Viraj's Weblog

I'm a fan of Primer, so this new movie about time travel intrigued me. It's another low budget flick. Turns out it was only playing in San Jose, so I decided to take the 30-mile bike ride (15 miles each way) to check it out.

First a word about my bike ride. I took this route and going there in the daytime was an enjoyable ride. Biking back on a Saturday night was not fun at all. I think I almost got killed twice. Both times were oncoming cars making left turns and not seeing me coming. I've noticed that drivers around here are getting worse, and today I need to buy a brighter light. As a biker, I'm also used to the standard yelling out of windows. One passenger tried to scare me by yelling "Boom!" like a gunshot as they passed me. Heh, maybe I should start carrying a gun with me?

Anyway, about the movie. It was pretty fun and dealt with the common doppelganger theme. These movies are funny because they try to portray recursion dramatically. I'm always interested in how they do it and whether it actually makes sense visually. Luckily this only recursed a few levels deep and was intriguing to follow. It's dubbed as a horror/sci-fi, and there are some scenes of blood, but not much. It's a case where a man finds a time machine. But he could not have found the time machine if he had not been led to it by a double that found it and went back in time. Repeat.

For a low budget film, it was nicely done. It's one of those films where things happen that don't make much sense. However, after some iterations, it does.

I'm reading a rather amazing book called Before the Dawn. It's pretty much the written version of a great documentary called The Journey of Man. Both of these tell the story of human migration and evolution out of Africa following the same Y chromosome all males share and the mitochondrial DNA all females share. These essentially came from our evolutionary Adam and Eve.

One of the interesting concepts is just how much warfare was likely in primitive societies. Think of the time when there were different human-like species. Do you think we got along well? Not so. One species survived, and for a reason. Daily there were extermination campaigns. Every day you were hunted or hunting. Follow chimp warfare and you get a glimpse of how the pre-humans must have been like. Hunting in groups, finding a lone 'outsider', and then jumping him to destroy him and his legacy. It must have been a vicious time to live in.

A small group of people started the population we now call humans. They left Africa and formed bubbles of societies as they traveled to new lands. Out of each of those bubbles left a few more humans, eventually finding a new land and again settling. Some stayed, some left. The cycle repeats, and eventually you have the different nations and races we have today.

We have come a long way. Animals gathering in groups larger than 50 require a lot of brain power to read others and work together.

One principle that biologists think may help explain larger societies, both human and otherwise, is that of reciprocal altruism, the practice of helping even a nonrelated member of society because they may return the favor in [the] future. A tit-for-tat behavioral strategy, where you cooperate with a new acquaintance, and thereafter follow his strategy toward you (retaliate if he retaliates, cooperate if he cooperates), turns out to be superior to all others in many circumstances. Such a behavior could therefore evolve, providing that a mechanism to detect and punish freeloaders evolves in parallel; otherwise freeloaders will be more successful and drive the conditional altruists to extinction.

Conditional tit-for-tat altruism cannot evolve in just any species. It requires members to recognize each other and have long memories, so as to be able to keep tally.

The book then goes and gives an example of the vampire bat, whose societies do just this.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

Think of how much information processing this requires and you can imagine how our brains might have evolved.

Reciprocity, and an ability to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation, underpin our social life, writes the economist Paul Seabright, "making it reasonable for us to treat strangers as though they were honorary relatives or friends." It is remarkable that this behavior evolved at a time when primitive warfare was at its most intense and people had every reason to regard strangers with deep suspicion. Strangers can still be dangerous, yet in the right circumstances we habitually trust them....

making it possible "to step nonchalantly out of the front door of a suburban house and disappear into a city of ten million strangers." Without this innate willingness to trust strangers, human societies would still consist of family units a few score strong, and cities and great economies would have had no foundation for existence.

...

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society's dissolution.

I can't help but be reminded of the scheming financial practices that many fell victim to. Sure you can pay that $1 million mortgage, don't worry. Trust me. Sure you can have a credit card with your awful credit. Trust me.

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of. It is religion.

Can it be that the lack of this freeloader eviction system, be it religion or whatever, what has led us to the economic meltdown we are seeing? I think that religion is dying, and it is evident in almost every aspect of daily life. But what will replace the handling of freeloaders? I have to wonder if hundreds of years from now there will still be the concept of guilt and shame. Will our trust for others diminish?