I choose to cooperate-- because i can.
Hofstadter was disappointed in his results--he says, "Cooperate was the answer I was hoping to recieve from everyone.". In the problem definition for the single shot Platonia Dilemma, he deliberately selected individuals who he believed would be superrational. Not a random sample.The answer closest to what i would have done was Scott Buresh's. Hofstadter says,
...he treated his own brain as a simulation of other people's brains and ran the simulation enough to get a sense of what a typical person would do.The results of Buresh's simulation (or, einsteinian thought experiment) parallel Hofstadter's sampling results. In Buresh's simulation, he chose to cooperate roughly one third of the time. Two thirds of the chosen players chose to defect, including Buresh. This aligns with my own hypothesis, that reason is non-deterministic.
Phlegm is right, it not possible to think of the single shot PD as a black box, bereft of I/O. Aziz says, he can choose to cooperate based on the mores and social values he has learned (input). Brenner (from Hofstadter's original matrix) cooperated and says he feared being labelled a defector in a published journal (output).
I do not, however, believe that this is a "moral" choice. Morals can contribute to the iterated PD. (Phlegm, you should read Maynard-Smith for this.) But for the single shot, it is more about survival versus altruism.
Now, at this point i could launch into a long-winded discussion of the evolution of cooperation, but Aziz has strictly restricted me to the single shot.
So in closing, i say, i choose to cooperate--because I can. ;)
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posted by jinnderella |
8.15.2006 |