Thoughts on Morality, Control and Game theory
As Bob Pirsig has said in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", ghosts are entities which exists only in the mind, and all scientific theories, conspiracy theories are also ghosts in the mind, i.e. they are the maps of reality in our mind . It is important to remember that they are just maps, and can be wrong. But nevertheless they can be great tool in understanding the world, and pursuing our dreams in it. It is good to have a verifiable theory of the world. It helps us see the big picture, and see a common thread in myriad chaos of daily life. I too have a pet theory, which I have made & remade over years, sometimes from experiences, many a times by borrowing others' wisdom. I shall describe this theory on this page.
I am a control engineer, working in the areas of "Optimal control". Our brethren worries about doing any task in the best possible or right way. When I was a new student, I often thought of optimization as some clunky math developed to satisfy perfectionist urge of all the world's misers & nitpickers, helping them save a buck here & or a penny there. But soon I realized the primal nature of this tendency. All of us optimize. What? that is difficult to describe..
For the lack of better term, lets call it Value, as in, what we are driven by. This changes with time, space & moods :-) Sometimes we value tranquility, creativity, adrenalin rush, sex, money, power, bliss, vanity, leisure, a good company, music, wellbeing of others (love/ emphathy) and so on. All of above are incentives. But we are driven by disincentives too. They can manifest as simply as inertia/lazyness (discomfort of getting out of it), or as fears & phobias, fear from our conscience or a nagging mind, fear from peer pressure, not following a norm, just to cite a few.
Value can be short term/ long term. e.g. eating a mango is a short term incentive, going to college is for long term incentive of getting a good job, buying a life insurance prevents long term disincentive of family poverty in case of early demise. (In Nachiketa story in AtharvaVeda, Yama calls this "shreya"-long term & "preya"-short term. The wise choice between the two is the secret of happiness!! See.. people knew about optimal control since eternity!)
Where does Value spring from? Is it genetic, cultural or merely transient, we dont have any good answers. But beyond doubt, they govern our actions either consciously / subconsciously. It might be safe to conjecture that Value is some measure of perceived happiness, and action maximizes some weighted sum of all the influencing values. So that is where we prioritize & optimize :-)
e.g. Investors in Stock markets maximize some combination of incentive of the future value of the portfolio and disincentive of risk by their decisions. We give to charity either to satisfy incentive of genuine happiness in giving or to avoid disincentive of nagging mind. Addiction happens when the high of short term incentive blinds out any long term disincentive (dependency & poor health).
Dynamics of Value are very queer. We can control them to some extent by our freewill & actions. (e.g. we can choose to let go the phobias, and repeated action/habit can make a value stronger). Sometimes we can not. The Values over which we have no control, and which we need to accept as they are, is called "Dharma" in Indian texts, which is our inherent nature.
Wisdom lies in exercising the choice. Accepting the Values you can not change, try to minimize being driven by disincentives, and favouring long term incentives more than short term is the ideal receipe for the 'right' way to live. Till now we were hovering in realms of Optimal Control, but Vedas describe that an enlightened person is the one who also doesn't crave happiness, because craving ultimately leads to sorrow. He thus observes all emotions, happiness & sorrow with dispassion, tranquility, and acts so as not to disturb others' minds. Thus he seeks stability, nor highs, nor lows. And stability has been one of most basic aims of Control theory. It is ironic that it is used to tune missile trajectories instead of engineering world peace.
Morality arises out of interplay of Values & actions of more than one person, and Game theory provides ideal framework to study these. Many a times perceiving collective value is difficult, our experiences being subjective & very individual. But nevertheless some special people can see it & can recommend social policy/ thumb rules to achieve it. These people are the leaders, saints, activists, freedom fighters. They rise to prominence by their innate ability to see & pursue greater good. The strategies they recommend become the foundations of a culture, religion, governments, economy, legal system, traditions and books of faith. Note that following these signposts enables all of us easily navigate the treacherous terrain of common good, just the way a trail can take to the summit without knowing underlying map of value. And Morality or Ethics is the net sum of all such thumb rules, social agreements which embed in minds and manifest in actions. They are not set in stone because, if notions of common good change, morality needs to change too.
In the pursuit of greater common good, the set of people with whom we decide to find commonality is again a matter of choice. This is the so called 'Identity'. People identify themselves with different groups, and can have multiple identities. This can lead to conflict, dilemmas on a personal level and constant power struggles going on between factions at a group level, to maximize their own common good at each other's expense, which is cause of so many tragedies in the world.
There are a number of thumb rules to achieve a greatest common good in a society. A number of these have survived the test of time, and found their way in every system of ethics.
