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Logical Structure of Environment and Its Internal Representation.

2011; Volume: 18; Linguagem: Inglês

0907-0877

Heinz von Foerster,

Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation

It is for the cultural anthropologists to explain the great popularity of a recent publication1 that bases man’s evolutionary success on his alleged intrinsic habit to kill and to destroy. Since this belief is contrary to the thesis on which my paper today rests, I hope you will forgive me if I open my remarks with an apparently unpopular confession: in contrast to the tenets of some self-appointed apostles of the glories of annihilation and destruction, I believe that love, not hatred and mutual killing, is the mainspring of man’s cultural and spiritual evolution. Clearly you will not let me get away with such an outrageous assertion, without sufficient evidence to support my proposition. To this end permit me to translate this assertion into somewhat more scientific terms. This can be done most advantageously in terms of a fast developing, fascinating branch of mathematics, namely “game theory.” This theory deals, among other game situations, with decision-making under insufficient information, determining those moves of a player which would give him maximum gain with minimum risk. In the particular case where a group of players have to play against a not completely determinable opponent — as man in his struggle against the partly unpredictable forces of nature — it can be easily shown that a “coalition structure” is much stronger than a “competitive structure.” By “stronger” I mean that the pay-off per element is higher; and my assertion that a coalition structure is stronger than a competitive structure refers to the fact that two elements jointly can do things which the two elements separately can never achieve. In other words, by joining, each element gets more out of the deal than if it remains single. As trivial examples of advantages of coalitions, may I point to man’s social build up during historical time, his vigorous urbanization in recent centuries, and his extensive development of the means of mass communication. Although this observation is almost trivial there are two facets which are — in my eyes — of considerable importance. First, a coalition is a much more sophisticated structure than a competition, because it requires the possibility of the elements to communicate with each other. As you probably know, all social animals — bees, ants, or animals that live in herds — constantly exchange denotative information about food, danger, and individual states of mind such as anger, submissiveness, etc. If I am not mistaken, von Frisch’s2 analysis of communication among bees allows for a bee’s vocabulary of about 200 “words.” I could give you a host of fascinating examples of information exchange in animals. And it is quite obvious that those poor creatures doomed incommunicado have to resort to a rather poor competitive game. Since evolution is cashing in at even the slightest edge of an advantage, it is clear that evolution fosters communication.