Thanks for those helpful responses and clarifications. Instead of getting lost in the weeds, I think that what’s most important in this interesting conversation is to be clear on where we disagree and on which disagreements matter more than others.
My best assessment now is that we may be disagreeing mainly about the choice of our theoretical languages. It’s true that I keep associating you with Ayn Rand and with libertarians and cowboy capitalists, because of your resort to game theory. We’ve talked about this before, and you’ve said that you’re much more neutral on those economic questions than are those ideologues. The question that raises for me, then, is whether we still need game theory to make the kinds of analyses and predictions you want to make, given that game theory has been at least hijacked by such ideologues. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
In any case, you speak in game theoretic terms, whereas I speak largely in terms of naturalistic, existential, cosmicist philosophy. Perhaps my way of speaking presupposes game theory or perhaps game theory presupposes a certain ideology. We’d each deny that that’s so for our chosen theoretical language. Regardless, what matters is whether those languages make for important, consequential differences in how we understand the world. Honestly, I’m not so sure there are such differences here, given your avowed neutrality (your disagreement with the neoliberal ideologues). For example, I’m critical of capitalism but I’m not anti-capitalist in the sense that I think we should abolish capitalism even though we don’t have an obvious workable alternative to it.
Still, I have some problems with game theory as a theoretical framework. You’re treating it like game theory is as fundamental as physics, which strikes me as odd. Sure, there can be a geometry or logical structure of strategies. But strategies are emergent, not fundamental in nature. Thus, when you say that “strategies compete,” I think that’s an anthropomorphism. Animals and people compete because “compete” means “to strive to outdo another for some gain.” Strategies aren’t alive so they don’t strive, which is where Dawkins’s gene’s eye view and memetics go off the rails.
Strictly speaking, competition applies to formal games, and life isn’t a game. The core of game theory was generalized to apply to the evolution of life, which is fine if we refrain from carrying over the connotations of the limited discourse to the more general one. There’s a danger of doing so, since Darwin arguably carried over some connotations of nineteenth century capitalism to his understanding of how animals generally relate to each other. Natural selection doesn’t require those connotations for biological understanding, but the connotations surface in social Darwinism, in Nazism, and in American libertarianism.
Likewise, as a mathematical construct, game theory may not depend on the connotations of “competition” and “strategy,” but those connotations surface in the ideological, American use of that theory in the Cold War and in neoliberalism. I understand that game theory can be applied just as well to socialism, and that you’re not a zealous libertarian.
But now I want to ask whether, once we’ve dispensed with that ideological use of game theory and disposed of the connotations that strictly apply only to the playing of formal games like chess or poker, we still need game theory to understand the evolutionary, economic, or sociological domains.
You keep coming back to the distinction between plus-sum and zero-sum outcomes, and you go as far as to affirm that “Evolution does indeed favor plus-sum outcomes.” Yet that distinction seems to me a free parameter. Is baseball really a plus-sum endeavour? Within the team, yes, but within the league, no, because only one team wins the playoffs, and teams don't share their profits. The league isn't a union or a commune. And in each game one team wins and the other loses. So individuals can join forces to form collectives that act as individuals in a higher-level, noncooperative endeavour.
Similarly, humans often cooperate outside formal games, which is good for us. But by doing so we typically succeed at the expense of all other species. So is the whole affair of life on this planet still plus-sum, or when we shift to the larger context, does our strategy of cooperation look like a move in a zero-sum struggle for dominance? You say the logical nature of game theory is as “absolute” as the second law of thermodynamics. On the contrary, this core distinction in game theory seems to me relative. In that respect, game theory is like neoclassical economics which rationalizes consumerism by ignoring the downsides as externalities. To that extent, game “theory” is propaganda or ideology, not science.
You’re interested only in the scientific uses. Fine, but would you agree that whatever you can explain with game theory I can explain with naturalistic philosophy that needn’t resort to game theory? We’d both be talking about evolution at some level, since we’d both take on board the sciences, but you’d prioritize the language of game theory in certain reductive moves, while I’d operate with a looser vocabulary.
Again, the question is whether you’d capture something I’d be missing, or whether the general use of game theory does more good than harm. Leaving aside the domain of formal games like checkers, I wonder whether you think there’s some specific phenomenon that game theory explains that I can’t understand without presupposing game theory. If not, our main disagreement may be just an arbitrary choice of different theoretical languages.
