Positive Morality

Are we fundamentally cooperative or egoistic?

It would be easy to argue that everything that everyone does is based on pure egoism. I disagree with that viewpoint, but let me present it.

If Eve does something that benefit her and nobody else (or has a negative impact on others), we call the action egoistic. If Eve is kind to a friend in a selfless way, it is because she wants something in return. The notion of reciprocity. If she needs help at some later time, this friend will help her out (she assumes). It can actually be proven that reciprocity is the best strategy (tit for tat) in a 'game' supposed to model real life. Let us come up with a situation where no reciprocity is expected.

If you find a drunk man lying in the gutters, and help him get a taxi home, would you expect reciprocity? Let us assume no. But then your genes are. Through millennia of evolution your genes have found the perfect way for you to behave; group-orientation, giving, reciprocity, caring, emotions, family values, etc. But in the end all your behaviours are designed for one purpose only: You (or your genes at any rate).

Let us return to my viewpoint.

Survival of the fittest. In accordance with Darwin's theory of evolution, the strongest (those most fit to survive the world and bring offspring) survive (or they genes do anyway). This is easy to believe (note how a lot of people that are pro-Darwinistic consider the theory of gravity to be just a theory, but the theory of Evolution to be given as an Axiom of The World).

Few people would argue against that kindness and selflessness are important concepts that we use to model our world. So in everyday life these models are true in some sense. Some may argue that the more fundamental model of Evolution is more true (since it is in a sense more fine-grained; this is the typical Reductionist view), but I'd say we have another way to choose what to consider 'the most true'.

What you believe changes who you are. If you disagree, for example if you do not believe in free will and purpose, reading this has no value anyway (you're just doing it as a consequence of random or deterministic happenstance). The question is: Do you want to live in an egoistic world, where you can always just interpret everything as egoism? Or do you want to live in a kind world, and learn time and again that the world is not so kind? Or do you want to live somewhere in between, thinking the best of people, that is, the best that your experience permits?

Question anyone: If I give you a present (and conscious reciprocity is not in the picture), is there any experiment that would give a different result whether it was fundamentally an egoistic or a selfless act?

Sometimes the purpose can be one thing, and the important sub goal something else. This is how I view free will vs. Darwinism. Free will is the goal, but survivability is an important bi-product.

The reason I blogged about this today was essentially

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk

To sum up:

Return favours: Conscious egoism,

Empathy: Unconscious egoism, or something else?

Is giving away something with absolutely no future gain a "bad" Darwinian side effect of the powers of empathy, or is it a sign of our "true" nature?

Is this really a question for science or a question of some other kind?

Solving Conundrums 3

- Solutions to Solving Conundrums 1 (and 2)

The Second Conundrum

"Which way would you tell me to go if I were to ask?" (Then take that way)

If it's the one who always lie, he would tell you to go the wrong way, but as he is lying he has to lie to the question by telling you the right way.

The Fourth Conundrum

The solutions to this depends on what you mean by surprised. In practical terms, what the death-sentenced king does is to believe with all his mind that he will be killed tomorrow (he believes this every day). Tuesday morning he is not killed, but does he consider himself to be surprised?

There are three ways to define surprised (that I can think of). The first is "I am surprised whenever I am wrong". Using this interpretation, where is he wrong in his analysis? He must decide in advance on one day when he thinks he will be executed. If he decides 'I think I'll be executed on Tuesday', then he is surprised when he is executed on Friday (or, rather, when he is not executed on Tuesday).

The second interpretation is "I am surprised whenever I have a false negative, that is, when I predict that I will not be executed but I am." So if you have a false positive (you think you'll be executed but you're not) you don't count as surprised. Then the king is correct, his analysis is good, it is impossible to surprise him. (This goes against the way I told the story, but there exist different versions.)

The third interpretation is a bit more complex. If it rains/not rains tomorrow, are you surprised? Not too much, because you don't have a strong prediction. But if a volcano erupts in your neighborhood, then you are surprised. If someone asked you beforehand you'd say that the chance of a volcano erupting so near you was almost 0, or just say 0. The interpretation is: "You are surprised whenever something occurs that you assigned less than 10% probability" (I chose 10% for convenience, you can substitute it with any number less than 50%). Every night the king can assign 50% probability to being executed the next morning. Then he is never surprised.

The Third Conundrum

When making statements in logic you can make almost any statement you can dream up. Almost. You are not allowed to define a logical variable by 'P:(not P)'. The easiest way to make sure your statements are definable is to only use logical variables that you have already defined, together with logical operations (and, or, not, etc.).

Let us define the logical variables:

P: not Q

Q: not P

This is impossible in the same way as

P: not Q

is impossible (you can't know if P is true or false, it can't be true or false, as you have not even defined Q).

If you'd rather think of this as a satisfiability question (see the last solution on this post) for 'P equivalent (not P)', then the answer is "no, there is no truth values satisfying this expression".

The First Conundrum

Using the clarified version:

If A) is correct then D) is also correct, and then A) is not correct as there are two correct solutions.

If B) is correct, then B) is false by its own statement.

If C) is correct, then C) is false by its own statement.

If D) is correct then A) is also correct and then D) is not correct.

So every answer gives a contradiction, hence none of them are correct. But isn't then alternative C) correct, since no of the alternatives are correct?

The resolution here comes from thinking about satisfiability. If you have a logical system you can give a number of variables A, B, C, ..., and a logical 'equation' (statement), for example

(A and B) or (C and (not A) and (not D) or (A equivalent B),

and ask the question "Is there a set of values for the variables that make the equation true?". The answer can be

"yes; A=true, B=false, ...", or

"no; there is no such choice of values".

Finally, the answer becomes "The question you posed has no correct answer". On this higher level, where you defined the question, you can say that there is no answer that can be correct (as all of them leads to contradictions).

The question cannot be satisfied. It is not so that 0 of the alternatives are correct on the level of the question. On the level above, it is so.

If you disagree, I would recommend a book on mathematical logic, and one on set theory (not naive set theory, but the serious kind), at least read the wikipedia articles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_satisfiability

And to see how complicated stuff becomes when someone tells you everything, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russels_paradox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory