This week is currently the start of 18th grade for me and the other students at UC Irvine, so I thought I might take a moment to review what I’ll be studying this quarter and some plans for the long term.

Study List

This quarter is my first heavy foray into the game theory part of the LPS department. Not only will I be taking the perennial Social Dynamics seminar, but I will also be studying learning in games through a seminar which will be reading The Theory of Learning in Games by Fudenberg and Levine, as well as parts of Strategic Learning and its Limits by H. Peyton Young. Hopefully by the end of the quarter I will be sufficiently caught up in the game theory that might be relevant for future work I’ll be doing.

I am also taking a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and one called Geometry and Spacetime. The first I am taking primarily because I need to fill a requirement, but the second could turn out to be quite interesting. At the very least, the first four weeks or so will be some interesting math.

Future Plans

At this point, I am virtually certain that I will be trying to focus on something in the neighborhood of evolutionary game theory. The field is quite interesting, though I feel quite behind on the literature and current status still. There is a nice mixture of programming, math, and philosophy such that I shouldn’t get bored with it anytime remotely soon.

Over the summer, I also started to introduce myself to topics in philosophy of biology, which tends to crop up a lot in the neighborhood of game theory, probably due to the evolutionary nature of a lot of the work being done around here. Though it may not be the most detailed introduction, I recommend Darwin by Tim Lewens. I gave what I thought was a nice overview of many standard phil-bio topics and their relevance to Darwin’s works.

I also have been working heavily on a paper in game theory considering more in-depth the connections between combinatorial communication and deception that I was introduced to in Lachmann and Bergstrom’s “The disadvantage of combinatorial communication.” Though it is still not properly framed, I have high hopes that it may turn into a paper for my portfolio, which is due in approximately one year.

Rousseau’s Social Contract

Over the weekend I began reading Rousseau’s On the Social Contract so as to get a better idea of what it was from the horse’s mouth. Though I have only gotten through Book 1 so far, it is clear not only how important the work must have been at the time and how it influenced American democracy, but also why such interesting connections have been made between it at evolutionary game theory. Skyrms has two books (that are very fun and easy reads) that draw out the beginnings of these quite interesting connections.

In general the connections are thus (as I see it so far). The social contract is a cooperation of people to give up some rights for the greater good. However, this cooperation prima facie seems to be irrational, since any one person could do better by pretending to follow the rules of society, but really pursuing their own ends exclusively. Skyrms does an excellent job of illuminating how this, and other problems may be resolved by understanding the development of necessary features of the social contract such as stable cooperation in game-theoretic terms. The use of evolutionary game theory instead of more economics-y one-shot interaction game theory lends weight to the emergence of a social contract and its stability instead of just its possibility as well.

Philosophy of Biology

For something (almost) completely different, I will now turn to some philosophy of biology and mind stuff. Over the weekend, I had something of a small epiphany about what might get me to a paper for the evolution of cognition seminar I am taking. This started a week ago when, towards the end of a presentation about the last chapter and overall plan of Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition I got hit with an unexpected¹ “So what?” question that I deflected.

Doing the reading for this week, I realised that the content was interesting, but it didn’t seem to have much obvious philosophical punch. Most of the readings were concerned with evidence for/against or standards for determining whether human cognition evolved. This seemed very strange when I tried to consider the alternatives. It seems that the answer is clearly yes, or alternatively a rejection of evolutionary theory generally². So I started asking myself why exactly we were reading it. The response I came up with — which is actually a bigger, but more correct question — was related to the fall seminar with the same professor and the colloquium talk last Friday: If evolution did evolve, then so what?

I don’t have a good answer to that question yet, but at least focusing on it seems to be a good place to look for paper topics. I only wish something like this had occurred to me in the fall so I could have attempted to write a paper for the evolution of morality class and gotten my ethics requirement out of the way then.

Non-Philosophy

On some things even more completely different, this weekend my bicycle was stolen, and I survived my first sensible earthquake last night. C’est la vie.

¹ The lack of expectation was probably poor planning on my part.

² That statement is probably wrong, but it doesn’t appear to be wrong in an interesting enough way to fix it.

I have started to notice a common theme in the things in which I am interested lately. That is conventionality. Perhaps this is something I should pay more attention to.

In terms of general philosophy, Carnap has been quite intriguing. This started with an (admitted) caricature of Carnap in Penelope Maddy's recent books. The major point was something like mathematics is conventional in that at some point, some people agreed on rules of inference and stating that things existed and changes to that system have only developed on pragmatic grounds of the goals of the social activity.

