Comments on: Primary aims

By: George Mcmee

George Mcmee — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:02:57 +0000

I’m wondering if personal happiness as a single long term aim might not require the emotional and spiritual well being necessary to embrace it when the opportunity present itself. For example, if one is terrified of intimacy, finding personal happiness in a meaningful relationship may be both threatening and difficult. If meaningful relationships require an openness to intimacy, one terrified of intimacy may avoid such relationships at all costs. Instead, they might pursue “risk free” superficial relationships devoid of intimacy, but familiar and “safe.” An inability to find personal happiness in relationships leaves one with few other fruitful sources.

By: David Laban

David Laban — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:38:29 +0000

I wouldn’t bother reading the stuff associated with my post. It’s mainly just me getting to grips with Kant, which you’ve probably already done.

Holly says she’s getting me into Mills next. It’d say that my utility function approach looks a lot more like general “egoism” than specific “utilitarianism”, but I will have to read up on both if I want to convince anyone that utilitarianism isn’t what I mean.

If you wish to maximise the integral over all time of p(at least 1 thing similar to yourself existing at time t), then I think you would probably get utilitarian behaviour emerging as the best way to act. Now I just need to prove it.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:47:31 +0000

Your latter comment required moderation. Your former comment was just spam according to Akismet but I corrected it

Biologically, the “evolution utility function” is, unfortunately, the only real one. Life only exists to propagate itself – there’s no higher aim in a biological sense. However, since we *are* here anyway, and happen to have self-awareness, there’s no reason why we can’t layer other things on top.

I shall look over your discussion so far when I have a mo… probably not for a couple of weeks now, I’m afraid But “+5 insightful” on your first comment anyway, for putting something vaguely like what I rambled on about into a more specific mathematical format

By: David Laban

David Laban — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 12:20:06 +0000

*wonders whether your comments system requires moderation or if it’s just broken*

By: David Laban

David Laban — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 22:30:28 +0000

Okay, so the discussion of “meta-aims” (“utility functions and optimality”) is the direction we (Holly, Alex and myself) are heading in at the moment with our little romp in the philosophical countryside.

I think that all aims should be able to take the form “maximise E[u(world)]” where “world” is the state of the world at all times in the future, “u(world)” is your utility function and “E[.]” is the expectation operator.

One person’s utility function might be
u(world) = A*health + B*wealth + C*wisdom
and another might be
u(world) = E*sexual_activity + F*drug_intake + G*rockandroll_volume
(where rockandroll_volume is a real-valued number between 0 and 11)

I’m trying to think of the simplest possible utility function (preferably well-behaved/measurable). One of the ones that came out of our discussion was the evolution utility function u(world) = count(copies of yourself in the world) or similar, but I don’t think any of us really like that as the “meaning of life”.

For now, we’re looking at the question “There exists a utility function. Does it have to include the happiness of others in order to make us act morally?” I think the answer is “no”, but I’m waiting for Alex’s blog post on the subject.

If you feel like contributing, give us a shout.