So, I stumbled across this news article recently, where in the biologists have figured out that it’s to the advantage of yeast to cooperate. This came as a bit of a surprise for the biologists (OK, at least one physicist- I’m not sure why he was quoted):
Cooperative behavior has puzzled biologists because if only the fittest survive, genes for a behavior that benefits everybody in a population should not last and cooperative behavior should die out, says Jeff Gore, a Pappalardo postdoctoral fellow in MIT’s Department of Physics.
My response to this is that they should have talked to the computer scientists and mathematicians, or anyone who read Douglas Hofstadter: we figured this out 25 years ago. And in the process of figuring this out, proved something interesting: you can have morality and cooperation without requiring a religious enforcement mechanism.
My copy of the book went walkabout (meaning: I loaned to someone, forgot who I loaned it to, and they haven’t returned it yet), so last week I broke down and bought a new copy of “Metamagical Themas”, which is a collection of his columns in Scientific American. In between such gems as introducing the game Nomic (I’ve actually played this game- we had a discussion once about having a Nomic tournament, but couldn’t agree on the rules) and self-referential sentences (“Please, oh please, include me in your collection of self-referential sentences!”), he talked about the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
For those who don’t know about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, here’s a short introduction. I’m going to give a slightly different introduction than normal- so if you want to know more about this (including why it’s called the Prisoner’s Dilemma), wikipedia is, as usual, a good place to start. Say you’re buying drugs, or diamonds, or nuclear secrets, or whatever, from your casual associate George. Because of the illicit nature of this deal, you both agree to the following slightly odd exchange mechanism. Every weekday for the next four weeks, over lunch, you’ll happen to both sit on the same park bench, both of you with your paper bag lunches. Your paper bag will hold the money, George’s will hold the diamonds or whatever. Then, when you get up, each of you will “accidentally” take the other person’s paper back and, without inspecting it, wander off (technically, this is the iterated closed-bag version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma).
So each day, each of you have a decision to make: what to put in each of your paper bags. For example, you might put in the money you agreed to pay George. Or you might decide to fill the bag with cut up newspaper, knowing that George will have wander off, and allowed you to make your escape, before discovering that you cheated him. Likewise, George might put diamonds in his paper bag, or he might put in gravel, and you won’t find out until after George make his escape. So both sides can cooperate (put money and/or diamonds in their bag), or defect (put newspaper and/or gravel in their bags).
This was a medium to long lived subject of interest to a lot of people in the early eighties- fueled in large part by Hofstadter himself. But what I found really interesting was the tournaments. The idea was fairly simply- host a (iterated, closed-bag) Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament, and get smart people writing programs, and run the programs against each other, and see who can come up with the smartest algorithm. The people running the tournament seeded the programs with various simple algorithms- like “always defect”, “always cooperate”, etc. One algorithm they seeded the tournament with was “tit-for-tat”, a very simple algorithm that always cooperated on the first round, and then every round thereafter simply did whatever the other player did last turn. The idea in seeding these algorithms was to get the obvious ideas out of the way, so people would think up better algorithms. So it was a great surprise to all concerned when, in the first year the tournament was held, tit-for-tat won.
So, in the second year, people started writing specifically anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, trying to beat last year’s winner. And, being the sort of people they are, anti-anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, and anti-anti-anti-tit-for-tat algorithms, and so on. And to much dismay, tit-for-tat won again. By the third year, nobody was surprised when tit-for-tat went 3 for 0, and variations of the game, like making a generational version, where how many copies of your program survive to the next generation is a function of your program’s score this generation, just increased the dominance of tit-for-tat. After that, interested in the game waned, and the tournament was discontinued.
Hofstadter actually discusses some of why he thinks tit-for-tat is such a robust strategy. Included in this are two important points: one, that tit-for-tat reward cooperation with cooperation but punishes transgressions, and two, that tit-for-tat also forgives transgressions after they are punished, allowing the two programs to go back to cooperating. What I want to discuss is the applicability. There is an important question: which version of the game is more generally applicable, the single round Prisoner’s Dilemma, or the multi-round version? Because in the single-round version, the logical thing to do is to defect, but in the iterated version, having a bias towards cooperation is the winning strategy.
If you think about it, even in the modern world, most of our interactions with other people are, in fact, iterative in nature. We tend to eat in the same restaurants, shop at the same stores, talk to the same people, etc. Even in situations you might think are one-off interactions generally include the potential of multiple interactions- you might think that it’s safe to stiff your waitress at that roadside diner you never intend to visit again, but stop and think- how often do you forget your credit card, keys, cell phone, or whatever and have to come back ten minutes or an hour later to claim them? If you leave a decent tip, you’re likely to be met with a smile and a “I thought you’d come back for this”. Stiff your waitress, and your cell phone might just have soup “accidentally” poured on it.
This feature of our lives was even more pronounced back when we still living in caves- it was rare indeed to meet a human who wasn’t either of your own extended-family/tribe, or one of the nearby extended-families/tribes with which you had regular dealings with (even if those “regular dealings” included going to war). We as humans are genetically programmed to be biased towards cooperation, as this is a pro-survival characteristic. Proto-humans who worked well together preferentially survived over those who didn’t.
This links into morality because morality is just another form of cooperation, only over issues we consider more fundamental or important. As an example of this, consider the following thought experiment: there are two different tribes of cave men. In tribe A, the members of the tribe make an agreement- you don’t try to kill me, I won’t try to kill you. You don’t steal my food, I won’t try and steal your food. You don’t try and steal my mate, I won’t try and steal yours. And so on. An agreement over things we’d consider “basic morality”- murder, theft, that kind of thing. Tribe B doesn’t make that agreement. Which tribe is more likely to survive? You’re right- tribe A. Being able to work together with less paranoia is a pro-survival characteristic, and pretty soon tribe B is extinct, and tribe A covers the land. It should come as no surprise, then, that most of the basic principles of morality are common among all religions and all people.
