© 2002 The Brotherhood of Man Library
In games theory, the term ‘zero-sum’ refers to a situation that clearly has a winner and a loser that, added together, have zero sum. In contrast, in non-zerosum games the interests of the players may overlap. Examples of the first are tennis, chess, and boxing. Non-zero-sumness is seen in hunting and fishing where participants can help one another in ways that bring benefit to all. Thus zero-sumness tends to be totally competitive while the tendency with non-zero-sumness can be towards increased cooperation.
For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.
William Blake
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.
John Webster
From its origin in games theory, the logic of zero- and non-zero-sumness has been found to have application in areas such as economics and biological and social evolution, and spreading out into the evolution of complexity, directionality, and purpose.
Using these basic principles from games theory, author Robert Wright[1] has erected an impressive summary and interpretation of the biological and human history of our planet to demonstrate that the dynamics of non-zero-sumness have crucially shaped the unfolding of life on Earth.
In accomplishing this task, Wright has also revealed serious weaknesses in works such as that of Richard Dawkins[2] with his The Selfish Gene and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained[3] that mechanistically downgraded purpose, consciousness, altruism, and the likes to the status of meaningless epiphenomena—inconsequential effects rather than being causes of anything at all.
It is the accumulation of the consequences of a multitude of non-zero sum ‘games’ that constitutes ‘growth’ in biological and social complexity—thus defining the direction of the history of life commencing with a primordial organic soup and leading to data communication systems amounting to globalization that transcends the individual.
Author Robert Wright’s thesis is that the orchestration of the multiple societies of living organisms that presently populate our planet is the natural outcome for ‘life’ once it started—provided only that it operates under Darwinian-style natural selection among systems that themselves function through self-regulation inherent in the dynamics of interacting zero-sum and non-zero-sum systems.
Both human history and organic evolution share a common dynamics, the energetic interplay between zero-sum and non-zero-sum forces. These two processes have an overall parallel direction that, in the long term, adds up to growth in non-zero-sumness (this can also be thought of simply as growth in cooperation and accompanying growth in complexity).
Indeed it appears to be close to inevitable that, given long enough, organic evolution must produce creatures so intelligent as to be capable of sponsoring cultural evolution that, in turn, would promote feedback to enhance the drift of organic evolution towards even greater complexity.
For organic (biological) evolution, an intriguing but difficult problem is the first one—how did it get started? Despite all the garbage spoken about the inevitability that life will develop wherever conditions are suitable, the fact is that nobody at all has yet come close to producing a satisfactory explanation for the origin of life. The time factor is often used as excuse. But surely if we optimized the environment for rare events to become less rare and more coincidental, we should have a good chance of reducing the time factor to manageable proportions.
One of these rare events is the composition of the primordial soup. We know the chemistry of all the ingredients that are likely to be required in this soup and can construct many possible mixtures at negligible cost that should have some chance of spontaneously generating life forms. And undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of hopeful biochemists and students do give it a try.
In fact, we can also tip the scales heavily in our favor by including organic polymers, lipids, proteins even enzymes, nucleotides, and nucleic acids that just might kick-start the mix. A report of possible success has yet to hit the airways. Hence we cannot assert with any certainty that it is even possible for ‘life’ to occur spontaneously4. The confidence that it can do so is based solely upon the argument that since life is here, it must be able to happen spontaneously.
There is so much good in the worst ofus,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us.
Anon.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Samuel Johnson
We have a similar situation for a ‘Big Bang’ beginning of our universe. If it occurred it did so before our laws of physics became operative. Thus, whether it really occurred is unknowable. The most the physicist can hope for is that there is no better alternative.
Is God possible? We do not even know for certain that we are possible!! But accepting that we do exist, the first realistic problem for life to solve is related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Allowing that energy can neither be created nor destroyed (for which there is strong evidence), ‘life’ has to cope with the problem that the only way to a higher energy state is to borrow or steal energy from some other high energy source. Here it is that we commence to see the effects of non-zero-sumness.
For an example consider the single-cell gut bacterium E.coli that, on finding itself in a place with no tucker, sends out a chemical messenger called cyclic AMP. This induces its DNA into action to make a tail, a flagellum, that enables the cell to swim to a new environment. Then, having provided itself with the means, it simply keeps swimming until it either finds a better home or perishes from its efforts.
Such a procedure involves the quite complicated cooperative interaction of many components—amounting to a considerable degree of non-zero-sumness. It also produces a complex structure that was not there before, a whip-like flagellum that the cell can manipulate to give itself mobility. In any such change, the 2nd law of thermodynamics insists that the total disorder of the system had to increase.
E. coli did this by burning highly ordered molecules of stored ‘food’ to simpler, more disordered things like carbon dioxide, water, and heat. Behind the scene, a bewilderingly complex ordered sequence of events occurred driven by the cooperative effects of non-zero-sum interactions.
We humans tend to think of ourselves as ‘higher organisms.’ But from an energy efficiency viewpoint we are quite crude compared to our brothers the plants. Complexity, the product of the dynamics of non-zero-sumness, can appear in many forms, some of them being information. The moment we bring information into the equation we can recover our status as ‘highest living organism.’ When we add information processing and ordered cooperation between individuals, our status heightens even more.
It requires the study of only one of thousands of these intricate control systems in living organisms that operate under the guidance of sophisticated information processing and negative feedback controls, to convince any rational person of the quite incredible, almost infinite complexity of even the simplest of living cells.
Multiply that infinity by another infinity (or two) and we might approach the complexity required to sustain a ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer society in the face of competing systems ‘designed’ to reverse the roles and the hunter to become the hunted. Wright thinks that the basic sequence, the conversion of non-zero sum situations into mostly positive sums commenced happening at least 15,000 years ago, then repeated many times. As natural selection pushed us up the evolutionary ladder, so new technologies kept arising, permitting richer forms of non-zero sum interactions—and here we are today, riding in airplanes, sending e-mail, and living in what looks like the beginnings of a global village.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Einstein
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Iris Murdoch
Wright has another target—to seek the hidden potential in the complexity he analyzes in order to reveal the possibility of an external and intelligent agency of control that he calls ‘God’ (but with a humble apology for his absence of qualifications to describe or explain God’s ways). “I’m using ‘God,’” he says, “as a convenient shorthand for something vaguer—the point being just to ask if there are signs of any divinely imparted meaning in the evidence before us. Granted directionality in the sense of growing complexity, is there any directionality along with what you might call a spiritual or moral dimension—or more simply, is there anything at all that might be called spiritual or moral?”
Wright notes that in the modern era the popular view among ‘intellectuals’ became that existence is pointless—plus a firm belief that there are solid scientific grounds for doing so. This paradigm assumes that modern science, by solving the mysteries of life, has actually demonstrated the absence of any higher purpose.
“What these people need,” says Wright, “is a good stiff thought experiment. Imagine another planet on which life evolves. Little bits of self-replicating material (equivalent to our genes) encase themselves through natural selection in a particular armor that exhibits behavioral flexibility. One species in particular—coincidentally a brainy, two-legged organism—becomes capable of exceptional feats like communicating with subtlety, creating artistic masterpieces, watching TV, playing computer games, and so on.”
“These organisms have another characteristic—they lack totally in consciousness, sentience, awareness. It isn’t like anything” to be like one of them. And yes, fire burns their hands and they are designed to pull them away to avoid damage. But they do not feel pain—or happiness, or anything.
“They look and act just like us except everything is without passion or pride. They are just robots with an unusually good skin.”
Such a world lacks those things that many of us believe make life meaningful—devoted love, allegiance, our triumphs and failures, the thrill of accomplishment, etc. Worse, their world is totally lacking in a sense of moral meaning.
These imaginary organisms of an imaginary world are really replicas of what many behavioral scientists assert us to be—machines that do as they do because they cannot do otherwise.
“Ask yourself this question,” says Wright. “Is there anything immoral about unplugging your computer? If not, how could there be anything immoral about ‘unplugging’ your neighbor by some convenient means if he/she is just an insensate organism and happens to be a nuisance to you for some reason?”
This is the kind of world we would live in if words like right or wrong had no meaning. The strangest thing about this imaginary world is that it is exactly the kind of world we would expect ours to become if it had evolved along a pathway in which consciousness and awareness were functionless epiphenomena and morality, goodness, and altruism were mental aberrations that have no effective function in real behavioral responses—as is claimed by so many behavioral scientists.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.
T.S. Eliot
Taking our imagining one step further, why would altruism evolve or exist anywhere in any universe if no force or power of any kind pre-existed that would somehow foster its eventual appearance? Supposedly machines like us do as we do because we cannot do otherwise. What then drove robots such as us to ‘imagine’ all these things that have no reality. What could be the source of such imaginings?
Wright accepts that the embarkation of biological and social evolution on pathways appearing to have an arrow of direction is not proof for the actual existence of an altruistically inclined architect. But surely, he says, it is more suggestive of there being such a divinity than the competing alternative—a world devoid of any meaning or value, having no direction, no valid differentiation of right from wrong, no good or bad, no love, no beauty, no altruism, no consciousness, and no self-awareness!
In such a world, the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot are incapable of evil, can inflict no suffering or unhappiness, and are behaviorally indistinguishable from a Mother Teresa or a Florence Nightingale.
An alternative scenario is a world in which organic and cultural evolution do have direction, a direction even suggestive of benign purpose. In it, from its beginning, life simulated being a machine to generate and process information and meaning that finally deepened to become a machine that creates the potential for good and evil but raises the ratio in favor of the good.
Along the way consciousness and self-awareness appear, perhaps as a response to non-zero-sumness that arises concomitantly with the socialization of the higher species. Consciousness is what it feels like not to be a robot. Self-awareness is what it is like to know you are not a robot. Both characteristics are profound, possibly eternal mysteries that are suggestive of having origin at a higher level than us earthlings—which opens the way for other unsolved questions like free will.
With subtlety and humility, Wright places the reader in many imaginary situations in which the only rational answer is that there really is, or at least ought to be, a transcendent Creator out there somewhere. Only a stubborn mule-head could answer otherwise.
Wright concludes with this comment: “Whether or not you believe that the story of life on Earth indeed has a cosmic author, one thing seems clear: it is our story. And as its lead characters, we cannot escape its implications.”