Cognitive Thrift 67 – Sets
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/04/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re talking about meta-game theory as applied to cognitive thrift. If we want to define this in more formal terms, we can define this as sets and elements with the elements as individual organisms and meta-game theory including sets with greater than one element and the payoff matrices between 2 or more sets – where sets can be groups or species.
Rick Rosner: What you’re calling meta-game theory is game theory applied to multiple groups or more complicated situations with, I guess, averaging across groups, what groups do rather than large numbers of individuals do in some instances. Anyway, it’s more complicated game theory.
One thing that evolution has revealed is that there is more than one successful general strategy as far as thought goes and half of the organisms on the planet have no brains and do no thinking, and they’re very successful.
People misunderstand evolution. Among the misunderstandings that people have about evolution is that evolution proceeds in the direction of increasing complexity, which is not exactly what happens.
Evolution having no agenda wanders randomly from a base of zero, no life. Life originates. It’s going to be pretty simple because it’s the first kind of life. In terms of complexity, over the next 4 billion years, species wander all over the place. Some becoming more complex.
Some becoming less complex. Some becoming stable. As new species arise, they can go in any possible direction and one of the directions is towards increasing complexity, and so over billions of years the niches that require increasing complexity get occupied.
Other niches that don’t require that kind of complexity mostly stay occupied. We still have relatively simple forms of life. It is not a march towards complexity. It is a random march in all sorts of directions, which continues to order proof that there are various strategies that lead to successful species because there are all these niches that require anything from zero thought on the part of viruses -there’s so much stuff that viruses don’t have including neurons.
Things like starfish, which are fairly large organisms that I don’t think have brains, but which are a successful species.
So, if you want to move onto groups of humans, I live in LA. So I get jealous when I see somebody in traffic who is obviously succeeding because they are obviously cute or super studly and they are driving a range rover, and they are obviously kind of an idiot.
You can tell sometimes. But they have followed a different life strategy which involves being attractive, but not necessarily smart. Occasionally, somebody like that will surprise and be really smart. There are plenty of examples – anyway.
As we move into the future with an increasing, there’s a coming proliferation of artificially engineered thought coming. People will have to decide what their strategy is going to be in terms of embracing technology that aids thought.
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