All of calebo's Comments + Replies

This is a good post. 

It would probably be better received if the substantive contents were detailed here and the link wasn't placed first.

3
Richard Y Chappell
1y
Thanks. To save time, I've gone the opposite route and just cut my very limited summary, in case it was giving a misleading impression. (I don't think the post itself contains anything controversial enough to make sense of the initial downvotes that were happening here...)

I've heard this view referred to as a time-slice view of personal identity before. 

Personal identity is tied to ordinary questions about the identity and persistence of ordinary objects.

So, you should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc. 

If that's true, then "personality, relationships, and ongoing projects" are also only things that exist at a time-slices. Plausibly, they don't exist at all since each necessarily exists through time. Either way, there'... (read more)

3
Holden Karnofsky
2y
I'm not following why "[I] should probably have the same set of persistence conditions (time-slice / constant replacement) for cups, computers, organisms, atoms etc." I don't have those persistence conditions for myself, in every possible sense - only in one particular important sense I pointed at in the post. I think there are coherent uses of the words "Holden Karnofsky" and the singular tense; you can think of them as pointing at a "set of selves" that has something important in common and has properties of its own as a set. What I'm rejecting is the idea that there is some "continuous consciousness" such that I should fear death when it's "interrupted," but not when it isn't. By a similar token, I think there are plenty of reasonable senses in which "my computer" is a single thing, and other senses in which my computer one day is different from my computer the next day. And same goes for my projects and relationships. In all of these cases, I could be upset if the future of such a thing is cut off entirely, but not if its physical instantiation is replaced with a functional duplicate.

I can't tell whether you are denying assumption 1 or 2.

4
Johannes_Treutlein
4y
I don't think Romeo even has to deny any of the assumptions. Harsanyi's result, derived from the three assumptions, is not enough to determine how to do intersubjective utility comparisons. It merely states that social welfare will be some linear combination of individual utilities. While this already greatly restricts the way in which utilities are aggregated, it does not specify which weights to use for this sum. Moreover, arguing that weights should be equal based on the veil of ignorance, as I believe Harsanyi does, is not sufficient, since utility functions are only determined up to affine transformations, which includes rescalings. (This point has been made in the literature as a criticism of preference utilitarianism, I believe.) So there seems to be no way to determine what equal weights should look like, without settling on a way to normalize utility functions, e.g., by range normalization or variance normalization. I think the debate about intersubjective utility comparisons comes in at the point where you ask how to normalize utility functions. Of course, if you are not using a kind of preference utilitarianism but instead just aggregate some quantities you believe to have an absolute scale—such as happiness and suffering—then you could argue that utility functions should just correspond to this one absolute scale, with the same scaling for everyone. Though I think this is also not a trivial argument—there are potentially different ways to get from this absolute scale or Axiology to behavior towards risky gambles, which in turn determine the utility functions.

Thanks for this.

Even if this argument is successful, there are debates over decision theory (evidential, causal, functional). Does an ideally rational agent intervene at the level of states, actions, or decision procedures?

If it's decision procedures, or something similar, functional decision theory can you get views that look quite close to Kantianism.

3
Johannes_Treutlein
4y
Just as a side note, Harsanyi's result is not directly applicable to a formal setup involving subjective uncertainty, such as Savage's or the Jeffrey-Bolker framework underlying evidential and causal decision theory. Though there are results for the Savage setup too, e.g., https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421173, and Caspar Oesterheld and I are working on a similar result for the Jeffrey Bolker framework. In this setup, to get useful results, the indifference Axiom can only be applied to a restricted class of propositions where everyone agrees on beliefs.

I'm glad y'all are thinking about this.