Questions of Survival
I'm not yet ready to accept an a priori ethical system, but I am intrigued by axiologist's comments about game theory, survival and immortality.
According to Plato's Symposium, all lusts stem from the will to eternity and immortality through creation of things, and even the begetting of children, as this is the only victory over death.
Is this anything more than a statement about human nature? Perhaps it is just the survival instinct manifesting itself on our higher personality.
Nature is game theory on a grand scale. Evolution tosses aside entire species just because new species are better competitors. In nature, survival is the only virtue.
On the other hand, human brains are very complex. For most of us, survival is not our only consideration. We take risks every day, and most of us can conceive of a "fate worse than death".
Can we say that it is always better to survive than to become extinct? Is this true only for our entire species, or for individuals as well? What will happen when we invent technology that makes an individual immortal?
Does any of this have any bearing on ethics, or have we just reviewed game theory?
Game theory tells us how to win, but not whether we should try.
doctor(logic)
posted by Doctor Logic @ 10:01 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I think that survival for as long as possible or, as Axiologist earlier put it, 'longevity' is more than a goal. A goal is something you have at least some marginal freedom not to pursue. By contrast, I maintain that longevity is something one absolutely cannot help but try to have more of. I am tempted to put this "poetically" by saying that we do not seek longevity, we ARE longevity.
The standard reply to this is 'what about suicide ?'. I would reply by saying that, in the sentence above, the crucial point is the meaning we give to the word 'we'. If it means just me or a definite group of people, then yes 'we' can commit suicide. Even humanity as a whole could concievably commit suicide. However, LIFE as a whole, concieved in its broadest sense, cannot. One way to support this claim is to say that the very meaning of the word 'life' is 'what has longevity'. Another is to say that when a form of life dies, for any reason, another will necessarily appear to take its place. Self-sustaining pattterns cannot help but emerge. This continouous process of emergence is what we call longevity. That is why longevity necessarily tends towards eternity.
What we now need to explain is ethics, beliefs and 'fates worse than death'. The best way I find to account for these is to say that we are here because we have evolved into beings that continuously generate mental schemata (what we call beliefs) that are able to influence aour behaviour to a certain extent (what we call ethics). The acquisition of this ability has proved a winning move in the evolutionary game, and this is why we are here to talk about it. However, the fact that our beliefs control us does not mean that they prompt us to make choices that enhance our survivability in all and every occasion. A capacity for belief-induced behaviour is a winning move but it is not the end of the game. Sometimes it fails. Another way to explain 'fates worse than death' would be to suppose that, in some cases, it makes sense for an individual to die for the sake of the groups global survival.
As examples, we may consider the case in which all your clothes fall off in the midst of a very formal party and everyone sees you in your underwear. To some, this may be 'a fate worse than death' that prompts them to jump out of the window. This is the first case : wrong survival move prompted by a belief. The second case are that of elderly people of certain cultures who go away voluntarily in the wilderness to die of starvation in order to avoid being a burden on their community. This may have been a winning survival move for some of the comunities that adopted beliefs to that effect.
Game theory is of little value except for making poetic statements like those above. The reason is that we have too little elements that we can feed as input to its models. That is why we want to know everything. If we did, we could make use of Game theory because we would have all the premises we need. This why longevity (that is to say US), in its quest for eternity, longs for the holy grail of universal knowledge.
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