Now lets study a bit about Game theory and how it can rationalize the seeming dilemmas, conflicts to their simplest cores, and recommend solutions.
Zero-Sum games: In such games if you win, I have to loose and vice versa. Hence there is no benefit in cooperation. Von Neumann found elegant mathematical solution to solve such games. His method asks both of us to cast a die, or choose policy randomly with a optimal probability distribution. Such two policies form so called, a Nash equilibrium, which means if either players deviate unilaterally (only one at a time) from these policies, he only stands to loose. A superb example is fair division of a cake between two kids. Design the following game: ask one kid to cut the cake, and ask other to choose whichever he wants for himself. The Nash equilibrium for such game is the fair division. If first kid deviates from making equal halves, and if the second kids deviates from choosing the bigger half, respectively, both stand to loose :-) Genius of Von Neumann was to prove existence & uniqueness of such equilibrium for more complicated situations as well. e.g. we can find similar randomized optimal policies in games of rock-paper-scissors and poker. Birth of this theory raised tremendous optimism. People thought that now onwards, all conflicts can be written on paper, solved on paper, and resolved in real life. But alas, they were surrounded by the treacherous terrain of non-zero sum games.
Non-zero sum games: Game is driven by rewards, which are what players value. And value, which is what makes people happy, as we saw earlier seldom obeys the mathematical simplifications. In real world, for example the values do not sum to zero. e.g. In case of cake, one may like the cream, and other may like the base. If they divide accordingly, they may end up much happier than the equal division. This enables possibilities of cooperation, i.e. win-win games , but has also trapdoors in form of prisoners dilemmas, dollar auctions which have no sane mathematical or rational solutions, and which lead to all the persisting conflicts & the evil in the world, as we will see.
Cooperative games: Non-zero sum games are very strange creatures. One subdivision is cooperative games. These are games in which Nash equilibrium, exists and is unique. But thats too abstract. A simplistic way to describe them is that in such games cooperation can be achieved without coordination. Such cooperative arrangements are Nash equilibriums of the game, which every player can calculate on his own. And since there is only one such equilibrium, there is no ambiguity of choice. It is to these games, we owe the whole of mankind's progress, the labyrinth of industry & all good things in capitalism. Playground for such games are free markets. A simple lead pencil, routes its way through lumber mills in Canada, lead mining in Africa, design & assembly in China and is distributed in USA at cheapest possible cost. All of this is specialization & cooperation, but without stringent coordination, which gives power & scale to the free markets. Cooperation has been the constant companion of progress throughout history, as man started living in tribes, villages, cities, nation states. Development of language & communication further accelerated it. Government structure evolved to provide security & promote higher & higher cooperation & prosperity. Cooperation without coordination, if achievable is the most desirous, since it is hugely scalable. This is seen in all free markets. The next best is cooperation with coordination. Coordination requires communication, which needs either a physical proximity, as in cities or electronic proximity, as seen in globalization. Concentration of capital, education, supply, demand and proximity to markets makes cities simmering couldrens of cooperative games. On the other hand, villages frequently suffer from coordination failure, hence cooperation failure, leading to vicious poverty spiral, or stagnant economy. Lack of education, capital, infrastructure, buying power keeps them out of all better games except farming. Poor roads & limited access to market keep even that from prospering, turning villages into economic traps.
Prisoner's Dilemmas: Nonzero sun games turn awry & bewildering, when they fester into prisoner's dilemmas. An accidental discovery by scientists in RAND, it has remained the academic equivalent of concept of evil ever since. Lets first study its bare bones. Two prisoners are arrested as suspects for a theft without incriminating evidence. A clever police officer locks them up in separate cells (note: no coordination possible :-) and offers this 'deal'. "If you both don't confess your crime, you will both be jailed for 1 year. If both of you confess your crimes, you both go in for 6 years. If you confess, and your partner doesn't, then you go scot free, and he goes in for 10 years. and same fate awaits you, if he does and you do not." Now the prisoner faces a very real "dilemma". The best collective outcome is both not confessing, leading to total 1 year in jail. But due to distrust & fear of other person ratting, if both choose to confess, then both suffer. So without cooperation/ trust, it is impossible to achieve greater common good in this case. Cooperation can be in terms of religious belief/ Golden Rule, that I will do as I would like other person to do, since prisoner's cant talk to eachother. He would think, "I dont want other guy to rat, so I wont rat"
Examples of Prisoners Dilemma: are many. Taking responsibility, turnstile jumping, pollution,
Problem of Identity:
Long term vs. short term:
Origins of equality & justice
Coordinated vs. Uncoordinated cooperation
Use of disincentives
Guidelines to incentive structure in modern society
Guidelines to effective personal habits in modern society