Yep, we’ve got pretty good evidence that our spacetime will have infinite 4D volume and, if you arranged happy lives uniformly across that volume, we’d have to say that the outcome is better than any outcome with merely finite total value. Nothing logically impossible there (even if it were practically impossible).
That said, assigning value “∞” to such an outcome is pretty crude and unhelpful. And what it means will depend entirely on how we’ve defined ∞ in our number system. So, what I think we should do in such a case is not say V equals such and such. Instead, ditch the value function when you’ve left the domain where it works. Instead, just deal with your set of possible outcomes, your lotteries (probability measures over that set), and a betterness relation which might sometimes follow a value function but might also extend to outcomes beyond the function’s domain. That’s what people tend to do in the infinite aggregation literature (including the social choice papers that consider infinite time horizons), and for good reason.
Yep, we’ve got pretty good evidence that our spacetime will have infinite 4D volume and, if you arranged happy lives uniformly across that volume, we’d have to say that the outcome is better than any outcome with merely finite total value. Nothing logically impossible there (even if it were practically impossible).
That said, assigning value “∞” to such an outcome is pretty crude and unhelpful. And what it means will depend entirely on how we’ve defined ∞ in our number system. So, what I think we should do in such a case is not say V equals such and such. Instead, ditch the value function when you’ve left the domain where it works. Instead, just deal with your set of possible outcomes, your lotteries (probability measures over that set), and a betterness relation which might sometimes follow a value function but might also extend to outcomes beyond the function’s domain. That’s what people tend to do in the infinite aggregation literature (including the social choice papers that consider infinite time horizons), and for good reason.