This discussion has made me feel I don’t understand what “utilon” really means. Hedons are easy: clearly happiness and pleasure exist, so we can try to measure them. But what are utilons?
“Whatever we maximize”? But we’re not rational, quite inefficient, and whatever we actually maximize as we are today probably includes a lot of pain and failures and isn’t something we consciously want.
“Whatever we self-report as maximizing”? Most of the time this is very different from what we actually try to maximize in practice, because self-reporting is signaling. And for a lot of people it includes plans or goals that, when achieved, are likely (or even intended) to change their top-level goals drastically.
“If we are asked to choose between two futures, and we prefer one, that one is said to be of higher utility.” That’s a definition, yes, but it doesn’t really prove that the collection-of-preferred-universes can be described any more easily than the real decision function of which utilons are supposed to be a simplification. For instance, what if by minor and apparently irrelevant changes in the present, I can heavily influence all of people’s preferences for the future?
Also a note on the post:
Akrasia is what happens when we maximize our hedons at the expense of our utilons.
That definition feels too broad to me. Typically akrasia has two further atttributes:
Improper time discounting: we don’t spend an hour a day exercising even though we believe it would make us lose weight, with a huge hedonic payoff if you maximize hedons over a time horizon of a year.
Feeling so bad due to not doing the necessary task that we don’t really enjoy ourselves no matter what we do instead (and frequently leading to doing nothing for long periods of time). Hedonically, even doing the homework usually feels a lot better (after the first ten minutes) than putting it off, and we know this from experience—but we just can’t get started!
This discussion has made me feel I don’t understand what “utilon” really means.
I agree that the OP is somewhat ambiguous on this. For my own part, I distinguish between at least the following four categories of things-that-people-might-call-a-utility-function. Each involves a mapping from world histories into the reals according to:
how the history affects our mind/emotional states;
how we value the history from a self-regarding perspective (“for our own sake”);
how we value the history from an impartial (moral) perspective; or
the choices we would actually make between different world histories (or gambles over world histories).
Hedons are clearly the output of the first mapping. My best guess is that the OP is defining utilons as something like the output of 3, but it may be a broader definition that could also encompass the output of 2, or it could be 4 instead.
I guess that part of the point of rationality is to get the output of 4 to correspond more closely to the output of either 2 or 3 (or maybe something in between): that is to help us act in greater accordance with our values—in either the self-regarding or impartial sense of the term.
“Values” are still a bit of a black box here though, and it’s not entirely clear how to cash them out. I don’t think we want to reduce them either to actual choices or simply to stated values. Believed values might come closer, but I think we probably still want to allow that we could be mistaken about them.
What’s the difference between 1 and 2? If we’re being selfish then surely we just want to experience the most pleasurable emotional states. I would read “values” as an individual strategy for achieving this. Then, being unselfish is valuing the emotional states of everyone equally…
…so long as they are capable of experiencing equally pleasurable emotions, which may be untestable.
Note: just re-read OP, and I’m thinking about integrating over instantaneous hedons/utilons in time and then maximising the integral, which it didn’t seem like the OP did.
We can value more than just our emotional states. The experience machine is the classic thought experiment designed to demonstrate this. Another example that was discussed a lot here recently was the possibility that we could value not being deceived.
That definition feels too broad to me. Typically akrasia has two further atttributes:
Improper time discounting: we don’t spend an hour a day exercising even though we believe it would make us lose weight, with a huge hedonic payoff if you maximize hedons over a time horizon of a year.
Feeling so bad due to not doing the necessary task that we don’t really enjoy ourselves no matter what we do instead (and frequently leading to doing nothing for long periods of time). Hedonically, even doing the homework usually feels a lot better (after the first ten minutes) than putting it off, and we know this from experience—but we just can’t get started!
Which is why it’s pretty blatantly obvious that humans aren’t utility maximizers on our native hardware. We’re not even contextual utility maximizers; we’re state-dependent error minimizers, where what errors we’re trying to minimize are based heavily on short-term priming and longer-term time-decayed perceptual averages like “how much relaxation time I’ve had” or “how much i’ve gotten done lately”.
Consciously and rationally, we can argue we ought to maximize utility, but our behavior and emotions are still controlled by the error-minimizing hardware, to the extent that it motivates all sorts of bizarre rationalizations about utility, trying to force the consciously-appealing idea of utility maximization to contort itself enough to not too badly violate our error-minimizing intuitions. (That is, if we weren’t error-minimizers, we wouldn’t feel the need to reduce the difference between our intuitive notions of morality, etc. and our more “logical” inclinations.)
It would be easier to discuss about them if we knew exactly what they can mean, that is, in a more precise way than just by the “unit of utility” definition. For example, how to handle them through time?
So why not defining them with something like that :
Suppose we could precisely measure the level of instant happiness of a person on a linear scale between 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst pain imaginable and 10 the best of climaxes. This level is constantly varying, for everybody.
