yellowgowild

This might be old news to some people but to me it's amazing since my friends and I realized this on our own, and it's so simple...

We got into a discussion over what drives most people to do what they do and after taking each emotion down to its root, we figured that PLEASURE and the avoidance of PAIN was at the root of everything we do. Now some people have different definitions of what pleasure and pain is but you get the idea.

We went a step further and decided that all pleasure stems from the survival instinct, that when you satisfy that survival instint you are rewarded with pleasure, and the pleasure is telling you you are surviving. That might explain why a heroin addict only cares about heroin since its stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain far more than anything else could for that person. I could elaborate further but then I might be reiterating a previous post..... I'd love to argue over this.

Xell101

I say desire and the undesirable would be better choices. SOmething may not necessarily be done for pleasure, but so that one may have a desirable outcome, or obtain something desirable. In the same action may avoid and undesirable result, like going to the doctor may hurt, but that pain is a side affect of something desirable, like a vaccination.

Not everything is done for a reason that benefits yourself, yesterday I helped some random guy move stuff from his truck to his garage, scurrying back and forth with some pretty heavy stuff, looked like he could use some help.

I'd say it is either for desire, the avoidance of that which is undesirable, or it is merely consistant with who you are.

chavos

explain why people create art then? it makes them happy because it's more likely that artists survive?

you've hit upon a classic over simplification....

ARTelevision

right. simple-minded people are pleasure driven.
human motivation is as complex as humans are.

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create evolution

CSflim

yellowgowild I would agree with you in part, but I would also suggest, like others have done, that you have oversimplified.

Everything we do comes from following our emotions(^1). Our emotions are pretty damn complex...a lot more to them than mere pain avoidance.

All of our emotions stem from what our DNA "wants". Our DNA uses a stick and carrot approach in order for us to do its bidding. Sex is pleasurable because it is what our DNA wants us to do. Getting mauled by a lion is painful because it is not what our DNA wants us to do.

Sometimes our emotions will make us do things which are illogical from a "preservation of self" point of view. E.g. many parents would willingly put themselves in danger in order to save their children.

Pretty much all of our "emotions" stem from encouraging the survivability of our DNA. For the most part this is fairly obvious...we have a desire to look successful to a potential mate, we have a desire to reproduce, we have a desire to eat, we have a desire to raise children, etc etc.

For some emotions, this is less obvious, but is still explainable.
Take the urge to create.
Surely as chavos claims, there is no inherent survivability to human creativity?
Of course there is! Without creativity, we would have no tools, no clothes, no agriculture, no nothing!
Admittedly in the modern sense of the word, most people would consider "true" creativity as only the creation of "useless" objects(^2)...art. This is a sad state of affairs. Creativity is what drives the sciences and engineering to this day. Certainly it is possible to have creativity in "isolation", and so create art, but this is not the full extent of creativity.

Or take the emotion of curiosity.
"Curiosity killed the cat", surely there is no survivability inherent in curiosity...the exact opposite seems correct?
Wrong! Take for instance lion cubs. Imagine two families. One family gives birth to "curious" lion cubs, the other gives rise to cubs with no curiosity.
The curious cubs will spend their youth exploring the territory. Looking around, trying to find out more about where they live. The other cubs won't. Now obviously the curious lion cubs are putting themselves at risk, by wandering from the den. The mother's protectiveness of her offspring will keep this in check, by not allowing them to wander too far. An equilibrium will be found between being overprotective, and being careless.
When the curious cubs grow up, and have to fend for themselves, they will already have the knowledge of the locality, which will become a major survival advantage, over the non-curious lion, who are, only now starting to explore their environment.

________________________________
(^1)By emotion I really mean that in the “extended” sense of the word. Not the narrow sense that we would often use.

(^2) Some might leap on this opportunity to declare me a philistine for claiming that art is useless. I mean useless in the “practical” sense of the word. You cannot eat a Da Vinci or use a Monet to go out hunting. Also, I use the word “art” to refer to the institutionalised art we have today. I mean art as meaning the art which you would find in a gallery. Personally I have a much broader interpretation of art, and the greatest “works of art” of all, could never be confined within the walls of a gallery.

