Acting Together
John Perry

15 March 2014

The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously said that in the state of nature, life is solitary, brutish and short -- as if nature designed people to act alone, rather than together. But acting together, this week's topic, is one of the most natural things in the world. If we never acted together, there would be no families, no teams, no countries. But what exactly is it to act together?

Suppose we’re outside and it starts to rain. We both run toward the door to the studio. We’re trying to do the same thing -- get into the studio and out of the rain. Though we’re acting at the same time, we aren’t acting together. So doing the same thing isn't enough.

Suppose we’re having a picnic. It starts to rain. I grab the food and put it in the cooler and run to the car. You fold up the blanket and run to the car. Now we’ve done something together -- something that neither of us did alone. We jointly put the picnic stuff into the car. In the earlier example, we were each trying to keep ourselves dry; in this case, we are both trying to accomplish the same thing, keeping the picnic stuff dry.

But don’t we still perform two separate and distinct actions in your scenario? I put the blanket in. You put the food in. No togetherness there.

We still do separate actions, but we share an over-arching goal. We break this goal down into smaller tasks and we divide them up. We each take responsibility for a share of these sub-tasks and rely on the other to do the rest. That’s acting together!

不过，假设我们都不知道对方的计划或意图。我的计划是去拿食物，然后回来拿毯子。你的计划是去拿毯子，然后回来拿食物。我们真的是“一起”做的吗?在这种情况下，它更像是一个幸运的意外，而不是我们故意一起做的事情。如果我们要一起行动，我们的计划和意图不是必须相互依赖吗?

By now its getting pretty complex. We have to share an overarching goal. We have to agree on a way of dividing up the tasks so that each of our contributions to the common goal dovetails with our partner’s contributions. And we have to make a commitment to actually doing our part, while relying on our partner to do his too.

所以我很怀疑。它一定要那么复杂和理智吗?想到蚂蚁。它们一直在一起行动，建造山丘，收集食物。但他们不会对彼此形成复杂的信念，也不会对彼此做出承诺。

I'm sure we'll clear everything up on the program.

Comments(9)

MJA's picture

MJA

Saturday, March 15, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

In Nature life = is Nature

Life is Nature too.
As One is the single truth .=

Harold G. Neuman's picture

Harold G. Neuman

Saturday, March 15, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

I won't critique such a mind

我不会批评托马斯·霍布斯这样的人——我只是觉得他的想法没有那么新颖或有帮助。早些时候关于弗里德里希·n和索伦·k这样的巨人的评论/观点也同样处于我有限的意识中。(不，我拼写得不太好，但是，这个缺陷并不会限制思维——感谢基因!)在很多方面(如果不是全部的话)，共同行动一直是人类的不足之处——就像看起来没完没了的战争所表明的那样。蚂蚁、白蚁和蜜蜂的生命虽然短暂，但却有目标。就个人而言，他们甚至不知道自己在做什么。他们生活和目标的美在于简单中的复杂。他们的基因决定了他们存在的古老原因。因此，他们缺乏个人意识是优势，而不是障碍。人类的议程超出了简单的目的。 Acting together only works when it suits a locally collaborative purpose and agenda. There is a book by someone named Brian McClaren I plan to research. It involves Jesus, Moses, The Budda (or is that Buddah?) and Mohammed (or is that Muhammad?) and why they crossed the road. Didn't know they did. Hopefully, Mr. McClaren (spelling?) will tell me. Maybe the crossing had something to do with my notion of historionic effect...
哦，还有，为什么“包揽一切”这个词变得如此，呃，慷慨?也许在十年前或十一年前，我从未注意到它……只是好奇;你好,肯。祝劳拉爱你，祝大家健康兴旺。
Neuman.

mirugai's picture

mirugai

Saturday, March 15, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Ah Neuman, you bring up the