In this context, one utilon could be the value of an action that is increasing the level of happiness of a person by one, on this scale, during one hour.
Then, for example, if you help an old lady to cross the road, making her a bit happier during the next hour (let’s say she would have been around 6⁄10 happy but thanks to you she will be 6,5⁄10 happy during this hour), then your action has a utility of one half of a utilon. You just created 0.5 utilon, and it’s a definitely valid statement, isn’t that great?
Using that, a hedon is nothing more than a utilon that we create by raising our own happiness.
What you describe are hedons. It’s misleading to call them utilons. For rational (not human) agents, utilons are the value units of a utility function which they try to maximize. But humans don’t try to maximize hedons, so hedons are not human-utilons.
Then would you agree that any utility function should, in the end, maximize hedons (if we were rational agents, that is) ?
If yes, that would mean that hedons are the goal and utilons are a tool, a sub-goal, which doesn’t seem to be what OP was saying.
No, of course not. There’s nothing that a utility function should maximize, regardless of the agent’s rationality. Goal choice is arational; rationality has nothing to do with hedons. First you choose goals, which may or may not be hedons, and then you rationally pursue them.
This is best demonstrated by forcibly separating hedon-maximizing from most other goals. Take a wirehead (someone with a wire into their “pleasure center” controlled by a thumb switch). A wirehead is as happy as possible (barring changes to neurocognitive architecture), but they don’t seek any other goals, ever. They just sit there pressing the button until they die. (In experiments with mice, the mice wouldn’t take time off from pressing the button even to eat or drink, and died from thirst. IIRC this went on happening even when the system was turned off and the trigger no longer did anything.)
Short of the wireheading state, noone is truly hedon-maximizing. It wouldn’t make any sense to say that we “should” be.
Wireheads aren’t truly hedon-maximizing either. If they were, they’d eat and drink enough to live as long as possible and push the button a greater total number of times.
They are hedon-maximizing, but with a very short time horizon of a few seconds.
If we prefer time horizons as long as possible, then we can conclude that hedon-maximizing implies first researching the technology for medical immortality, then building an army of self-maintaining robot caretakers, and only then starting to hit the wirehead switch.
Of course this is all tongue in cheek. I realize that wireheads (at today’s level of technology) aren’t maximizing hedons; they’re broken minds. When the button stops working, they don’t stop pushing it. Adaptation executers in an induced failure mode.
It depends on your discount function: if its integral is finite over an infinite period of time (e.g. in case of exponential discount) then it will depend on the effort of reaching immortality whether you will go that route or just dedicate yourself to momentary bliss.
This discussion has made me feel I don’t understand what “utilon” really means. Hedons are easy: clearly happiness and pleasure exist, so we can try to measure them. But what are utilons?
“Whatever we maximize”? But we’re not rational, quite inefficient, and whatever we actually maximize as we are today probably includes a lot of pain and failures and isn’t something we consciously want.
“Whatever we self-report as maximizing”? Most of the time this is very different from what we actually try to maximize in practice, because self-reporting is signaling. And for a lot of people it includes plans or goals that, when achieved, are likely (or even intended) to change their top-level goals drastically.
“If we are asked to choose between two futures, and we prefer one, that one is said to be of higher utility.” That’s a definition, yes, but it doesn’t really prove that the collection-of-preferred-universes can be described any more easily than the real decision function of which utilons are supposed to be a simplification. For instance, what if by minor and apparently irrelevant changes in the present, I can heavily influence all of people’s preferences for the future?
Also a note on the post:
That definition feels too broad to me. Typically akrasia has two further atttributes:
Improper time discounting: we don’t spend an hour a day exercising even though we believe it would make us lose weight, with a huge hedonic payoff if you maximize hedons over a time horizon of a year.
Feeling so bad due to not doing the necessary task that we don’t really enjoy ourselves no matter what we do instead (and frequently leading to doing nothing for long periods of time). Hedonically, even doing the homework usually feels a lot better (after the first ten minutes) than putting it off, and we know this from experience—but we just can’t get started!
I agree that the OP is somewhat ambiguous on this. For my own part, I distinguish between at least the following four categories of things-that-people-might-call-a-utility-function. Each involves a mapping from world histories into the reals according to:
how the history affects our mind/emotional states;
how we value the history from a self-regarding perspective (“for our own sake”);
how we value the history from an impartial (moral) perspective; or
the choices we would actually make between different world histories (or gambles over world histories).
Hedons are clearly the output of the first mapping. My best guess is that the OP is defining utilons as something like the output of 3, but it may be a broader definition that could also encompass the output of 2, or it could be 4 instead.
I guess that part of the point of rationality is to get the output of 4 to correspond more closely to the output of either 2 or 3 (or maybe something in between): that is to help us act in greater accordance with our values—in either the self-regarding or impartial sense of the term.