________________________________

Here’s a related post that I made in the thread Emotion: Man's Greatest Fault

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Kyo

People create art so they can sell it, or (more likely) because they enjoy creating it. I haven't met an artist that didn't like what they do.

I don't believe it is an oversimplification - people tend to do what makes them feel good. Even self-sacrifice makes people feel warm and fuzzy inside because they know they did the 'noble' thing. Nobody likes pain (anybody who derives pleasure from pain is feeling pleasure, not pain). People will do what it takes to avoid it. The shot is a case of foresight - some pain now to protect against more pain in the future.

And of course, all beings tend towards self preservation.

Biologically speaking, however, there are many inconsisten human behaviors. Laughter, for instance, serves no biological purpose - animals don't laugh. Why are things 'funny'? What could this trait have evolved from? Love, also, is not biologically intuitive. Maternal love, yes, but sexual love is not. Reproduction is more efficient and effective if the two parties are not emotionally attached to each other. In today's society, biologically sound reasoning would be for women to look for the richest, most able-bodied men - not the men with the greatest smile or personalities.

Caring for the elderly and the terminally ill are also counter-intuitive. It is a waste of resources, and in the case of the ill, a weakening of the gene pool. The more sick and weak people we keep alive, the weaker the human race is on the whole.

There is a lot that doesn't make sense in a purely biological sense, which makes many wonder how these behaviors evolved in the first place.

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Sure I have a heart; it's floating in a jar in my closet, along with my tonsils, my appendix, and all of the other useless organs I ripped out.

ARTelevision

I see a lot of people who make their lives unpleasurable.
They are motivated by things like self-hatred, spitefulness, rage, etc. If you know want to say that this makes them feel good - you have just created a situation where the original concept is meaningless. If everything can be called "pleasure" then it doesn't have any meaning.

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create evolution

CSflim

A sense of humour is the one thing that I have yet to figure out. I was going to create a thread discussing it. I have a number of disconnected conjectures about it, my main falling point is finding a "unified" understanding....we percieve humour as something singular.

Sexual love is biologically intuitive. Given the difficulty of attracting a mate, its makes sense that you do your very best to keep that mate.
1. You will protect that mate, and ensure that no harm comes to that mate.
2. You will ensure that your mate knows your feelings, by showing affection. Otherwise you run the risk of your mate becoming bored, and leaving you.
3. You want to ensure your mate persists in believing that you would make a good parent, by showing your caring side.

Where did you get that idea from?


"in today's society" is the important thing to bear in mind. Modern Society has only been around in a blink of an eye in geological time.
So most of our instincts are directly inherreted from our "natural" times.
Further more i believe that most our our inherrited instincts do in fact translate very well into modern society.
The simple fact of the matter is that rich men do in fact tend to "look" more attractive than paupers.
Sociological experiments have proven this. a group of women were asked to take part in an experiment. They we sat at a table outside a cafe/restaurant. They had to comment on the attractiveness of everyman that walked into the place. They we're to only comment about his physical looks, not say his fashion sense, or anything like that.
Men turned up, and were rated accordingly. Two notable apperances were:
A man who turned up in a very old battered car, wearing reasonably cheap clothes. He was of course rated as frighfully ugly.
Later on in the day, a man arrived in a very expensive looking car, and got out, wearing a designer suit. This man was seen as incredibly sexy.
Of course, you've guessed it, they were in fact the same man.
Our perception of "sucess" gets projected onto the physical appearance of the person.

