I’m not sure we’ve ever had cooperators that weren’t subjects within agents.
In every case I can think of, systems of cooperators (eukaryotic cells, tribes, colonies) arose with boundaries, that distinguish them from their conspecifics, predators, or competing groups, who they were in fierce enough competition with that the systems of cooperators needed to develop some degree of collective agency to survive.
I think the tendency for sub-agents within a system to become highly cooperative is interesting and worth talking about though.
It’s not obvious how to… pierce the boundary… and get them to cooperate with things outside of the system.
I think it might be interesting if you tried to characterize “cooperation” more, give it the same level of vividness or tangibility that agency holds for us. Until then, I’m not sure what you think cooperation is. It might just be complicity. A hammer is a very cooperative object. It goes along with everything an agent might want to do with it, for instance, cracking another agent’s skull. Abundance of complicity often doesn’t lead to conditions of peace. It can be like kindling for wildfires, a source of environmental instability.
Symbiosis is ubiquitous in the natural world, and is a good example of cooperation across what we normally would consider entity boundaries.
When I say the world selects for “cooperation” I mean it selects for entities that try to engage in positive-sum interactions with other entities, in contrast to entities that try to win zero-sum conflicts (power-seeking).
Agreed with the complicity point—as evo-sim experiments like Axelrod’s showed us, selecting for cooperation requires entities that can punish defectors, a condition the world of “hammers” fails to satisfy.
Power-seeking conflict might be zero- or negative-sum in terms of its immediate effect, yet the order which is established after the conflict is over (perhaps, temporarily) is not necessarily zero-sum. Dictatorship is not a zero-sum order, it could be even more productive in the short run than democracy.
I’m not sure we’ve ever had cooperators that weren’t subjects within agents.
In every case I can think of, systems of cooperators (eukaryotic cells, tribes, colonies) arose with boundaries, that distinguish them from their conspecifics, predators, or competing groups, who they were in fierce enough competition with that the systems of cooperators needed to develop some degree of collective agency to survive.
I think the tendency for sub-agents within a system to become highly cooperative is interesting and worth talking about though.
It’s not obvious how to… pierce the boundary… and get them to cooperate with things outside of the system.
I think it might be interesting if you tried to characterize “cooperation” more, give it the same level of vividness or tangibility that agency holds for us. Until then, I’m not sure what you think cooperation is. It might just be complicity. A hammer is a very cooperative object. It goes along with everything an agent might want to do with it, for instance, cracking another agent’s skull. Abundance of complicity often doesn’t lead to conditions of peace. It can be like kindling for wildfires, a source of environmental instability.
Symbiosis is ubiquitous in the natural world, and is a good example of cooperation across what we normally would consider entity boundaries.
When I say the world selects for “cooperation” I mean it selects for entities that try to engage in positive-sum interactions with other entities, in contrast to entities that try to win zero-sum conflicts (power-seeking).
Agreed with the complicity point—as evo-sim experiments like Axelrod’s showed us, selecting for cooperation requires entities that can punish defectors, a condition the world of “hammers” fails to satisfy.
Power-seeking conflict might be zero- or negative-sum in terms of its immediate effect, yet the order which is established after the conflict is over (perhaps, temporarily) is not necessarily zero-sum. Dictatorship is not a zero-sum order, it could be even more productive in the short run than democracy.