I often opine that those who espouse “enlightened self-interest” generally forget the “enlightened” part, and instead practice stupid, short-sighted self-interest. This is exactly what I mean when I say this- most often, the practitioners of “unenlightened self-interest” try and treat every situation as a non-iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the rational thing to do is defect. The problem is that true, non-iterative Prisoner Dilemma games are few and far between in pretty much all societies. Every man for himself is tribe-B mentality, and liable to get your genes removed from the gene pool.
But even in the case where defection doesn’t come with a direct cost, there is still the indirect cost of defecting. If widespread defections (without punishment) are the norm, than the basic societal agreements are at risk- and the survivability of the entire society is at risk. In fact, the most common argument in favor of “every man for himself” is that this breaking point has already been reached, that the social contract has already been broken. The evidence that this is false lies in the huge numbers of people blithely acting as if the social contract has not been broken- restaurants that don’t force you to pay before getting your food, people not stiffing their waitress, murder being a rare occurrence, etc. Almost all people are honest almost all of the time. The simple fact that the contract has not yet been broken, however, doesn’t imply that it can not be broken. And in each of our dealings with other people we choose, whether to reinforce the contract (cooperate), or harm the contract (defect).
And our decisions to reinforce or harm the contract, and thus help or reduce the survivability of ourselves, does count. It’s the aggregate, cumulative total of all decisions that determines the outcome, but each contribution (in either direction) is measurable, especially relative to it’s cost. And being unable to see the connection between small matters (like whether I tip my waitress, or kill someone) and large matters (survival of western culture, survival of the political entity called The United States, or the survival of the human race as a species) is mainly one of lack of imagination.
And even if the ultimate survivability of the tribe isn’t called into question, it’s wealth is. Paranoia costs- costs economic opportunities that would otherwise be taken advantage of because, in the lack of (general) trust and cooperation they are too risky. This places a real fiscal/wealth burden on all members of the society, making everyone poorer for it. Places where the social contract did collapse are synonymous with large reductions in wealth as well.
So this is the core question I wanted to tackle. Robert asked, in a comment on this blog, how it was possible to have morality without a god (paraphrasing here). This is my answer- all that is necessary to develop a morality which encompasses not only big things, like thou shall not kill, but also little things, like thou shall not stiff thy waitress, arises naturally from the combination of having any empathy for some other people at all (not even all other people, just some other people), some scientific and repeatable observations about the nature of the world, and the imagination and insight to see how your behavior affects not only yourself and those you may not care about, but also those you care about. And once the true downside costs are taken into account (including the probability of being punished for your defection, as most everyone else you are interacting with is using some minor variant of a tit-for-tat strategy), and compared to the upside advantages, most “sin” becomes cost-ineffective. In the remaining cases, either there is a significant case to be made that the action is not, in fact, a sin (how much damage, really, does a cartoon depicting Mohammad really do to society?), or the evidence suggests that religion is not a very effective deterrent against the sin (how many business fraud cases has the church prevented?).
In fact, injecting the concept of god and/or religion into the debate over morality can give rise to a suboptimal behavior for maximizing general wealth and/or survivability. An example of this is the case of slavery. Economically, free labor is much more productive than slave labor in an industrial society, which is why the north was richer than the south, and why Europe had already given up slavery. But the south argued that there was ample support for slavery in the bible, including Leviticus 25:44, “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves.” I hope that everyone reading this will agree that slavery, in addition to being economically suboptimal, is also immoral. But by introducing God, or at least the Bible, especially as the final arbiter of morality, into the discussion you’ve actually made the argument against slavery more difficult.
In fact, most people’s behaviors are more in line with the economic/social-contract definition of morality than a biblical/religious definition, as the question of slavery demonstrates. The economic advantage of free labor in an agrarian society is much less than in an industrialized society- so the economic incentives to eliminate slavery are less in an agrarian society, and thus, in the pure economic/social definition of morality above slavery is more moral, or at least less immoral. In 1770, the United States was still, by and large, an agrarian society- which is why pretty much all of the founding fathers owned slaves. But between say 1790 and 1850, the north switched over from being an agrarian economy to being an industrial one, while the cotton bubble kept the south not only agrarian, but an labor-intensive cash-crop oriented (cotton being both of those things) agrarian society, that economically benefited from slavery. Within the economic/social definition of morality, one would expect the two sides to hold different opinions as to whether slavery was “moral” or not.
I could write a very similar story concerning the equal rights of women and minorities in an informational-technological society, but the fault lines are not nearly so clear there. Of course, we’re also not exchanging gunfire over the issue either. Yet. I hope.
And before you accuse me of being cold-blooded about slavery, allow me to remind you that the morality I’m discussing here isn’t a simple list of explicit (and supposedly invariant) value judgments- this good, that bad. Instead it is basically an approximation of providing the most good to the most people, with the caveat that circumstances change, and therefor how you provide the most good to the most people can change as well. And for those still hung up on the word “slave”, consider: what is the difference, at least to the person involved, between being a slave and a serf?
Morality is not the sole domain of religion. In fact, morality as it is actually practiced seems to be hardly influenced at all. If even the unthinking yeast bacteria cooperate for their own better as well as the betterment of others, might not we humans?
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