philosophical implications of networks for issues of cooperation, communication, and epistemology

Abstract

Computational modeling offers an environment in which to explore a range of philosophical issues:

 How does a sound take on a meaning? 

 How can altruism emerge from egoism? 

Can a scientific community learn more when individual scientists learn less? 

Suggestive hints, worthy of further philosophical scrutiny, arise in agent-based simulations focusing on local interaction in a range of network structures. 

This paper builds on earlier work regarding (a) cooperation in the spatialized Prisoner's Dilemma and (b) the emergence of simple signaling by simple imitation, localized genetic algorithm, and neural net learning in a

spatialized environment of wandering food sources and predators.    That earlier work is extended here in two ways:

(1) to a wider consideration of spatial networks, and (2) to a range of intriguing questions in the general area of epistemology and philosophy of science. 

Patrick Grim is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and currently a visiting scholar in Philosophy and the Center for Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan.  He is author of The Incomplete Universe: Totality, Knowledge, and Truth, The Philosophical Computer: Exploratory Essays in Philosophical Computer Modeling (with Gary Mar and Paul St. Denis), editor of Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions and and founding editor of 28 volumes of The Philosopher's Annual.  His recent work appears not only in philosophical journals (Analysis, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Nous, Synthese, Theory and Decision, Public Affairs Quarterly) but in journals in a range of other disciplines (Journal of Theoretical Biology, Adaptive Behavior, BioSystems, Evolution of Communication, Journal for Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Interaction Studies, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems).