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Article 5638 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: moravec@Think.COM (Hans Moravec)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: AI failures
Date: 14 May 1992 03:19:27 GMT
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References: <MORAVEC.92May10004528@turing.think.com> <1992May12.081742.22060@norton.com> <upsnbINNk2c@early-bird.think.com> <1992May13.210948.5060@psych.toronto.edu>
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In article <1992May13.210948.5060@psych.toronto.edu>, michael@psych.toronto.edu (Michael Gemar) writes:

|> For someone who disparages "dead humanist windbags", this sound an awful
|> lot like Rousseau.  And, using the term "state of nature" to imply that
|> solitary existence is the natural state of humans is just plain wrong.
|> Humans, just like our primate ancestors, are social creatures.  Society,
|> in whatever form, *is* our true "state of nature".

I picked up the term from some republican in the news recently - poor
choice on afterthought.  Modern society, though, is far, far from
the way our ancestors spent most of their existence.  Native arctic
Inuit (as they once lived) or South American Yanomami are almost
certainly much closer.   Inuit and Yanomami learn to gather, hunt
and build shelter from their parents, but they do it quite naturally,
and don't have schools.
          --  DANGER! DANGER!     Sociobiology alert!  --
In primate groups (unlike ungulate herds) individuals recognise each
other, and have long-term one on one relationships.
This takes mental storage space, to remember for each
individual if you owe them one, can count on them for a handout, to
pick your fleas, to beat you up, let you beat them up, etc.  So the
larger the social group, the bigger the individual brains should be
to remember all those individual small town/soap-opera type details.
There is, in fact, a tightly correlated linear relation in monkey and
ape troupes between brain size and troupe size  (Chimpanzees and gorillas
live in large tribes of 30 to 40 members).  Tribes compete for territory,
which provides the food and shelter needed for survival, and a
co-ordinated larger group is likely to beat out a smaller one, so there
is selective advantage in being in a well-coordinated larger group.
(These two things taken together suggest that social interaction may
have been a driver for the evolution of large brains.)  Now, if you
extrapolate the primate troupe-size/brain-size curve to human brain size,
you find that a human troupe should be about 200 individuals (after that
it presumably becomes too hard to remember everybody well enough to build
trust or to coordinate).  In fact, this is just the maximum size found
in non-heirarchical societies: Yanomami Indian villages, for instance,
and gypsy bands.  My wife tells me that about 200 members is where
growing churches have their major first crises of identity.

Larger societies were made possible by a series of social inventions
made only during the last 5,000 years:
Institutionalized social positions like Chief and Brave and Medicine Man
and Slave (or King and Soldier and Priest and Merchant and Peasant),
marked by costumery and ceremony, where it's no longer necessary to know 
people individually: you're taught to react to their uniforms.  With
more anonymous interactions, there's more opportunity for getting away
with cheating, so an enforcement mechanism becomes necessary - Tax
collectors and Police.  Big societies still often have an advantage
over little ones, so evolution, now operating rapidly mostly in the
social realm, produces counting, writing, mathematics, pyramids, and you
know the rest.  And now we can't make a living without going to school
for half our lives.

(Most of the brain/troupe results remembered from Merlin Donald's new
  book "The Evolution of Intelligence", where it was attribituted to
  original work who's author I don't remember)

   > [Marxist societies] didn't work.   (Social) Evolution in action.
|> 
|> And capitalism *does* work?  (Counterexample provided upon request...)

It's worked for me so far, but that's not the point.  
Differing social organisations, persist, mutate and grow or shrink
in competition with one another, so you have the essentials
for a Darwinian evolution of social structures (with the "genes"
encoded in the attitudes, memories, rituals and lawbooks of the
populations affected).  As with DNA based evolution of biological
structures, the fitness criteria change with time, affected by things
like weather, the competition, new technologies, etc.).

   > I think a strong argument could be made that the early civilizations
   > depended on slavery the way ours depends on mechanization, and wouldn't
   > have worked otherwise.
|> So therefore it was right?

I don't believe in a universally absolute right and wrong as you seem
to (based on your unqualified question).  I believe it was an appropriate
social institution for its time.  Slaves were the large-civilization
institutionalization of the guy in the tribe that everybody picks on,
who gets to do all the dirty work, who gets fed last.   There's
a pecking order among chickens, wolves, chimpanzees and humans.
It seems to be a necessary, or at least stabilizing, solution to
the problem of group decision making.  Instead of fighting over
every decision, we'll establish in advance who has to follow who's
orders.

|> "Basic survival" of the *free*, and *not* basic survival of all members of
|> the culture.  (BTW, would *you* have been content to be a slave in Rome,
|> knowing that, in your small way, you were producing the leisure time
|> necessary to develop the foundations of Western civilization.  *I* certainly
|> wouldn't have been...)

