Cooperation makes us resilient, but the fruits of cooperation aren’t immediately apparent. You have to keep doing it for a while even though it seems like it sets you back. Until you have a breakthrough. That’s not how nature usually works. Nature usually rewards immediately successful efforts. Humans keep doing unrewarding things beyond “reason” and I think that’s beautiful and I think that makes us human.
I agree that doing things that aren’t immediately obviously necessary is a good trait of humans. I do think that humans seem to value things that don’t have a clear payout besides that humans like them, and I agree that those things are usually beautiful. Eg, art is hard to see as having a payout. But I think it probably has a variety of simple and reliable payouts that make it valuable to do in a Community vs Environment scenario. And nature isn’t picky about how long you took to prepare—the ultimate rule in nature is “that which survives, survives”. there isn’t a strict time horizon there, and so if you can do long-horizon preparation and pull it off, survival will reward it; it seems to me that human survival reliability is higher on short timescales because of preparations that have accumulated—that’s not unusual for nature, the only thing that’s unusual is for the preparations to be accumulating as memetic culture rather than as genetic culture.
Now, that’s not to say that “that which survives” should be our only source of what-is-good. I agree that things that we value are, from the perspective of survival, some degree of waste. But I think we came to value them because, previously, they weren’t waste. My worries about the future can be summed up as “the partially-competitive struggle to survive created everything we love, and competition to survive is inclined to destroy everything we love”.
This is in fact part of a bigger thing I’m writing and will post this week. After I do, can I come back and answer you? I promise I’m not copping out. I just want to be as thoughtful as you are here, and also keep a few things under my sleeve.
And maybe, just maybe, what I’m writing might assuage your fears. I hope it will.
Cooperation makes us resilient, but the fruits of cooperation aren’t immediately apparent. You have to keep doing it for a while even though it seems like it sets you back. Until you have a breakthrough. That’s not how nature usually works. Nature usually rewards immediately successful efforts. Humans keep doing unrewarding things beyond “reason” and I think that’s beautiful and I think that makes us human.
My opinion, of course.
I agree that doing things that aren’t immediately obviously necessary is a good trait of humans. I do think that humans seem to value things that don’t have a clear payout besides that humans like them, and I agree that those things are usually beautiful. Eg, art is hard to see as having a payout. But I think it probably has a variety of simple and reliable payouts that make it valuable to do in a Community vs Environment scenario. And nature isn’t picky about how long you took to prepare—the ultimate rule in nature is “that which survives, survives”. there isn’t a strict time horizon there, and so if you can do long-horizon preparation and pull it off, survival will reward it; it seems to me that human survival reliability is higher on short timescales because of preparations that have accumulated—that’s not unusual for nature, the only thing that’s unusual is for the preparations to be accumulating as memetic culture rather than as genetic culture.
Now, that’s not to say that “that which survives” should be our only source of what-is-good. I agree that things that we value are, from the perspective of survival, some degree of waste. But I think we came to value them because, previously, they weren’t waste. My worries about the future can be summed up as “the partially-competitive struggle to survive created everything we love, and competition to survive is inclined to destroy everything we love”.
Lovely one, thank you for your thoughtful answer.
This is in fact part of a bigger thing I’m writing and will post this week. After I do, can I come back and answer you?
I promise I’m not copping out. I just want to be as thoughtful as you are here, and also keep a few things under my sleeve.
And maybe, just maybe, what I’m writing might assuage your fears. I hope it will.