing like a rock”. There are other options like “Bob wants to eventually get out of debt, but Bob also wants to always act with honor and integrity”. See my post Consequentialism & Corrigibility.
Relatedly, I don’t think memetics is the only reason humans don’t approximately-coherently pursue states of the world in the distant future. (You didn’t say it was, but sorta gave that vibe.) For one thing, something can be pleasant or unpleasant right now. For another thing, the value function is defined and updated in conjunction with a flawed and incomplete world-model, as in your Pointers Problem post.