WHAT IS THE UPPER LIMIT OF VALUE ? Anders Sandberg * Future of Humanity Institute University of Oxford Suite 1, Littlegate House 16/17 St. Ebbe’s Street, Oxford OX1 1PT anders.sandberg@philosophy.ox.ac.uk David Manheim * 1DaySooner Delaware, United States, davidmanheim@gmail.com January 27, 2021 ABSTRACT How much value can our decisions create? We argue that unless our current understanding of physics is wrong in fairly fundamental ways, there exists an upper limit of value relevant to our decisions. First, due to the speed of light and the definition and conception of economic growth, the limit to economic growth is a restrictive one. Additionally, a related far larger but still finite limit exists for value in a much broader sense due to the physics of information and the ability of physical beings to place value on outcomes. We discuss how this argument can handle lexicographic preferences, probabilities, and the implications for infinite ethics and ethical uncertainty. Keywords Value · Physics of Information · Ethics Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the Global Priorities Institute for highlighting these issues and hosting the conference where this paper was conceived, and to Will MacAskill for the presentation that prompted the paper. Thanks to Hilary Greaves, Toby Ord, and Anthony DiGiovanni, as well as to Adam Brown, Evan Ryan Gunter, and Scott Aaronson, for feedback on the philosophy and the physics, respectively. David Manheim also thanks the late George Koleszarik for initially pointing out Wei Dai’s related work in 2015, and an early discussion of related issues with Scott Garrabrant and others on asymptotic logical uncertainty, both of which informed much of his thinking in conceiving the paper. Thanks to Roman Yampolskiy for providing a quote for the paper. Finally, thanks to Selina Schlechter-Komparativ and Eli G. for proofreading and editing assistance. 1 Introduction The future of humanity contains seemingly limitless possibility, with implications for the value of our choices in the short term. Ethics discusses those choices, and for consequentialists in particular, infinities have worrying ethical implications. Bostrom [1] and others have asked questions, for example, about how aggregative consequentialist theories can deal with infinities. Others have expanded the questions still further, including measure problems in cosmology, and related issues in infinite computable or even noncomputable universes in a multiverse. In this paper, we will argue that "limitless" and "infinite" when used to describe value or the moral importance of our decisions can only be hyperbolic, rather than exact descriptions. Our physical universe is bounded, both physically 1 and in terms of possibility. Furthermore, this finite limit is true both in the near term, and in the indefinite future. To discuss this, we restrict ourselves to a relatively prosaic setting, and for at least this paper, we restrict our interests to a single universe that obeys the laws of physics as currently (partially) understood. In this understanding, the light-speed * The authors contributed equally in the conception and preparation of the paper. 1 While cosmology debates some aspects of whether the universe is finite, as we note in the appendix, the various suggested possibilities still admit that the reachable universe is finite. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by PhilPapers