Ah Neuman, you bring up the issue of animal consciousness, addressed in the show. AC has always been alluded to as something differentiated from Human Consciousness, as a way of pointing out how the simplicity of animal behavior is so unlike the complexity of human thought-motivated behavior.
Philosophy concerns itself with two types of questions not addressed by other disciplines: 1. unanswerable questions (such as, is there anything other than my consciousness), and 2. 50/50 questions (like, which came first, the radio or the radio station). We can all talk about HC (though, authoritatively, only our own); but we can say nothing about AC. We are making wholly speculative assumptions about AC by looking at animal behavior and extrapolating along all kinds of speculative lines, to consciousness. And while this may sound like a type 1 philosophical question, the doing of philosophy means doing rational thinking about thought, and we have neither the "rational" capability to understand animal thought, nor can we even describe AC as "thought." Anthropomorphisizing about AC is not "rational." You can say ants are doing communal work, but calling the work "intentional," or "planned," or, even worse, "the expression of shared social goals," is beneath us as rationalists. We just don't know one thing about what and how an animal is thinking.
mirugai

Guest's picture

Guest

Thursday, March 20, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Actually, there is a case to

Actually, there is a case to be made for anthropomorphizing. For one thing, we are genetically related to all other life - that's why the behaviors of seals seem more familiar to us than the behaviors of fish or octopi, we're more closely related. For another, we're subject to the same evolutionary pressures as other organisms are - bears, for instance, are fairly intelligent, and they're omnivores, they eat a variety of things like we do, so they have to be smart enough to track down the different of foods they eat. Compare that to cows, which only eat grass.

Daniel Pech's picture

Daniel Pech

Sunday, March 23, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Hmm.. Human society has long

Hmm.. Human society has long since been finished with its Honeymoon stage. 'Complicated' and 'cerebral' is, in principle, just part of how we can figure out the reasons why we often do not so naturally get along any more.
But, is it possible to be mal-motivated such that we end up over-analyzing our potential disharmonies, and therein draw mistaken conclusions as to what constitutes entirely justified solutions?

MJA's picture

MJA

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

An entirely justified

An entirely justified solution:
E Pluribus Unum
One
=

MJA's picture

MJA

Tuesday, March 25, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

An entirely justified

=

gee's picture

gee

Thursday, March 27, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Disaster is a driver to get

Disaster is a driver to get people to act together - need is a push but the more pressure exerted at the moment the easier it is to get cooperation. Love hate and fear are also very big players on the group.

mirugai's picture

mirugai

Sunday, March 30, 2014 -- 5:00 PM

Fred - Philosophers should

Fred - Philosophers should reject the idea that because two animals are genetically related (or better, similar) that there is any relationship or coincidence of consciousness. Genetics only relates info on cell structures, despite the claims of the new pop-science (TED favorite) neuroscience. Philosophers and poets and comedians are the only professionals qualified to debate consciousness.
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
When someone tells me how smart a crow, or a dolphin, or an ant, or FGS, their dog or cat, is; or if someone reminds me how close the DNA of a human is to the earthworm, I say ?Please let me know when your cat requests an encrypted email with its lost PIN number (sic) enclosed.?
I saw a group of framed lithographs (of Ceylon sights) on the walls of a beautiful guesthouse in the highlands of (now) Sri Lanka. They were so remarkable that I took photos of them with my iphone, and close-up photos of the information at the bottom of each image. When I got home to San Francisco, I googled what I took to be the name of the artist, and in the Wiki entry I saw the name of the book containing the lithographs.
I asked a friend who is expert at finding books online, to try to find any copies of the book for sale, and she found one copy (only one) in the possession of an antiquarian bookseller in Germany.
我给书商发了邮件，我们用我的信用卡通过贝宝(PayPal)用欧元付款，现在这本书正在通过UPS快递给我。
这篇文章是在旧金山凌晨3点看费德勒和穆雷在澳大利亚网球公开赛的直播时写的。我被在缅甸旅行的妻子的手机铃声吵醒，当时我正在同一时间观看同一场网球比赛。
Fred, how close can your seal or your bear come to this? Think how enormous the distance in consciousness must be, based on the only indications of consciousness we have, behavior (not speculation).