The other factor of what makes someone appear attractive is how fit a parent they would make.
In all cases, health is one of the main things which makes a person appear attractive.
In the case of women, they also want to see their man as being strong and athletic. They want a hunter-gatherer who will be able to provide for the familty, and protect them.
Men want a curvy figure, as that it a sign of sexual maturity.
(Now in modern society our perception of sexyness has been perhaps distorted by the media. This is debatable. We have other threads for that, but my belief is that yes they have, to an extent, but it is hard to tell exactly how much)

Caring for the elderly is somethign we have only had to do in modern society. Before this, in almost all cases, people died long before they would have been considered elderly, and hence useless.
It is a moral decision on our part to look after the elderly. But to be honest with you, "caring for the elderly" is hardly the number one priority of the vast number of people int he world. Stick 'em in a home, and keep 'em quiet, seems to be the more common attitude.
Further more, individuals don't care about the human race as a whole. They care about themselves.

Quote:

There is a lot that doesn't make sense in a purely biological sense, which makes many wonder how these behaviors evolved in the first place.

Admitedly it is often hard to detangle the complex web of factors that cause these traits to evolve, but that doesn't make me doubt in any way, that these traits did in fact evolve.
Bear in mind, that we still have an appendix, despite the fact that it serves no useful purpose. Its purpose has been lost in the sands of evolutionary time.

Further more, I am not a "Social Evolutionist", though I am sure that it may seem that I am. I am stating that evolutionary survivability is the root cause of emotions, not the single only factor that must be taken into consideration, as some people seem to believe. In other words, while i believe "nature" plays a crucial role in forming us, I don't see that we should ignore "nuture".

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Kyo

In terms of 'love', I don't understand where monogamy came from - which leads to me believing reproduction to be more efficient in the absence of moral attachment. 'Keeping a mate' means killing or otherwise dominating all of your competitors. If you are the last man standing, where else can the women go? Similarly, if a superior male comes along, why shouldn't all the women go to him?

Consider - if you ever 'loved' anyone that was biologically inferior, you would have defeated survival of the fittest. From a natural standpoint, there is no reason why any but the most superior specimens of humankind should ever be reproducing. There is no reason why any but the most superior should even survive, really. Those with terminal illnesses, disability, etc. should all perish rather quickly, if nature had its way.

To put it more succinctly, I don't understand why humans don't act more like pack animals in all aspects. Where did the spark that eventually became 'society' come from? Not ignoring nurture is fine - but it had to start somewhere.

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Sure I have a heart; it's floating in a jar in my closet, along with my tonsils, my appendix, and all of the other useless organs I ripped out.

chavos

you misread me, csflim. it is exceedingly difficult to argue that a person's motivation in expressing creativity, especially abstract creativity, is a direct result of genetic pressures for survivial. that's genetic determinism at it's most close minded, and i believe, it's most errant.

You later make the point that we must not ignore nurture...and i would strongly concur.

CSflim

Certainly, running around "spreading your seed" with every possible partner, will ensure that you have more offspring, but what is important is that these offspring survive. By practicing monogamy, you pay attention to a small group of offspring, and make damn sure that they survive to maturity. Just going around producing illegitimate children is not really a good strategy in the long term.

Well, for the most part, our instincts will tell us to go for the healthiest specimen we can find. This doesn't hold 100% of the time, but certainly in the vast majority of cases.



I don't see how that follows. The inferior amongst us are removed from the gene pool, only in the presence of survival pressure. In this age, in the first world, pretty much anyone who wants to have children, can. There is no selection pressure, and hence no improvement in the gene pool.

In fact, that was the thinking behind Hitler's "master race". If you want to take the strength of the human species as a whole, then Hitler's approach is the way to go. Ignore the fact that Jews aren't objectively inferior, killing the handicapped and the "inferior" people was really for the betterment of the human race.
By sterilising the handicapped, he was attempting to increase the quality of the gene pool! Now you can see why taking the view of the human race as a whole can be quite destructive!

Ah. I see where you are coming from now.
How can a bunch of egoists form a cooperative society?

