Complexity of value is the thesis that human values have high Kolmogorov complexity; that our preferences, the things we care about, cannot be summed by a few simple rules, or compressed. Fragility of value is the thesis that losing even a small part of the rules that make up our values could lead to results that most of us would now consider as unacceptable (just like dialing nine out of ten phone digits correctly does not connect you to a person 90% similar to your friend). For example, all of our values except novelty might yield a future full of individuals replaying only one optimal experience through all eternity.

Related: Ethics & Metaethics, Fun Theory, Preference, Wireheading

Many human choices can be compressed, by representing them by simple rules - the desire to survive produces innumerable actions and subgoals as we fulfill that desire. But people don't just want to survive - although you can compress many human activities to that desire, you cannot compress all of human existence into it. The human equivalents of a utility function, our terminal values, contain many different elements that are not strictly reducible to one another. William Frankena offered this list of things which many cultures and people seem to value (for their own sake rather than strictly for their external consequences):

Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one's own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc.

The "etc." at the end is the tricky part, because there may be a great many values not included on this list.

Since natural selection reifies selection pressures as psychological drives which then continue to execute independently of any consequentialist reasoning in the organism or that organism explicitly representing, let alone caring about, the original evolutionary context, we have no reason to expect these terminal values to be r...

Value Drift