X-Message-Number: 8895 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #8883 - #8886 Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 23:36:51 -0800 (PST) Hi again! More on reciprocal altruism. Apparently some economists (NOT immortalists, just people thinking theoretically) have come to a similar conclusion about what an expectation of a very long life would do to us. It goes something like this: If the present value of the future is high enough, and the probability of future interactions between people is sufficiently close to 1, then on the average an individual can best advance his/her own selfish interests by adopting an attitude of altruism toward those he/she meets. A lot here depends on just how expensive that altruism may be, but even if we aren't much richer we will have time --- which means that something it took us a year to accumulate wouldn't feel very expensive. Cf Axelrod, THE EVOLUTION OF COOPER- ATION. Note that the value of the future has to be high. It's not sufficient for everyone to know one another at all. For the value of the future to be high, we must expect to be living then. No, people won't always be lovey-dovey. That's not what the idea says. But even if they get into arguments the knowledge that someday the opposite person in the argument you're having might turn out to be a strong ally on some other issue. That will not so much affect whether or not you argue as affect what you do and how far you go when you argue. Moreover these processes will always have limits: just as anything material can be broken with sufficientforce, anyone expecting to live for hundreds of millenia can find themselves in situations in which physical force and threat of physical injury become appropriate. Not often at all, but to say NEVER would be wrong. As someone who is not a teenager (welcome to any teenagers reading this --- maybe you're more mature than your fellows, even if you don't know it) I remember when I was, and can watch the behavior of teenagers now. I would hardly compare the degree of difference between adults and teenagers in our current society to that which there would be between current adults and someone expecting to live for many millenia. But we can see, in a small way, how when many of us were young we did not place much value on the future (say 20 years in the future) compared to "adults". All you have to do is notice them smoking. So multiply that difference by several powers of 10, and imagine the society which would result. That's what I am saying. Best and long long life, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8895