Well, my best answer to this question is to read Evolution of Cooperation by Robert M. Axelrod. I think it is a shitty way to answer someone by saying "Here: Fuck off and read this book", so I will do my best to sum up the book simply, and if you wish to learn more, then check out this book. I would highly recommend everyone to read it, not least because it is concise and simple, you don't have to make a huge time investment in it, you should be able to finish it in just a few hours.
But first I would have to say that the book is very misleadingly titled, as it is not about biological evolution. It does contain a single chapter on biological evolution, but to consider this a book about "evolution" very much confines where its theory is applicable. This is one of the few books where it seems to apply to absolutely everything! It is without a doubt, a philosophy for life (One woman wrote to him and thanked him for helping her through her divorce!) and it is where I get my sense of "morality" from, despite the fact that ethics or morality are never mentioned in this book.

The book is basically about a simple "game", known as the prisoner's dilemma.
Each player has a choice: Cooperate, or defect.
Then, depending on how the players acted, they are each rewarded a certain number of points:
If they both cooperate, they are both rewarded 3 points.
If they both defect, they are both rewarded 1 point.
If one defects, and the other cooperates, the defector is rewarded 4 points, and the cooperator is rewarded 0 points.

Quite a simple model, but it very effectively acts as an abstracted mathematical model of (almost) any situation where cooperation may occur.

Now suppose you are in this situation, and you don't know what the other player is going to do, do you defect or cooperate?
Well, think it through logically, and you will come to the conclusion that whether your opponent cooperates or defects, you are always better off to defect. Things don't look good for the formation of cooperating egoists! (and hence society).
But this logic only applies to a "once-off" encounter. What if you're going to meet again? Now there is a cause for cooperation. But the question remains, when should you cooperate, and when should you defect? If you keep on cooperating, the other player is probably going to take advantage of you, but if you keep defecting, the other player is going to stop cooperating and you are back to square one.

A tournament of game theorists was set up, and they were all to submit an algorithm to decide when to defect, or cooperate. They set all of these strategies playing with each other in a round robin tournament, to see who would have the most points at the end.
Some of the strategies were incredibly complex algorithms, other were quite simple.
Amazingly it was the simplest strategy of all that won! TIT FOR TAT. All it did, was cooperate on the first move, and then simply copy what the other player did in the previous round.

There was then a second tournament, where people could enter, knowing the results of the previous tournament. TIT FOR TAT won that one as well!

Interestingly, though TIT FOR TAT won the tournament as a whole, it never once scored higher than its current opponent...it simply cannot do so, the best it can hope for is to match the other player's score...but the mentality of "you vs. me" doesn't work in a situation. TIT FOR TAT did well by solicitation cooperation, and so getting high scores, both for itself and the other player.

Axelrod, then goes on to describe what would happen in various other circumstances. I won't go into detail here, but TIT FOR TAT comes out on top in nearly all of them. He then goes on to describe "populations" of strategies...which are stable, and which are not.
Take for instance a population of DEFECTS ALWAYS, can TIT FOR TAT hope to do well in such an environment? Well, obviously not...it cannot solicit cooperation, and so is doomed to score lower than everyone else in the population. In a DEFECTS ALWAYS environment, the best you can hope to score is 1 point per round, by always defecting yourself. But sadly, this means missing out on the potential score of a mutual 3 points per round.

We can assume that a pre-societal population of egoists is modelled quite accurately by DEFECTS ALWAYS. How can a society of TIT FOR TAT arise, given that it cannot score higher than one per round? The answer lies in TIT FOR TAT players sticking together. Even a tiny "island" of TIT FOR TAT players will score a higher average than 1 per round, if they interact with each other on a semi-regular basis (say 10% of the time is with like player, 90% with DEFECTS ALWAYS).
Apply the principles of biological evolution to this mathematical theorem, and you've arrived at something pretty damn profound! In my mind, this is the key to understanding the origin of society.

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Proof:
This proof is reconstructed, I can't remember how exactly Axelrod went about it in the book, but regardless, they both come to the same conclusions.

Let n be the number of interactions between two players
A TIT FOR TAT interacting with DEFECTS ALWAYS will score n-1 points
A TIT FOR TAT interacting with another TIT FOR TAT will score 3n points

A DEFECTS ALWAYS interacting with another DEFECTS ALWAYS will score n points
A DEFECTS ALWAYS interacting with a TIT FOR TAT player will score n + 4 points.

