Comment by Inadequately Uncivilized (john-millar) on The "Measuring Stick of Utility" Problem · 2022-05-26T04:46:01.636Z · LW · GW

If the rate of entropy generation was increasing within a physical system, wouldn't that indicate an optimization process. As the physical system went through a narrower and narrower band of state space, that would have to be the result of some optimizer.

 The utility function could be represented by the path that is taken through state space. Each next step would be higher in the optimizer's preferences, or it is "throwing away money". 

I do not know how to reverse engineer a utility function from a path through state space, though. (Could resources be represented by the amount of entropy your willing to generate to move from your current state to a different one?)