Right Reason

Chimps, Game Theory, and Morality

 

In "Chimps Rock at Game Theory" at Marginal Revolution, Alex Taborrak discusses a new paper which finds that chimps are actually really good at game theory:

Economics assumes that people are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. Obviously a bad assumption as we are constantly told. Chimps, on the other hand, are rational, self-interested, lightning fast calculators. That is the surprising conclusion to a great paper by Colin Camerer and co-authors. Camerer had chimps play versions of the matching pennies game also called the cat and mouse game. In the cat and mouse game each player can go left or go right. The cat wins when cat and mouse choose the same strategy. The mouse wins when they choose different strategies. In the simple version the best strategy is 50:50, toss a coin. When the payoffs change, however, the optimal strategies still involve randomization but they change in surprising and nonobvious ways. 

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Camerer et al. also tested humans in similar games and they found that humans often deviate from NE play and they adjust their strategies more slowly when payoffs change, i.e. they learn more slowly! The only thing that Camerer didn’t do was to play humans against chimps in the same game. That would have been awesome! 

 

Two important paragraphs in the original paper are:

Ecological experience and development are likely to play an important role too. In the wild, great apes engage in many competitive strategic interactions such as predatory stalking, young chimpanzee wrestling, border patrolling (which is very much like the Inspection game), raiding crops from human farms, and play chasing (“tag”). Because competitive payoff games are common in chimpanzee life, evolutionary theory predicts that chimpanzees would have developed cognitive adaptations to detect patterns in opponent behavior and to create predictability in their own behavior. More generally, chimpanzees are capable of strategic thinking in cooperative hunting, sneaky copulation, future planning, and many elements of theory of mind computation. Some have argued that the capacity to randomize effectively evolved because primate predatory behavior and routine social interaction selects for unpredictability in counter-strategies. Experiments also show that chimpanzees are better at competitive tasks than at comparable cooperative ones.

In contrast, humans are relatively highly prosocial and cooperative. As human children begin to speak and acculturate, their play shifts between ages 2 to 4 from solitary and parallel play, to associative and cooperative play. While young chimpanzees continue to hone their competitive skills with constant practice, their young human counterparts shift from competition to verbally-facilitated cooperation.

 

We may think of human beings as great rational calculators, but what matters more to being human is the ability to cooperate. When it comes to being human, morality and the sense of duty, two factors which throw in complications to the prediction of human behavior with game theory, outweigh rational calculation. Charles Darwin even noted this in The Descent of Man when he wrote: 

I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, ‘has a rightful supremacy over ever other principle of human action’; it is summed in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance (Darwin 1989[1877]: 101 [97]). 

 

Hawking on Apparent Horizons

 

A new paper, a new thing to talk about. In the paper "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," Stephen Hawking, who had previously reversed his belief that information is lost in a black hole in 2004 after a bet with John Preskill on the topic, now argues that there is no such thing as what it commonly thought of as a black hole, that is a ravenous maw in space which will consume everything within its reach and whatever is unfortunate enough to fall in it is lost to the universe forever. Instead, there are only objects which can capture matter for so long before eventually that matter, in one form or another, escapes with its information preserved. No event horizons, only apparant horizons.

 National Geographic has a story on the topic: 

A new study from Hawking also says that black holes may not possess "firewalls," destructive belts of radiation that some researchers have proposed would incinerate anything that passes through them but others scientists deem an impossibility.

The conventional view of black holes posits that their gravitational pull is so powerful that nothing can escape from them—not even light, which is why they're called black holes. The boundary past which there is supposedly no return is known as the event horizon.

In this conception, all information about anything that ventures past a black hole's event horizon is destroyed. On the other hand, quantum physics, the best description so far of how the universe behaves on a subatomic level, suggests that information cannot ever be destroyed, leading to a fundamental conflict in theory.

No Event Horizons

Now Hawking is suggesting a resolution to the paradox: Black holes do not possess event horizons after all, so they do not destroy information.

"The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes, in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape," Hawking wrote in a paper he posted online on January 22. The paper was based on a talk he gave last August at a workshop at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California.

 

Why the black hole information paradox matters so much for our understanding of the universe is best put by Hawking himself in a lecture he in 2008, entitled "Into a Black Hole":

As particles escape from a black hole  the hole will lose mass, and shrink.This will increase the rate of emission of particles. Eventually, the black hole will lose all its mass, and disappear. What then happens to all the particles and unlucky astronauts,  that fell into the black hole. They can't just re-emerge when the black hole disappears. The particles that come out of a black hole, seem to be completely random, and to bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in, is lost, apart from the total amount of mass, and the amount of rotation. But if information is lost, this raises a serious problem that strikes at the heart of our understanding of science. For more than 200 years, we have believed in Scientific determinism, that is, that the laws of science, determine the evolution of the universe. This was formulated by La~plass as, If we know the state of the universe at one time, the laws of science will determine it at all future and past times. Napoleon is said to have asked La~plass how God fitted into this picture. La~plass replied, Sire, I have not needed that hypothesis. I don't think that La~plass was claiming that God didn't exist. It is just that He doesn't intervene, to break the laws of Science. That must be the position of every scientist. A scientific law, is not a scientific law, if it only holds when some supernatural being, decides to let things run, and not intervene.  

In La~plass's determinism, one needed to know the positions and speeds of all particles at one time in order to predict the future. But according to the uncertainty relation, the more accurately you know the positions, the less accurately you can know the speeds, and vice versa. In other words, you can't know ~both the positions, ~and the speeds, accurately. How then can you predict the future accurately? The answer is, that although one can't predict the positions and speeds separately, one ~can predict what is called, the quantum state. This is something from which both positions and speeds can be calculated, to a certain degree of accuracy. We would still expect the universe to be deterministic, in the sense that if we knew the quantum state of the universe at one time, the laws of science should enable us predict it at any other time. 

If information were lost in black holes, we wouldn't be able to predict the future, because a black hole could emit any collection of particles. It could emit a working television set, or a leather bound volume of the complete works of Shakespeare, though the chance of such exotic emissions is very low. It is much more likely to be thermal Radiation, like the glow from red hot metal.  It might seem that it wouldn't matter very much if we couldn't predict what comes out of black holes.There aren't any black holes near us. But it is a matter of principle. If determinism breaks down with black  holes, it could break down in other situations. There could be virtual black holes that appear as fluctuations out of the vacuum, absorb one set of particles, emit another, and disappear into the vacuum again. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can't be sure of our past history either.The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.