Mercury wrote: ↑October 16th, 2022, 11:59 pm
The tribe tends to punish defectors and free riders - who act in their self interest to the exclusion of the interests of the tribe. One could argue that this is the origin of virtue; and evolution ingrained into the individual organism a social sense of moral obligation - wherein, a moral sensibility is an advantage to the individual within the tribe, and an advantage to the tribe composed of such moral individuals.
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All that said, I'm not sure I answered your question. More directly, yes - that's accurate, but also the natural consequence of individual and group facets of identity.
Paul91 wrote: ↑October 17th, 2022, 12:23 am
From your understanding, yes, you answered my question. Thank you.
Sy Borg referred me to Robert Axelrod's 1980 computer tournament involving the iterated prisoner's dilemma game. Here's a slideshow summary:
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1429470
The best strategy is to start with cooperation and respond in kind to your "opponent's" last move - "tit for tat". It fits with your understanding, I believe.
Game theory is interesting, but real life is so much more complex. In evolution, defectors may be excluded from the tribe - particularly if they are young males who may grow up to challenge the alpha male's monopoly on sexual opportunity and the principle share of food resources. This is unlike prisoner's dilemma, and also another key difference between a state of nature and civilisation.
Insofar as chimpanzees troops are an adequate socio-biological analogy, it may be assumed hunter gatherer tribes were fission societies - societies that would eject young pretenders to maintain homeostasis; whereas the multi-tribal social organisation of civilisation is a fusion society. In game theory - there's no getting ejected from the game; whereas in real life, even in a fusion society there are power relations, such that the opponent may have to take a long series of tats before he ventures a tit. Even in a fusion society social exclusion is still the practised; imprisonment for example, but more simply, refusal to acknowledge a truth that contradicts the socially accepted lie. i.e. magma energy. The opponent ignores your move.
The ultimate consequence of this is that it's very difficult to challenge the socially accepted lie; for the lie is advanced from a position of power and accepted because of the potential or actual consequences for refusing to accept the lie. The question then becomes; not tit for tat - but tit for tat, tat, tat, tat, and you have to ask yourself if it's worth it.
With regard to magma energy; it's my view that there is nothing to lose - as we are certainly doomed if we do not act, and there's everything to gain from acting. But still there's resistance from the right who deny climate change for the sake of fossil fuel profits; and from the left who use sustainability as a weapon to advance an anti-capitalist political agenda. People lie.
I suppose what I'm saying is, prisoner's dilemma is in the mix - but there's no such simple trick to it. Defection disguises itself as cooperation; often so badly that you know it's defection, but are forced to respond - tit for tat, as if it were cooperation - because ultimately, power devolves to the ability to do violence. That so, what appears to be defection can actually be the ultimate in cooperation. People just don't understand the relation between the validity of the knowledge bases of action and outcome within a causal reality, but rest assured, if you're lying, you're dying!