Agents don’t need to merge by changing anything in their individual preferences, merging is just a way of looking at the system, like in process algebra. Three agents can be considered as three separate agents cooperating with each other, or as two agents, one a merge of the first two of the original ones, or as one merged agent. All different perspectives on the same system, revealing its structure.
The crucial relation in this picture is that the global cooperation must be a Pareto improvement over cooperations (merges) among any subset of the agents. This is a possible origin for the structure of fair coopertive strategy. More than that, if each agent that could otherwise be considered as individual is divided in this manner on a set of elementary preferences, and all of these elementary preferences are then dumped together in the global cooperation, this may provide all the detail the precise choice of the fair cooperative strategy might need. The “weights” come from the control that each of the elementary agents has over the world.
Are you familiar with Cooperative Game Theory? I’m just learning it now, but it sounds very similar to what you’re talking about, and maybe you can reused some of its theory and math. (For some reason I’ve only paid attention to non-cooperative game theory until recently.) Here’s a quote from page 356 of “Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, Vol 1”:
Of all solution concepts of cooperative games, the core is probably the easiest to understand. It is the set of all feasible outcomes (payoffs) that no player (participant) or group of participants (coalition) can improve upon by acting for themselves.
I couldn’t find anything that “clicked” with cooperation in PD. Above, I wasn’t talking about a kind of Nash equilibrium protected from coalition deviations. The correlated strategy needs to be a Pareto improvement over possible coalition strategies run by subsets of the agents, but it doesn’t need to be stable in any sense. It can be strictly dominated, for example, by either individual or coalition deviations.
A core in Cooperative Game Theory doesn’t have to be a Nash equilibrium. Take a PD game with payoffs (2,2) (-1,3) (3,-1) (0,0). In Cooperative Game Theory, (-1,3) and (3,-1) are not considered improvements that a player can make over (2,2) by acting for himself. Maybe one way to think about it is that there is an agreement phase, and an action phase, and the core is the set of agreements that no subset of players can improve upon by publicly going off (and forming their own agreement) during the agreement phase. Once an agreement is reached, there is no deviation allowed in the action phase.
Again, I’m just learning Cooperative Game Theory, but that’s my understanding and it seems to correspond exactly to your concept.
The following is an honest non-rhetorical question: Is it not misleading to use the word ‘cooperation’ as you seem to be using it here? Don’t you still get ‘cooperation’ in this sense if the subsets of agents are not causally interacting with each other (say) but have still semi-Platonicly ‘merged’ via implicit logical interaction as compared to some wider context of decision algorithms that by logical necessity exhibit comparatively less merging? This sets up a situation where an agent can (even accidentally) engineer ‘Pareto improvements’ just by improving its decision algorithm (or more precisely replacing ‘its’ decision algorithm (everywhere ‘it’ is instantiated, of course...) with a new one that has the relevant properties of a new, possibly very different logical reference class). It’s a total bastardization of the concept of trade but it seems to be enough to result in some acausal economy (er, that is, some positive-affect-laden mysterious timeless attractor simultaneously constructed and instantiated by timeful interaction) or ‘global cooperation’ as you put it, and yet despite all that timeless interaction there are many ways it could turn out that would not look to our flawed timeful minds like cooperation. I don’t trust my intuitions about what ‘cooperation’ would look like at levels of organization or intelligence much different from my own, so I’m hesitant to use the word.
(I realize this is ‘debating definitions’ but connotations matter a lot when everything is so fuzzily abstract and yet somewhat affect-laden, I think. And anyway I’m not sure I’m actually debating definitions because I might be missing an important property of Pareto improvements that makes their application to agents that are logical-property-shifting-over-time not only a useless analogy but a confused one.)
This question is partially prompted by your post about the use of the word ‘blackmail’ as if it was technically clear and not just intuitively clear which interactions are blackmail, trade, cooperation, et cetera, outside of human social perception (which is of course probably correlated with more-objectively-correct-than-modern-human meta-ethical truths but definitely not precisely so).
If the above still looks like word salad to you… sigh please let me know so I can avoid pestering you ’til I’ve worked more on making my concepts and sentences clearer. (If it still looks way too much like word salad but you at least get the gist, that’d be good to know too.)
Is it not misleading to use the word ‘cooperation’ as you seem to be using it here?
Yes, it’s better to just say that there is probably some acausal morally relevant interaction, wherein the agents work on their own goals.
