First, to clarify, I believe in moral realism. This means, that goodness(universe) is not actually up to me to define, it’s a quantity that exists even if I cease to exist. Of course, my perception of goodness(universe), and the heuristics that I use to approximate goodness(universe), can totally change, and it’s great if these change to being more accurate. But that’s not what this post is about. This post asks the question of can/should I change how I want to spend my life.
Before answering this question, we can address a simpler question:
Q: Does my “objective function” change over time?
A: Empirically, Yes.
The question of can I change my objective function is a bit more interesting. First, to even discuss this we have to agree that determinism is useless.
So, I can choose things — nice.
At this point I think the question of “can I change my objective function” becomes a bit confusing; luckily taboo resolves the confusion:
I definitely can try to expose myself to new data / world perspectives and be open to updating how I want to spend my life. For instance, maybe I ask a friend “what’s one of your best habits?” And they respond “I don’t eat things with high sugar content.” Then, if I decide that being healthy is valuable to me, this might cause me to update my “how I live my life” to avoid eating bad foods.
Of course, you could argue that this doesn’t really constitute a fundamental change in how I want to spend my life, but rather it represents a change in policies to better reflect how I want to spend my life based on an increased amount of data.
Q: Do I act to optimize my objective function?
A: Sometimes I fail to do so — this is called akrasia.
Anyways, framed like this, the answer to “should I change my objective function” becomes pretty clear: I should act to try to shape my objective function to be more good. For instance, I can do this by surrounding myself with good people, and exposing myself to good ideas. If I so desired, I could make my objective function worse, e.g., by doing things which cause me to forget my values. And that’s obviously pretty bad.