Before reading “Art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning”

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

A few essentials about the language game: language is cooperation; cooperation, far from being occasional among us, is the underlying condition of humanity as water is to a fish. Cooperation is so basic to our nature that we scarcely notice it. We share a code and share it among us constantly. We are the conversing species. The seven points below are an expansion of H. Paul Grice’s insights into conversational logic. 

1. It is obvious that language evolved and survived for the purpose of conversation — sharing information. As powerful as symbolism is for an individual alone — to have a symbol “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “will” or “may” or “could” or “not” let alone “could not have” or “couldn’t not have” allows us to think about imaginaries beyond the real, possibilities, counterfactuals and even impossibilities, that non symbolic minds cannot think about — as powerful as that individual possession is, it is vastly more powerful for a species to use it for sharing information. Cultural transmission allows rapid technological accrual; instruction on self-protection allows a species to evolve out of instinctual behavior into flexible choice-behaviors including interacting with the world through understanding rather than narrow instinctual responses to it. 

2. If conversation is the purpose of language, then analysing the code (words, grammar, sounds) alone will only get you so far. Language can’t be fully understood except in the context of interaction, and that interaction turns out to be game-theoretic, that is, the value of the symbols (roughly, the words) do not depend only on their value in the code (the language). The most obvious and simple example is sarcasm. The conversational context will determine the final meaning or value of the symbol in a particular conversational situation or context. So even knowing the code and all its symbols does not suffice for understanding the meaning or value of those code-defined symbols.

3. Language is a form of cooperation. It is also the most distinctive behavior of the species. It is a constant behavior, whether in conversation with others or with oneself. The cooperation in language holds even when we argue vehemently: we do so sharing the same code, and our arguments are most vehement when we desperately want the other to agree with us, demonstrating a need for each other in argument as in any other sharing of information. This communication cooperation is accompanied with other forms of cooperation like politeness, deference and even morality. Self-identity — arranging our appearance so that others will understand our place in relation to them — is itself also a form of cooperation. Your choice of clothing, western or ethnic or even weird, are forms of cooperation, accepting the norms even when rebelling, since the rebellion is a rebellion against a norm with a meaning recognized and accepted as such by the rebel. IOW, your most common interactions and even your identity are all forms of cooperation, although we don’t view these as cooperation at all. We take them for granted since they are the underlying conditions of being and living in a culture. 

4. Anyone who thinks humans are a combination of occasional competitiveness balanced with occasional cooperativeness doesn’t understand what “social species” means. We can’t make it on our own. Together we build bridges, fly across the world, conduct wars, understand the origins of the universe. The role of the individual competitor is utterly trivial compared with the cooperativeness of cultural transmission and collective actions. This is the meaning of Newton’s “I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Even competition in a market is working to supply what people want — yet another pervasive aspect of cooperation, the necessary condition for competition is that cooperation of buying and selling under the mutual assumption of trust.

5. Language, the most powerful tool of our species, would never have evolved without the default assumption that what people tell us is true. If we all assumed that we’re being lied to, there’d be no point in conversing at all and language would never have evolved as a species trait. That it did evolve and survive and thrive, demonstrates that our default assumption must be and must have always been that what we are being told is true. That is why it is possible to deceive someone with a lie. If we didn’t assume truth, no one could ever deceive with a lie. And we can deceive with a lie. That’s the meaning of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” For a society with speech, the default assumption must be that everyone is at least sincere and generally accurate. Doubt must be justified. The default must be belief, otherwise we would never have evolved language.

6. This logic of language evolution predicts that humans must be deeply and fundamentally gullible. And, of course, we are. The prediction is abundantly evidenced. Anthropologists and atheists wonder why humans believe in beings without any evidence, invisible beings, absurd beings, fanciful beings, deities, angels, Djinns, devils. The reasons should be obvious. We’re gullible — otherwise we would have no language. We’re social. We’re deeply devoted to, cooperative with, our group. The power of language — that it allows us the flexibility to believe beyond instinctual behaviors that protect us; the gullibility that facilitates cultural transmission; this constellation of cooperativeness that keeps us together and powerful — overcomes every weakness attending it, and that includes the fantasy land of religion. And like any fictional story, the fantasy itself will have some value to its listeners. Where it distinguishes the Us vs Them, all the more value when it isn’t practical (“We do it this ridiculous way just to show that we’re not you! So there.”)

7. We’re actually somewhat stupid as a species. Chimps can handle game-theoretic activities faster and better than we do, and it seems because we’re constantly second guessing each other. We’re invested in what others think. It’s part of the gullibility of conversation and our cooperative sociality. It’s smart in one way — to consider other minds that way, not just what I think and want– but stupid in another. It slows us down and complicates decisions. If you depend on what others do, and not what they think, it’s easier to predict others’ behavior. But if you second guess the other, and assume the other is second guessing you, it’s impossible to make any decision.

Now on to art, craft and artificial intelligence.