“Values” are still a bit of a black box here though, and it’s not entirely clear how to cash them out. I don’t think we want to reduce them either to actual choices or simply to stated values. Believed values might come closer, but I think we probably still want to allow that we could be mistaken about them.
What’s the difference between 1 and 2? If we’re being selfish then surely we just want to experience the most pleasurable emotional states. I would read “values” as an individual strategy for achieving this. Then, being unselfish is valuing the emotional states of everyone equally… …so long as they are capable of experiencing equally pleasurable emotions, which may be untestable.
Note: just re-read OP, and I’m thinking about integrating over instantaneous hedons/utilons in time and then maximising the integral, which it didn’t seem like the OP did.
We can value more than just our emotional states. The experience machine is the classic thought experiment designed to demonstrate this. Another example that was discussed a lot here recently was the possibility that we could value not being deceived.
Which is why it’s pretty blatantly obvious that humans aren’t utility maximizers on our native hardware. We’re not even contextual utility maximizers; we’re state-dependent error minimizers, where what errors we’re trying to minimize are based heavily on short-term priming and longer-term time-decayed perceptual averages like “how much relaxation time I’ve had” or “how much i’ve gotten done lately”.
Consciously and rationally, we can argue we ought to maximize utility, but our behavior and emotions are still controlled by the error-minimizing hardware, to the extent that it motivates all sorts of bizarre rationalizations about utility, trying to force the consciously-appealing idea of utility maximization to contort itself enough to not too badly violate our error-minimizing intuitions. (That is, if we weren’t error-minimizers, we wouldn’t feel the need to reduce the difference between our intuitive notions of morality, etc. and our more “logical” inclinations.)
Then, can you tell me what utility is? What is it that I ought to maximize? (As I expanded on in my toplevel comment)
Something that people argue they ought to maximize, but have trouble precisely defining. ;-)
Has anybody ever proposed a way to value utilons?
It would be easier to discuss about them if we knew exactly what they can mean, that is, in a more precise way than just by the “unit of utility” definition. For example, how to handle them through time?
So why not defining them with something like that :
Suppose we could precisely measure the level of instant happiness of a person on a linear scale between 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst pain imaginable and 10 the best of climaxes. This level is constantly varying, for everybody. In this context, one utilon could be the value of an action that is increasing the level of happiness of a person by one, on this scale, during one hour.
Then, for example, if you help an old lady to cross the road, making her a bit happier during the next hour (let’s say she would have been around 6⁄10 happy but thanks to you she will be 6,5⁄10 happy during this hour), then your action has a utility of one half of a utilon. You just created 0.5 utilon, and it’s a definitely valid statement, isn’t that great?
Using that, a hedon is nothing more than a utilon that we create by raising our own happiness.
What you describe are hedons. It’s misleading to call them utilons. For rational (not human) agents, utilons are the value units of a utility function which they try to maximize. But humans don’t try to maximize hedons, so hedons are not human-utilons.
Then would you agree that any utility function should, in the end, maximize hedons (if we were rational agents, that is) ? If yes, that would mean that hedons are the goal and utilons are a tool, a sub-goal, which doesn’t seem to be what OP was saying.
No, of course not. There’s nothing that a utility function should maximize, regardless of the agent’s rationality. Goal choice is arational; rationality has nothing to do with hedons. First you choose goals, which may or may not be hedons, and then you rationally pursue them.
This is best demonstrated by forcibly separating hedon-maximizing from most other goals. Take a wirehead (someone with a wire into their “pleasure center” controlled by a thumb switch). A wirehead is as happy as possible (barring changes to neurocognitive architecture), but they don’t seek any other goals, ever. They just sit there pressing the button until they die. (In experiments with mice, the mice wouldn’t take time off from pressing the button even to eat or drink, and died from thirst. IIRC this went on happening even when the system was turned off and the trigger no longer did anything.)
Short of the wireheading state, noone is truly hedon-maximizing. It wouldn’t make any sense to say that we “should” be.
Wireheads aren’t truly hedon-maximizing either. If they were, they’d eat and drink enough to live as long as possible and push the button a greater total number of times.
They are hedon-maximizing, but with a very short time horizon of a few seconds.
If we prefer time horizons as long as possible, then we can conclude that hedon-maximizing implies first researching the technology for medical immortality, then building an army of self-maintaining robot caretakers, and only then starting to hit the wirehead switch.
Of course this is all tongue in cheek. I realize that wireheads (at today’s level of technology) aren’t maximizing hedons; they’re broken minds. When the button stops working, they don’t stop pushing it. Adaptation executers in an induced failure mode.
It depends on your discount function: if its integral is finite over an infinite period of time (e.g. in case of exponential discount) then it will depend on the effort of reaching immortality whether you will go that route or just dedicate yourself to momentary bliss.