Cognitive Thrift 49 – Cognitive Evolutionary Game Theory 2
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That leads into something. You noted in off-recording talks about something called cognitive evolutionary game theory. It might tie in these ideas.
Rick Rosner: Cognitive evolutionary game theory is – there is game theory over time, which is the game evolution is involved in helping us develop our brains. Then there is game theory when applied within the lives of individual organisms.
So, two different applications of game theory. One is we are the successful outcome of random bets made by evolution, which doesn’t care about the outcome that provides pressure to fill niches that increase cognitive ability. Cognitive ability would lead to a successful organism.
And then, for individual organisms, it’s the gambles we make when we think or choose not to think to extent that we can just go off of rules that are well-established. We’ll come up with a better definition for that.
Evolutionary game and then we can narrow in on how it applies to cognition, where at some point in our history. Some point in – at some point in the history of primates it became possible for big brains to exist.
I have no idea how easy that was evolutionarily, was it just a couple of genes that shifted around and brains got bigger and bigger, probably not because it was a gradual thing or millions of year – 4 or 5 million years or more if you want to go from lemur-like tree dwelling things or proto chimpanzees or whatever, but the push for bigger brains.
Bigger brains look as though it was a successful enough niche-occupying aid or benefit that there was steady pressure for bigger brains for millions of years and that we had whatever is in our genetic makeup was able to provide mutations and changes and support of that pressure.
There’s probably stuff in evolution that there is a push to occupy niches, but just that our genetics and mechanical makeups don’t make it easy for those things to evolve.
Brains can evolve, but you never – you hardly ever seen wheels evolve, people say. There’s no large animal that gets around by naturally evolved wheels.
But we were able to evolve bigger and bigger brains, which indicates that bigger brains are helpful in exploiting niches. Commonsensically, we understand how that might work. Smart animals are better at understanding and exploiting their environments.
In order to understand the world, you need to perceive the world. So along with bigger brains, we have at least held onto much of our perceptual abilities. People say that when humans and dogs got together dogs became domesticated.
Humans lost much of their ability to think and deferring to humans’ ability to think and humans lost their ability to differentiate odors, deferring to dogs’ sense of smell. I don’t know how accurate that is. We’re talking about only 10-15,000 years ago.
But if you lot at the diversification of dog breeds, a lot can happen in thousands of years. We have highly – some of our senses are highly developed. We have big eyes, decent ears, and we have a lot of mental hardware to differentiate the sensory information that we are taking in.
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