If I were a slave in Rome, I would have had the choice of obedience
or death, probably.  I probably would have chosen obedience.  Nobody
gets everything they want (and some who get more than average seem to be
less content, on average).  My life still might have been better and
longer as a slave in a thriving civilization than if I had lived as a free
man in some starving, disease ridden barbarian tribe.   And I think my
distant relatives of the 20th century would probably be better off for there
having been an imperial Rome.  (sort of past-future subjunctive: they never
taught me that tense in school!)

|> No doubt these things are instinctual.  The list you give, though, is
|> a far cry from what is necessary for the sociobiological claim that
|> almost *all* human ethics is derived from our evolutionary heritage.

	That's a leftist caricature of the Wilson's sociobiological
position, just as its opposite "all human behavior is the result of
conditioning" is a caricature of Skinner's behaviorist position.

|> Um...aren't we being a little misleading here?  The debate between
|> Wilson, Dawkins, and others vs. Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould, and others
|> has by no means "faded away", nor, as far as I understand it, is
|> radical sociobiology embraced by most biologists.  It *is* true that
|> there has been a recognition that evolution shapes behaviour as well
|> as morphology.  However, the "just-so stories" that sociobiologists
|> try to tell about behaviours are for the most part simply ad hoc
|> accounts, with *very* little work examining the actual selection
|> pressures at work, and *no* attempt to quantify their work, or indeed
|> suggest what would count as a falsification of their explanation.  This
|> is "science"?  Sounds more like religion to me...

	So what's your alternative?  REAL religion?  or humanist
subjectivist (windbag) crypto-religion?    The just-so stories are
theories about the evolution of various observed (or predicted) features.
When developed sufficiently they can be used to build mathematical models
that make testable predictions (like the brain/tribe correlation above,
or expected ratios of alternative reproductive strategies, or expected
ratios of parasitism, or mimicry.)

|> By the way, I would still suggest that you read _Vaulting Ambition_
|> by Kitcher.  His extremely detailed attack on Wilson is simply
|> devastating.   

Sounds like a hatchet job to me, from the title alone.  There is a very
strong political motivation in the opposition to sociobiology - as it
undercuts most of the Marxist social engineering premises.  Anyway,
the field has moved beyond Wilson's pioneering work, and many issues of
Science and Nature in recent years have an article or two comparing
observed behavior mixes against mathematical utility models.

|> >The message hasn't gotten through to the softer heads
|> >in the humanities, though.
|> 
|> But didn't you say that *society* shapes us, too?  So why should we
|> be that interested in a view that for the most part denies this?

You don't quite understand (misled by leftist caricatures, probably).
Dawkins, for instance, talks not only about genes, but about their
cultural analog "memes".  Memes are sort of atomic units of learned
behavior, that replicate by spreading from mind to mind.  They
replicate, mutate, and survive differentially just like DNA genes,
and so are as subject to evolutionary logic as the DNA variety.
Memes have more tricks than genes, so the story can be more
complicated, but evolutionary utility is a great approach in the
study of culture as well as biology.  It has been said that biology
makes sense only in the light of Darwinian evolution.   Study of
social organization and change seems to approachable the same way.

Results from this kind of thinking that have excited me in recent
years include Robert Axelrod's famous computer tournaments that
demonstrate that being nice (cooperate, then tit-for-tat), rather
than cheating whenever possible, is the strategy with the highest
payoff in most long-term relationships.  And Herb Simon's recent
theory/calculations that a package of memes can do well (that is
reproduce itself effectively) even if it contains "tax" items (like
inducements towards non-reciprocated altruism) that have a negative
value, as long as the package overall has a net positive value to
those adopting it.  This is because it's expensive and error prone
for individuals with limited observational, computational and time
resources to sort out the tax items from the goodies, and a viable
biological tendency would be to adopt learned packages whole.  So
your church can get away with teaching you to tithe and to proselytize
at the same time it teaches you to read and to be nice.

To me it's utterly clear that such a utilitarian, mathematical
approach to human (and animal, plant and robot) behavior is light-years
ahead of one based on ancient humanistic concepts like morals.
At best the humanistic concepts are oversimplified, distorted,
cartoons of the underlying utility mechanisms.

|> Honestly, Hans, must you be *quite* so rude?

The medium made me do it.  It just seemed funny at my end.
But I find it SO hard to take leftist humanists seriously.
So passionate!   So viscious!   So humorless!   So ludicrously wrong!  

|> - michael
				-- Hans




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