Software Intelligence, Equality, Diversity & Unity - The Case for a Rational SI and Game Theory

“There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.” ― Sam Harris

Rawls draws an important distinction between the rational and the reasonable. [1] He argues, "[t]he rational applies to a single, unified agent (either an individual or corporate person) with the powers of judgment and deliberation in seeking ends and interests peculiarly its own. The rational applies to how these ends and interests are adopted and affirmed, as well as to how they are given priority. It also applies to the choice of means, in which case it is guided by such familiar principles as: to adopt the most effective means to ends, or to select the more probable alternative, other things equal (....). [2]

He continues, 'what rational agents lack is the particular form of moral sensibility that underlies the desire to engage in fair cooperation as such, and to do so on terms that others as equals might reasonably be expected to endorse. I do not assume the reasonable is the whole of moral sensibility; but it includes the part that connects with the idea of fair social cooperation.' [3]

He argues further that the rational and the reasonable are distinct in these ways hence it would be a a mistake to try to derive the moral (qua the reasonable) from the rational. Paul Clements and Emily Hauptmann (2002), however, say that, while decision theory’s modeling of the rational leads to problems such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Game Theory), drawing on the reasonable allows us to make sense of playing a PD in a cooperative way.[4]

Following Clements and Hauptmann argument this note argues that the human mind economic has no problems with accommodating the “reasonable” qua a desire to engage in fair cooperation as such. As argued by Gaus '[t]he difference between simply rational agents and those who are also reasonable is not that they would behave differently in Prisoner’s Dilemmas, but that a reasonable person are more successful at avoiding the Prisoner’s Dilemma and tend to play more cooperative games.' [5]

What does the latter indicate ?

Imagine a person A and a person B both have been arrested for robbing the Barclays Bank. Both have been placed in separate isolation cells and both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A prosecutor made the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I'll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I'll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges.” The above is a basic example of Prisoner's Dilemma. The only win - win outcome is if they both behave in a "reasonable" not "rational" way. This is when they both confess. One could argue that the Prisoner's Dilemma generates a measure of "reasonableness."

One can define "reasonableness" as in Figure 1. Where reasonable action is equal "Confess".

Person A

Person B

Figure 1. Prisoner's Dilemma and "reasonableness"

By combining the models of game theory with brain neurons (consciousness & subconsciousness levels) of the brain economic approach to the study of individual thought-creation has the potential to improve our recognition of brain mechanism involved in individual creativity and to our understanding how one makes decisions after being influenced by multiple environments and interactions. This in turn could provide a venue to modeling economics of artificial mind.

How?

Previous study has shown that neurons in the brain are wired. To be more precise, researchers in that study has found that connections between nearby neurons are organized like a social network.[6] In a social network, the ‘brain neurons’ are people that interact with each other. Furthermore, as argued by Daeyeol Lee 'recently, many neurobiological studies have exploited game theory to probe the neural basis of decision making, and found that these unique features of social decision making might be reflected in the functions of brain areas involved in reward evaluation and reinforcement learning.' [7]

These findings have become a starting point for this note's ideas that suggest creation of a model of an artificially created process, informed by the game theory approach, which has been successfully applied in brain economics. Researchers have already built the world’s first artificial neuron that’s capable of mimicking the function of an organic brain cell.

Our previous work in various areas (e.g., artificial intelligence, soft computing, reasoning under uncertainty, and neuroscience) identified that many cooperations between two agents (artificial or natural) can be interpreted or bear some of the characteristic features of a game. For example, the main concepts in a game are the players in a game, a set of rules by which the game is played, and an outcome in the form of a reward or a punishment (more generally referred to as a payoff) for the players in the game. In addition, a so-called payoff matrix is a common scheme to represent the dynamic behavior of a game. This note indicates that the existing methods and techniques for brain network analysis might be inadequate to capture conscious (rational and emotional) and subconscious strategic interaction that occur among brain neurons. This same would go when constructing the artificial neural interactions. Game theory would become a natural instrument that would help us to overcome this inadequacy since it creates mathematical models of strategic interplay among different natural and/or artificial neurons. The interaction between different e.g.: artificial neurons would lead to a 'rational' or 'reasonable' outcome that would be interpreted from the perspective of a game.

References:

(OSCOLA type of referencing)

1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press 1996) 50-51.

2. ibid

3. ibid

4. Paul Clements and Emily Hauptmann, 'The reasonable and the rational capacities in political analysis' (2002) 30 (March) Politics & Society 85-111.

5. Gerald F Gaus, 'Reasonable Utility Functions and Playing the Cooperative Way' (2008) 11(2) Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 220.

6. [1] University of Basel, 'The brain’s social network: Nerve cells interact like friends on Facebook' (biozentrum, 4 February 2015) <http://www.biozentrum.unibas.ch/news-events/news/news-details/article/the-brains-social-network-nerve-cells-interact-like-friends-onfacebook/> accessed 6 June 2018.

7. Daeyeol Lee, 'Game theory and neural basis of social decision making' (2008) 11(4) Nat Neurosci 404.