I wrote:
They are trying to individually maximize the total sum of their gratification over continuous time for the life of the game.
Ted Winslow commented:
Perhaps they need to be more critically reflexive about their desires. They might start with Aristotle on "friendship" (<http:// www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_08.htm> and <http:// www.constitution.org/ari/ethic_09.htm>). This associates true "gratification" - the "feeling" to which one would say "stay" (as Goethe puts it in Faust) - with human relationships as ends in themselves rather than with their "usefulness" (the latter being, according to Aristotle, the basis of a mistaken idea of "friendship"). Aristotle on friendship one of the main sources from which Marx's dissent from classical political economy's conception of "wealth" derives.
Of course I can get cooperation as the outcome of an economy populated by individuals who are predisposed to cooperate. If they are trying to maximize their individual wellbeing and their individual wellbeing is assume to depend on own consumption as much as on the consumption of others, then whatever works for one works for all. Voilà. Economists call them "altruistic preferences." In fact, a big chunk of modern growth theory is based on that implicit assumption. And the economic definition of wealth in economics is whatever enhances human wellbeing. It may include personal interactions with others, not only "stuff." Wealth = use values. Tangible or not. But let me ask, Ted: Is it clear to you what I'm talking about? Mine is a simple *mental experiment*. All I try to do is clarify the logical implications of having simple-minded, self-interested individuals decide how to spend their possessions among current consumption, production for the future, or appropriation of each other's possessions if they are not assumed to care about each other's wellbeing. I am *not* saying actual, historical humans (political or civilized animals) are simple-minded automatons driven only by that type of narrow self interest. I'm just trying to figure out what would happen if that were the case under particular abstract scenarios. I mean, don't you think actual people in concrete historical societies are driven by narrow self interest *to some extent*? To *that extent*, to the extent actual historical societies (like ours) have people driven by narrow self interest, isn't it interesting to figure out the social implications of such behavior? Now, if you say that the premises of my mental experiment render it trivial or uninteresting or irrelevant, you're perfectly entitled to saying that. But what are you suggesting to be a nontrivial, interesting, and practically relevant mental experiment then? Or should we just stop conducting mental experiments? Should we just shut down all scientific endeavors (whether in the physical or social disciplines) that rely on mental experiments (abstraction) due to the cost, immorality, or impossibility of some experiments with human subjects? Now, if you are saying that I should assume instead that people prefer to cooperate to the alternative, then I can tell you why that doesn't interest me. Again, this is the trivial case. You assume people predisposed to cooperate and the outcome of that abstract economy will be cooperation. If your premise is perfect communism, I doubt that your conclusion will be anything else than perfect communism. Furthermore: the behavior of an economy where everybody tries to extract the most fun out of their interaction with the rest of the universe, facing it as if they were all one, has already been studied extensively -- at least to the extent it can be studied in the abstract. IMHO, the question that is most interesting and *relevant* in human practice is how to build a truly cooperative society starting from where we are now, with the kind of people we are -- not with the kind of people we can imagine ourselves to be if only we were that way. My little model, if its math is correct, shows that some form of cooperation is highly likely to emerge even if people *in that* economy are driven by narrowly defined self interest, on the basis of technology and economics. Am I saying that these conclusions -- derived from an abstract, admittedly simple mental experiment -- are descriptive of the actual behavior of people in actual economies? Well, it depends on how much an actual, historical economy resembles this extremely abstract fantasy. If it resembles it only superficially, then I won't expect the conclusions to account for much of the concrete historical behavior of that economy. Still, I think that it's illuminating that out of a few simple premises one can derive a rather complex set of implications so sharply. Am I saying that mental experiments of this kind are the only or main way we people should learn about life? Not really. There are many ways for people to appropriate life. But I contend this is a legitimate way to do it as well. Regarding your last paragraph on how biological or, particularly, genetic determinists may be using game theory to advance their arguments, I'll just say that there's nothing in the math of game theory (and game theory is just a mathematical theory) that is necessarily tied to those views. I wouldn't be surprised if biologists who reject those views use game theory as well. What would keep them from using it? More generally, if guilt by association (against a mathematical theory or against its practitioners) is a valid argument, then we are all guilty of everything.