Now assume each player interacts with each other player n times.
Let 1-j:j be the ratio of DEFECTS ALWAYS players to TIT FOR TAT players, where 0<j<1.
We can now work out the score of both types of players.
A DEFECTS ALWAYS player will receive:
n(1-j) + (n+4)j =
n + 4j points

A TIT FOR TAT player will receive :
(n-1)(1-j) + 3nj =
n + 2nj +j -1 points.

Now lets sub in values for n and j.
Let n = 100, and let j = 0.1
DEFECTS ALWAYS scores 100.4 points
TIT FOR TAT scores 119.1
a clear victory!

Now, having 10% of a population just spring into existence is a bit much to ask. However, we must remind ourselves what j actually represents. It represents the probability of a given player interacting with a TIT FOR TAT, as opposed to a DEFECTS ALWAYS. If we were to create a "community" of TIT FOR TATS, our weighting wouldn't be quite so simple, as a TIT FOR TAT player would be more likely to interact with another TIT FOR TAT player, and a defects always would be more likely to interact with another DEFECTS ALWAYS player. This would allow us to have a massively lower proportion of the population using TIT FOR TAT, and still scoring higher than the DEFECTS ALWAYS players. I don't really want to produce a proof of this, but I'm sure that you can intuitively see that it is true (as far as I can remember such a proof is found in the book).
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So, now we can see how Egoists can evolve to cooperate, and do better in life than people who refuse to cooperate, and hence form the societal norms that we observe today.

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CSflim

My point was that art is a result of us having a disposition towards the "emotion" of creativity, and that creativity in of itself does have inherrent surviability benefits.

To put it another way, nothing that an artist does is going to contribute towards his/her survivability, but art is a manifestation of our need to create, and that "need to create" does have a very strong survival benefit.

And yes, after re-reading my post It did in fact appear as though I came off sounding like a "genetic detrminist" or a "social evolutionist", hence the footnote in my second post. My point is not that evolution is the be all and end all in life, but rather our "instincts" and "emotions" have all formed due to evolution.
How we use these emotions/instincts is a result of our personal intelligence, and the environment we find ourselves in.
So I am of the belief that it is "nature" which creates us as we are, but it is our "intelligence" or "society" or "nurture" which determines which traits rise to the surface, and how they manifest themselves.

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EeOh1

Chavos hit upon a brilliant point. I was in the bandwagon, but the point is very powerful.

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If life gives you lemons...throw them at someone.

Kyo

Actually, I've been over the Prisoner's Dilemma quite a number of times - but always in a purely game theory context. I suppose this would be a case of me not being able to put two seemingly unrelated concepts together.

There are several points to make, however.
1) TIT FOR TAT does not take advantage of unresponsive strategies. For instance, if paired against a strategy that always cooperates, TIT FOR TAT will always score 3 points, when it could always defect and score 5. In real-world terms, I see this as being able to reliably 'dupe' the other party - something which corporations and governments are quite good at.
2) TIT FOR TAT also doesn't do very well against random strategies, because it inherently assumes that the other strategy is attempting to earn the most points. Humans are far from perfectly logical and are prone to indecision and random action.
3) TIT FOR TAT is also a victim of echo strategies. If you are paired with another TIT FOR TAT, except that it throws in a random defection, they will alternate between cooperate and defect forever - earning a lower average than the cooperation payoff (by alternating the 'sucker' payoff and the 'temptation' payoff)

To demonstrate a different point, however, consider Shubik's dollar auction. I have little doubt you've heard of it, but just in case, here are the rules:
a) A dollar bill is being auctioned, and will go to the highest bidder. Bids start at one cent, and each new bid must be higher than the previous one.
b) The second-highest bidder still has to pay - but for nothing!

