rob brown writes: == So...lets see....I want to quantify this. Since you are saying net utilities are numerical values, and that it might make sense to say "I like A ten percent more than B"....what exactly does that 10 percent represent?
I imagine your calculations must be measuring the quantities of seratonin or dopamine in their brains or something? Because if not, whether it is linear or logarithmic is not quantifiable, nor is their baseline. It's like saying one day is 10% hotter than another day. No makie sense. == but say that i tell you something about 3 temperatures, X, Y, and Z, such as: (X-Y)/(Y-Z) = 1.1 in other words, the difference between temperature X and Y is 10% more than the difference between Y and Z. and if you look at the utility efficiency numbers at http://rangevoting.org/vsi.html you'll see that we have scaled everything relative to X and Y, where X is "social utility maximizer" and Y is "expected result from random non-democratic selection". * * * this was all explained in links that i have sent to you dozens of times, like the one above. and it doesn't really matter which neurotransmitters are responsible for utility, or how it works internally. the point is that we know it exists. a very simple economic concept called "revealed preference" demonstrates this. it works like this. say you prefer apples to oranges to bananas. i give you a guarantee of having to eat an orange, or a 50/50 chance of having to eat an apple or a banana. if utility_apple-utility_orange is less than utility_orange-utility_banana, then you'll choose the orange - because you like it more than the average of the other two fruits. but say we change those odds to 60/40. well, then you have to ask whether orange- banana is at least 60% as much as apple-banana. if so, stick with orange, otherwise take the gamble. by offering you enough different options, we can force you to reveal your true magnitude of preference (unless you get more utility out of lying to us about your preference than you do out of the fruit outcome, but that is obviously besides the point). so it's clear that utility exists, and has levels of intensity that are empirical reality. regardless of what brain activity is behind it all, you arrive at your relative estimation of the values of different outcomes. we don't need to understand neurology to study it's effect. CLAY
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