From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Thu Jun 06 2002 - 05:20:27 MDT
On Wednesday, June 05, 2002 9:10 PM Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
sentience@pobox.com wrote:
>> Should I have replaced phrases such as "many societies
>> have evolved to..." with "many individual behaviours,
>> which collectively resemble a society, have evolved
>> in the context of external social influences to...", and
>> "it makes the society a nicer place to be" with "it
>> improves what the individual can expect of his/her
>> social environment"?
>
> It doesn't fix the logical problem, unless you can explain
> how the behaviors which improve the social
> environment collectively also improve reproductive
> fitness individually.
I can see two possibilities here -- neither of which are necessarily the
case. One is a purely memetic one. Certain forms of society or
behaviors spread merely because they are good at spreading themselves
culturally without regard to the impact they have on the organisms
spreading them. This would include fashions and fads. (In a sense
there might be "improve[d] reproductive fitness," if individuals
carrying the meme are more likely to mate or help others with the same
meme.) Some of these memes might make the societies "society a nicer
place to be," but that's only incidental. (This seems the way
agriculture and industrialism spread -- i.e., they are not genetic.
Whether they made society nicer is debatable.:)
Two is that things which make "society a nicer place to be" will
encourage people to live in such societies and be more likely to
"improve reproductive fitness" of individuals choosing to do so -- or
alternatively of choosing not to leave such societies. For example, a
subsociety that is rude -- like many an email list -- might chase away a
lot of people, making it less likely for reproductive encounters, while
one that is nice might increase the odds of reproductive encounters.
My stating these potential explanations here does not mean I believe
them or that they are true. Merely having a just so story that sounds
somewhat reasonable does not mean things really are that way. See
"Testing Evolutionary Explanations" at
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Testing.html for my thoughts on
testing such explanations.
(Also, I wouldn't focus too much on marginal improvements in
"reproductive fitness" given that there must be a threshold below which
such improvements are no better than noise. Why? Well, individual
organisms are discrete units -- not infinite collections. I know this
isn't an issue you raised, but I'm raising it.:)
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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