#4 - Sentient Spiders and the Prisoner's Dilemma
Spiders and the Prisoner’s Dilemma
Welcome to the fourth issue of “Camp of the Children”. According to Year Progress, as of 19 January, we were 5% through 2020. Time flies, and we press on.
As always, please reach out by emailing me if you’d like to chat, or if you have any feedback.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma
In The Children of Time, a band of humans on the spaceship Gilgamesh make it to a terraformed planet which has become the home to various species of intelligent beings, the most intelligent, sentient of which is a species of spider. As the humans approach the world, they see the planet shrouded in a network of webs. Uncertainty follows. They have no way of communicating with the spiders and some of them don’t even believe that the spiders could be sentient. As the leadership of the Gilgamesh deliberate, the following exchange takes place:
“There was a tradition the Old Empire once had,” Vitas stated slowly. “It was a choice they gave to their criminals, their prisoners. They would take two of them and ask them to spare or to accuse each other, each making the decision quite alone without a chance to confer. All went very well indeed if they both chose to spare one another, but they suffered some degree of punishment if they both accused each other. But, oh, if you were the prisoner who decided to spare his friend, only to find you’d been accused in turn …” She smiled, and in that smile Holsten saw suddenly that she had grown old, but that it showed so little on her face—kept at bay by all the expressions she did not give rein to.
“So what was the right choice?” Karst asked her. “How did the prisoners get out of it?”
“The logical choice depended on the stakes: the weighting of punishments for the different outcomes,” Vitas explained. “I’m afraid the facts and the stakes here are very stark and very plain. We could approach the planet in the hope that we were, against all past experience, now being welcomed. As Karst says, that will leave us vulnerable. We will put the ship at risk if it turns out that this is really a trick, or even that Mason has simply made some error in his translation.” Her eyes passed over Holsten, daring him to object, but in truth he was by no ways that confident of his own abilities. “Or we attack—use the drones now, and prepare to back up that first strike when the Gilgamesh reaches the planet. If we do that, and we are wrong, we are throwing away a priceless chance to reach an accommodation with an Old Empire intelligence of some sort.” There was genuine regret in her voice. “If we go in peace, and we are wrong, we are most likely all dead, all of us, all the human race. I don’t think we can argue with the weighting that we have been given. For me there is only one rational choice at this point” (528-529).
Taken to its extreme, with the very fate of humankind resting on their shoulders, the Prisoner’s Dilemma appeared to result in only one possible option. Cooperation was possible, but too risky. Even the smallest risk of this immense downside would be impossible to accept. As such, the human beings attacked.
One of the thrilling features of science fiction is its capacity to take rather simple ideas, or restrained experiments, and cast them in larger-than-life proportions. Two people become two ships become two civilisations. Release becomes survival, punishment becomes extinction. Although there isn’t always much that we can learn from these examples in extremis, working out the implications of such conceits is one of the beauties of science fiction.
As our civilisation grows more and more complex, or as we become more and more aware of the complexity in which we live, we may be forced to grapple with these ideas on a more consistent basis. In my view, reading science fiction is an education in a way of seeing, an attempt to think, feel, and articulate the oddities of life in this vast, strange universe.
Status Board
Reading: Having just finished The Children of Time, I’m now in the uncomfortably liberating position of having to decide what to read next. I’m inclined to keep going down the science fiction route, since my work involves a lot of less-than-pleasant reading, but perhaps I should return to some non-fiction soon. Considering either Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey or Ringworld by Larry Niven.
Listening: I’ve spent bits of the past few days listening to a very interesting discussion, “Balaji Srinivasan and Glen Weyl on Identity, Governance, and Radical Markets” from Venture Stories, which I’ve taken ages to get through because it is quite dense. For a more theological bent, I enjoy Gerald McDermott’s discussion of his book in “A Typological Vision of the Cosmos” from Via Media.
Watching: A few people from my D&D group have recommended “Critical Role”, and I’ve been snatching bits and pieces from Episode 1 on Youtube over the past few days. It’s been really fun, just simply fun, to watch talented voice actors roleplay.