This is obviously an extremely bad situtation to be caught in. Someone will obviously bid 1 cent. If you can get 99 cents of the deal, why not? But then, someone else thinks, "I could have that dollar for 2 cents." They bid 2 cents. But now the first bidder is in the unhappy position of paying 1 cent for nothing, so he bids 3 cents, etc. We keep going until the bid hits $1.00 even. But the previous bid was 99 cents. If he doesn't make a new bid, he will lose 99 cents. So he bids $1.01. And the game continues. Regardless of how high the number, the second-highest bidder will always be able to improve his position by almost a dollar by topping the current high bid.

This experiment was conducted at MIT, and it was found that a dollar could routinely be 'sold' for amounts much larger than a dollar - people were buying a dollar bill for $5!

Cooperation, in this case, would be to just let the first bidder take the dollar - for 1 cent. But that never happened.

The real-life analogy is 'investing too much to pull out.' Like waiting for hours in line for an amusement park ride, only to find out that part of the line was hidden and is actually twice as long as you thought it was. Or watching a movie that's terrible, but thinking you might as well finish it because you're almost done anyway. Television companies know about this syndrome, and tend to put more commercials near the end than at the beginning, because they know people are likely to want to finish the movie even if commercials are appearing at a rate of one after every scene.

On a different note, about spreading your seed rampantly - wild animals do it, and it seems to work for them. I don't know enough biology to form a more complex formulation, so if you can explain why it wouldn't have worked for humans, I'll take it at face value.

CSflim

That's true. But all of these points are addressed in this book. Going into detail on them, would be going far too much off topic, but the simplest thing to bear in mind, is whether or not populations using these strategies are stable or not.

1. "COOPERATES ALWAYS" would be very easily "invaded" by DEFECTS ALWAYS.
2. TIT FOR TAT does reasonably well against RANDOM. It is not it's best partner, but it does as well as can be expected. Plenty of other strategies also do terrible against RANDOM.
3. This is also true, and is one of the biggest problems with TIT FOR TAT. A solution to TIT FOR TAT's problem is available, but is unworkable within the prisoner's dilemma, but works in the vast majority of "real" situations.
You might call it 75% TIT FOR TAT. If you assume that rather than just having the clear cut option of defection or cooperation, you can also have any shade of grey in between, a more durable form of tit for tat would be to defect by 75% of the amount that the other player did.
So if the other player defects by 0% (i.e. cooperates) then you also defect by 0%. If the other player defects by 100% (i.e. defects) then you defect by 75%, and the other player will defect by 56%, and then you will defect by 42%, then he will defect by 31% etc etc.
I'm sure that there is a "golden" number, I just picked 75% off the top of my head.


Well this auction is really a similar thing to a single round of the prisoner's dillema. In order for cooperation to arise, you need for the same group of players to go through the auction numerous times, the only difference being that there is not "mutual" gain. It is a case of you vs. me.
But in an abstracted sense, a TIT FOR TAT-like stategy could be found stable, allowing each player to take turns in winning the dollar for a penny....
However, i don't see how this links in with the argument at hand?

Quote:

On a different note, about spreading your seed rampantly - wild animals do it, and it seems to work for them. I don't know enough biology to form a more complex formulation, so if you can explain why it wouldn't have worked for humans, I'll take it at face value.

I guess it's a different stategy of reproduction.
Do I run around and try and make as many offspring as possible, and then hope that at least, by the law of averages, some of them are to survive.
Or do I "put all my eggs in one basket" and stick around to protect them, to make damn sure that they survive?

It's the same with plants. Some plants produce loads and loads of seeds, and just have them scatter around in the hope that at least a few of them will grow (dandelion). Some create only a few seeds, but these seeds are much more robust, and individually are much more likely to survive. (Coconuts).

If you look at it from the point that 90% of illegitatimate children would die, but only 50% of fathered children would die (figures of the pulled out of my ass variety, obviously enough), it would seem that rampant procreation is the way to go...

5 sexual partners = 1 sexual partner.

so anything greater than 5 sexual partners will mean that you are doing better than raising your own kids.

but if you look at the population at a whole, you will see that its numbers would very rapidly decline if this were the case.....90% of the children born would die!

