Curious Wonder web notes

Follow up to  Reciprocal Altruism  Humans are, of course, a brainy species, and are zoologically unusual in how often they help unrelated individuals (Chapter 3). Our lifestyles and our minds are particularly adapted to the demands of reciprocal altruism. People have food, tools, help, and information to trade. With language, information is an ideal trade good because its cost to the giver—a few seconds of breath—is minuscule compared with the benefit to the recipient. Humans are obsessed with individuals; remember the Blick twins from Chapter 2, one of whom bit a police officer but neither of whom could be punished because each benefited from reasonable doubt that he and not his twin did the deed. And the human mind is equipped with goal-setting demons that regulate the doling out of favors; as with kin-directed altruism, reciprocal altruism is behaviorist short hand for a set of thoughts and emotions. Trivers and the biologist Richard Alexander have shown how the demands of ...

We often hear people ask to define certain words before diving into complicated topics, or people will say "by definition" as some defeater to an argument. In the former case, it seems this is done because certain words can mean different things in different contexts and it cannot always be guaranteed that everyone will have the same understanding of the word, so asking for a definition from someone is an effort in reaching consensus in parlance and making contexts clear so that people don't talk past eachother. In the latter case, the person seems to be implying that a consensus of a word has already been reached and that the definition of the word must set further grounds of the debate or discussion. When we provide a definition in case one, we often just go by the consensus given by a trusted authority, like wikipedia, or provide context if the authority has more than one available. However, imagine that someone has discovered something new and has to come up with a de...

 This variable can be measured by accounting for the types of game theories that can be possible in a given context, the consequences of the possible dicision makers, and the alignment of nash equilibriums with the stability of modules in variable A and the low cost of loss in variable C. The following are examples of game theories with some moral relevance. Conflict games . (cells to nations, any system that can make decisions) In contests of strategy, as opposed to contests of skill, strength or intellect; in contests where two or more players have partly conflicting and partly shared interests, the winning strategies tend to include a self handicapping to make threats and promises credible.  Read Schelling's "The Strategy of Conflict"  Tragedy of the Commons . (communities) Commons like public water fountains, restrooms, parks, are services provided by governments as a public reward. Their survival is dependent on the restraint of players and the perceived availa...

This variable can be measured by quantifying the stability of each module and the structure as a whole; the effectiveness of the mechanisms used to improve stability. Depending on whether you're a lumper or a splitter, there can be more or fewer modules in the hierarchy, and there need not be a single possible module at each level. The relevant moral hierarchy is as follows: Atoms=>Molecules=>Cells=>Organs=>Bodies=>Families=>Tribes=>Communities=>Cities=>Nations=>Civilizations. Complex systems are formed out of stable modules because only modules that can exist for sufficiently long enough times can they reliably be implemented into larger modules, as with the Watch Makers' analogy. At each modular step there are mechanisms that can stabilize or improve itself or other modules in the structure. These hierarchies exist out of necessity due to survivorship bias; we are focusing on structures that have these mechanisms because they wouldn't exist ...

1. What is being measured? What elements of beliefs, emotions, reasoning and decisions are essential for something to be moral? Without which, these relevant aspects would merely be pragmatic, convenient or efficient. What specific aspects turn something morally relevant? That is what will be measured.   Things become morally relevant when two concepts are introduced; the Well-being and Prosperity of conscious creatures.  Entertain the following examples below by Jonathan Haidt, which focuses on the 5 conservative spheres of morality: A: Stick a pin into your palm. B: Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know. (Harm.) A: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it at no charge because of a computer error. B: Accept a wide-screen TV from a friend who received it from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family. (Fairness.) A: Say something bad about your nation (which you don't believe) on a talk-radio show in your nation. B: Say something bad about...

 The biologist Robert Trivers developed a suggestion from George Williams on how another kind of altruism could evolve (where altruism, again, is defined as behavior that benefits another organism at a cost to the behaver). Dawkins explains it with a hypothetical example. Imagine a species of bird that suffers from a disease-carrying tick and must spend a good deal of time removing them with its beak. It can reach every part of its body but the top of its head. Every bird would benefit if some other bird groomed its head. If the birds in a group all responded to the sight of a head presented to them by grooming it, the group would prosper. But what would happen if a mutant presented its head for grooming but never groomed anyone else? These freeloaders would be parasite-free, and could use the time they saved not grooming others to look for food. With that advantage they would eventually dominate the population, even if it made the group more vulnerable to extinction. The psycholog...