(I don’t understand what you were saying about time/causality. I disagree with Nesov_2009′s treatment of preference as magical substance inherent in parts of things.)
Agents don’t need to merge by changing anything in their individual preferences, merging is just a way of looking at the system, like in process algebra. Three agents can be considered as three separate agents cooperating with each other, or as two agents, one a merge of the first two of the original ones, or as one merged agent. All different perspectives on the same system, revealing its structure.
The crucial relation in this picture is that the global cooperation must be a Pareto improvement over cooperations (merges) among any subset of the agents. This is a possible origin for the structure of fair coopertive strategy. More than that, if each agent that could otherwise be considered as individual is divided in this manner on a set of elementary preferences, and all of these elementary preferences are then dumped together in the global cooperation, this may provide all the detail the precise choice of the fair cooperative strategy might need. The “weights” come from the control that each of the elementary agents has over the world.
Are you familiar with Cooperative Game Theory? I’m just learning it now, but it sounds very similar to what you’re talking about, and maybe you can reused some of its theory and math. (For some reason I’ve only paid attention to non-cooperative game theory until recently.) Here’s a quote from page 356 of “Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, Vol 1”:
I couldn’t find anything that “clicked” with cooperation in PD. Above, I wasn’t talking about a kind of Nash equilibrium protected from coalition deviations. The correlated strategy needs to be a Pareto improvement over possible coalition strategies run by subsets of the agents, but it doesn’t need to be stable in any sense. It can be strictly dominated, for example, by either individual or coalition deviations.
A core in Cooperative Game Theory doesn’t have to be a Nash equilibrium. Take a PD game with payoffs (2,2) (-1,3) (3,-1) (0,0). In Cooperative Game Theory, (-1,3) and (3,-1) are not considered improvements that a player can make over (2,2) by acting for himself. Maybe one way to think about it is that there is an agreement phase, and an action phase, and the core is the set of agreements that no subset of players can improve upon by publicly going off (and forming their own agreement) during the agreement phase. Once an agreement is reached, there is no deviation allowed in the action phase.
Again, I’m just learning Cooperative Game Theory, but that’s my understanding and it seems to correspond exactly to your concept.
Sounds interesting, thank you.
The following is an honest non-rhetorical question: Is it not misleading to use the word ‘cooperation’ as you seem to be using it here? Don’t you still get ‘cooperation’ in this sense if the subsets of agents are not causally interacting with each other (say) but have still semi-Platonicly ‘merged’ via implicit logical interaction as compared to some wider context of decision algorithms that by logical necessity exhibit comparatively less merging? This sets up a situation where an agent can (even accidentally) engineer ‘Pareto improvements’ just by improving its decision algorithm (or more precisely replacing ‘its’ decision algorithm (everywhere ‘it’ is instantiated, of course...) with a new one that has the relevant properties of a new, possibly very different logical reference class). It’s a total bastardization of the concept of trade but it seems to be enough to result in some acausal economy (er, that is, some positive-affect-laden mysterious timeless attractor simultaneously constructed and instantiated by timeful interaction) or ‘global cooperation’ as you put it, and yet despite all that timeless interaction there are many ways it could turn out that would not look to our flawed timeful minds like cooperation. I don’t trust my intuitions about what ‘cooperation’ would look like at levels of organization or intelligence much different from my own, so I’m hesitant to use the word.
(I realize this is ‘debating definitions’ but connotations matter a lot when everything is so fuzzily abstract and yet somewhat affect-laden, I think. And anyway I’m not sure I’m actually debating definitions because I might be missing an important property of Pareto improvements that makes their application to agents that are logical-property-shifting-over-time not only a useless analogy but a confused one.)
This question is partially prompted by your post about the use of the word ‘blackmail’ as if it was technically clear and not just intuitively clear which interactions are blackmail, trade, cooperation, et cetera, outside of human social perception (which is of course probably correlated with more-objectively-correct-than-modern-human meta-ethical truths but definitely not precisely so).
If the above still looks like word salad to you… sigh please let me know so I can avoid pestering you ’til I’ve worked more on making my concepts and sentences clearer. (If it still looks way too much like word salad but you at least get the gist, that’d be good to know too.)
Yes, it’s better to just say that there is probably some acausal morally relevant interaction, wherein the agents work on their own goals.
(I don’t understand what you were saying about time/causality. I disagree with Nesov_2009′s treatment of preference as magical substance inherent in parts of things.)