From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jul 29 2002 - 20:43:02 MDT
At 07:05 PM 7/29/02 -0700, Hal wrote:
>Generally, an altruist cares about other people. In this scenario,
>there are no other people. Hence an altruist would not behave kindly
>in this scenario.
Well, except as a result of noticing the consequences of:
>manipulation works just as well as it does in the real world.
>Hence an egoist would continue to behave "kindly" and "altruistically"
>in this scenario.
Unless the altruist is self-destructive as well as kindly, I reckon s/he
would continue to mimic benevolence since that would still work best on the
whole, while perhaps defecting furtively when this seemed effective. But
while Hal's paradox is amusing, it doesn't make a lot of sense
psychologically (IMO) since we embed these action heuristics at a deep
level, and just knowing that the world's a sham might take a long time to
sink in and rewrite our bents.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:46 MST