I'm interested in values. Rationality is usually defined as something like an agent that tries to maximize its own utility function. But, humans, as far as I can tell, don't really have anything like "values" beside "stay alive, get immediatly satisfying sensory input".
This, afaict, results to lip servive to "greater good", when people just select some nice values that they signal they want to promote, when in reality they haven't done the math by which these selected "values" derive from these "stay alive"-like values. And so, their actions seem irrational, but only because they signal of having values they don't actually have or care about.
This probably boils down to finding something to protect, but overall this issue is really confusing.
So, I've been thinking about this for some time now, and here's what I've got:
First, the point here is to self-reflect to want what you really want. This presumably converges to some specific set of first degree desires for each one of us. However, now I'm a bit lost on what do we call "values", are they the set of first degree desires we have(not?), set of first degree desires we would reach after infinity of self-reflection, or set of first degree desires we know we want to have at any given time?
As far as I can tell, akrasia would be a subprob...
ITT we talk about whatever.