In less of a caricature, Carnap really had something called language-planning more in mind. That is, the purpose of a logician of science was to come up with myriad formal systems of logic and math such that the natural scientist can figure out which is the most useful for their activities.

Strangely, Carnap still maintains that there is bifurcation of geometry into mathematical geometry and physical geometry. This is based on the idea that there is a correct (true) geometry of space. This seems rather strange to me, and I am planning on writing about it before the end of the quarter.

In my (mostly naive) view, the mathematics used in physics is just a model that has proved useful for accounting for empirical data in a "good" way. That is, idealising space as a Riemannian manifold is better than as a Euclidean manifold, not because the Riemannian model is more correct, but rather that it is just more useful, perhaps on account of its simplicity.

Back to convention, however, Quine talks about the (conceptual) impossibility of the development of logic by convention, and this view is rightly doubted by Skyrms based on intuition from evolutionary game-theoretic models of the evolution of conventional meaning in Lewis signalling games. I think it would be quite interesting to see something resembling logical inference develop in a game-theoretic population model, but being able to do that myself is still a bit of a ways off.

Quite a number of weekends ago, I was able to crash a conference on game theory, evolution, and social contract. While I didn't understand all of what was going on, it still was very interesting for me to see what sort of stuff is going on in the area. I thought I'd make a post with a run-down of what was covered. [It is worthwhile to note that these summaries are based on my sketchy notes and may not accurately reflect what was said, necessarily.]

The following are synopses of the first several talks. I meant to write up the others, but at this point, I would rather post what I have than take the time. The rest are the titles/topics covered without synopsis.

Ken Binmore - Natural Justice

This was one of the more interesting talks for me, since I could follow a lot of it. Generally, Binmore was concerned with equilibrium selection problems concerning cultural maintenance of social contract. Particularly, he was using game theory as a tool to analyze what might be considered "fair," using pure hunter-gatherer societies as examples. Within this framework, he focused on social indices, which he claimed helped select fair equilibria, but which were highly context dependent.

Jason Alexander - Local Interaction Models

Jason Alexander generally focused on local interaction models vs. replicator dynamics in modelling evolution. He tried to motivate that local interaction was better because it favored Nash equilibria less artificially. In general, he tries to see what notion of stability might be best for these games immitating social structure. Evolutionary stability, dynamic stability, and stochastic stability all turn out to be different. In doing this he focused on whether moving to local interaction models might give results that better approximate intuitive expectations for systems.

Peter Vanderschraaf - Justice as Mutual Advantage

Peter Vanderschraaf's talk was one of the ones most dense to me, primarily because I have no substantial background in ethics. What I got out of it, though, was that considering Justice to be just mutual advantage has some problems. The commonly cited necessary properties are not sufficient to capture a notion of Justice, but adding another property to make it sufficient causes new problems. Furthermore, in any case, the Contribution Requirement and vulnerability objection stand in the way as well. With the CR, the system seems too narrow, whereas without CR, it seems too broad.

Jim Woodward - Empirical Evidence of Cooperation and Normative Implications

Carl Bergstrom - Questions on Deception

Simon Huttegger - Structural Stability and Signalling Games

Patrick Grim - Implications of Interaction and Information Networks

Kevin Zollman - When is More Information Harmful?

Allan Gibbard - Does Evolution Give us Moral Knowledge?

Zach Ernst - Models of Common Knowledge

Lately I have been taken in by some interesting aspects of Skyrms Studies (more commonly known as evolutionary game theory as applied to philosophical issues). Particularly, I am interested in what sort of progress has been made on the evolution of logic, which was a project suggested by Skyrms in his The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure.

On other fronts, I am working on a paper regarding both "The emergence of simple languages in an experimental coordination game" by Selten and Warglien and "The disadvantage of combinatorial communication" by Lachmann and Bergstrom. What I am hoping to accomplish is to determine whether or not a reasonably simple game can be modelled such that results on deception contrived in the Lachmann and Bergstrom paper can be achieved evolutionarily. As a model for this, I am looking at simulating games based on those in the Selten paper. Nature will choose 2 independent aspects (think shape and color). A sender perceives the combination (a colored shape) and sends 2 independent messages to the receiver (think of a 2-letter string, where the letters have no prior meaning). The receiver then attempts to duplicate the shape and color perceived and both the sender and receiver are paid off in proportion to the correctness of the duplication. In order to get the deceptive signals, it is rather likely that the payoffs might have to be jerry-rigged a bit to create a non-perfectly cooperative game. In general though, whatever results I can obtain should prove interesting.