Patrick Knodel – Question Everything – Towards Cooperation & Change – The Great Simplification #115
[ 27/March/24 ]
At 1:23:42 Patrick said “Learn how to cooperate” – which is close, but it is much deeper.
What is really needed is understanding that cooperation is fundamental to the emergence and survival of complexity (all levels, necessarily). And it gets complex. Cooperation is always vulnerable to exploitation by cheating strategies, so requires evolving ecosystems of cheat detection and mitigation systems.
We have a name in biology for any set of agents that start selfishly using resources at cost to the whole – it is called cancer.
From the perspective of individual cancer cells, everything seems to be going well, right up to the point that everything dies.
In 1978 I started reading the first paperback edition of “The Selfish Gene” at the Auckland University Bookshop. I bought it, took it back to my flat, and finished it before dinner. It was clear to me from reading that, that cooperation was foundational to the evolution of complexity, but Richard was explicitly stating that competition was foundational. I thought I must have got something wrong, so I started again, and read it again, cover to cover (twice in a 24 hour period). The only book I have done that with. At the end of the second read, all of my conclusions held, all the logic and evidence was consistent. Last time I spoke to Richard he still could not see that. David Sloan-Wilson sees most of it, and it is deep.
It has been clear to me for 46 years that the current political and economic dogma, that competition delivers optimal solutions to all problems, is not simply wrong, it imposes existential level risk to our species. It is a radical over simplification of something deeply more complex and fundamental to our survival.
It is our ability to cooperate, not our ability to compete, that is responsible for our complexity and success. The idea that it is competition is essentially a mimetic cancer on our species (embodied in many agents and cultures and institutions).
The definition of life that I now use, that of “systems capable of searching the space of possible systems for the survivable”, allows us to see the radical change that human language allows, the whole new domains of search across the vastly larger space of possible systems at speeds many orders of magnitude faster than was possible with the classical biological method of “replication with variation and differential survival in different contexts”.
Unfortunately, one of the things that evolution encoded in our neural networks (via the mechanism of punishing the slow much more harshly than the slightly inaccurate) is a strong preference for simple certainty over an acceptance of complex uncertainty.
Thus we have a strong bias to simplify evolution down to “competition” and most (including Richard Dawkins and many others) fail to go deeply enough into the complexity present to see the foundational role of cooperation. Hence the mess within our current economic and political systems.
What we need, is more people going beyond the simple certainty of True/False, Right/Wrong, and being able to embrace real freedom, which results in real diversity, and real uncertainty – necessarily. Accepting diversity is a necessary consequence of claiming any level of freedom. And any freedom demands responsibility if it is to survive.
Freedom is a fundamental aspect of “Search”, which is part of the definition of life above.
But another part of that definition of life is “survival”, and that imposes limits on freedom, that land in the form of responsibility – for avoiding actions that pose significant risk to the life or liberty of any other agents. And that gets extremely complex and uncertain – the best any of us have is some sort of best guess. No set of rules is going to be applicable in all cases of real novelty, and real novelty is what you get from search beyond known boundaries, which is part of freedom, part of the very definition of what life is and does.
So yes – we are in a poly-crisis, and that crisis stems from multiple levels of over simplification that has delivered much of our current economic and political dogma and systems, that are no longer fit for purpose.
And yes – we need to cooperate, to love, to accept diversity, to demand cooperation and responsibility from our systems and leaders; and to demonstrate it ourselves – each to the best of our limited and fallible abilities.
And on top of that, AI systems are currently increasing capacity by a factor of 10 every 6 months, 100 every year. By the end of next year, we hit a singularity, where AI systems are more effective than humans in all domains – and thus, by definition, they will be beyond our ability to predict, at any level of strategy or logic. At that point, any conjecture about the future becomes essentially random. We do not and cannot know what technologies and strategies and systems will emerge.
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