From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Sep 10 1997 - 10:45:30 MDT
Hagbard Celine <hagbard@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> > If you become known as a killer, people are less likely to share
> > resources with you, while they will cooperate against you. Hence
> > under some circumstances killers and defectors will be less effective
> > than cooperators.
>
> Killers and defectors may cooperate with each other as well. One
> consequence of spontaneous order is the "syndicate." When one person
> realizes that it is more efficient to kill or steal for resources, you
> can be reasonably sure that others are of like mind.
The interesting thing about syndicates is that the defectors inside
them do cooperate to a large extent (defections tends to be messy).
So the end result of this may be a population divided into blocks
which cooperate internally and more often defects against each other.
> Order does not seem
> to have any moral connotations other than in relation to moral views
> concerning disorder. Spontaneous order may be for the community or
> against it.
True. This is the major reason I don't think market solutions
always produce the best results as perceived by human individuals;
markets can organise to produce good results for other entities
than humans, such as corporations.
I'm reading Kauffman's "Investigations", and his ideas might be
applicable here. First, the what the community *is* will be changed
by the actions of the participating individuals. And spontaneous
order seems to move it towards a self-organized critical state, where
avalanches of change occur at varying frequencies. The interesting
possibility is that Kauffman claims the mean fitness tends to be
maximal in this "border of chaos" state, and that this may be an
universal property.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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