So in this over-simplified model, we can see that it makes evolutionary sense to have a single partner, but different results could be formed by "tweaking the percentages", which may in an abstracted sense, explain why some male animals do not help raise their children.

However, I would point out the difference between helping to raise children, and monogamy, but the two are related.

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Kyo

I actually don't have much argument with TIT FOR TAT - I have a suspicion that I put in my own 2 cents for the sake of being argumentative (it's too enjoyable to me, somehow). It has been shown that given a random population, TIT FOR TAT will eventually take over - even against an exploitive strategy such as 'always defect', by putting 'evolutionary pressure' on the other strategy to cooperate. I'm sure you've read about it and agree, so no, I don't know why I'm bothering.

The reason I bring up the dollar auction is the evidence of discord - obviously these people are incapable of cooperating. If TIT FOR TAT is such a dominant strategy - which has been proven again and again - why don't people follow it? I other words - TIT FOR TAT is evolutionarily stable, and would explain where our tendency for cooperation came from - except that the tendency to cooperate doesn't seem to exist in modern-day society!

In other words - in the actual prisoner's dilema (with real prisoners), how many prisoners would actually choose to cooperate, even if they had reasoned it out? Can you count on the other person to reason it out? Can you count on them not to take advantage of you even if you know they can reason it out?

In other words - taking a single-iteration prisoner's dilemma is a more accurate representation of our various decisions and conflicts than a repeated prisoner's dilemma. If you don't have a chance to retaliate - what do you do? It has been shown, through (and seems intuitive enough, anyway), that people will overwhelmingly tend towards defection.

Greed is all: Note that in a prisoner's dilemma with a finite number of iterations, you can defect at the last iteration to 'beat' the other person - since they will still be cooperating if they are playing a TIT FOR TAT strategy. However, if they wise up to that, they will also know to defect on the last iteration - so you will have to defect on the second-to-last iteration. But they will reason similarly, so you end up defecting at the third-to-last. Fourth-to-last. Fifth-to-last. Etc. Until the entire game is one massive defection.

That's the way real life tends to play out. TIT FOR TAT doesn't really help us in real-world situations. Even Axelrod admits that.

CSflim

hehehe...yeah, thought as much! But don't worry...I do it too!

The big difference is that in "Real Life" you tend to think about things in an apprently "intelligent" manner. As such you logically think the prisoner's dillema through, and come to the conclusion that it undoubtedly better for you to defect.

However, our emotions/instincts are "unintelligent" creations of evolution.
We don't "logically" decide what our emotions are going to be, they simply "are" (to a large extent...social distortion aside).

The creation of a society, and the social norms that go with it would not have been a conscious decison by like minded individuals who intelligently came to the conclusion that they should form these social "rules". Rather societies evolved from uncooperating egoists, into TIT FOR TAT-like cooperating egoists.

Now TIT FOR TAT,a dn the prisoners dillema in genreal is only a rough mathematic abstraction of reality. Reality is much more complex (illustrated nicely by our inability to implement a 75%TIT FOR TAT strategy). However the simple fact remains:
Mutual cooperation is better than mutual defection.
And on this basis it has been shown that it is possible for egoists to "evolve" their cooperation, and so build a society.

Evolution cannot effect what conclusions we come to with our intellect.
Logically speaking, there is no reason for anyone to raise children.
So it would seem that it is in our DNA's best interest not to give us consciouness/intelligence, due to the fact that as automata we are forced to do our DNA's bidding.
But the problem is that there is so huge benefit's to intelligence...someone who is intelligent will be infinitetly more flexible when it comes to competing with an unintelligent automata.
So intelligence will appear to win out....but may not replicate!
This dead end is soved by our DNA giving us intelligence, but also keeping tabs on what we use this intelligence for, by giving us emotions/instincts/desires etc.
So we can use our intelligence to do what we like, but in the vast majority of cases, what we intelligently decide to do, will be benificial rather than detremental to our DNA's chances of replicating itself.

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