[BLOG] Some thoughts about Choices, Consensus and Evolution

(about 5 min to read)

One day my friend asked me a question I very hard to thought about.

What is the 'right' decisions?

And I want to take you into a course of my thoughts about it.

The first answer we think is something like 'decision we make to change some parameter we can change to get a positive result'. Hmm, but 'positive' for whom? For me? For all, or..?
I tried to look at humanity like the system of elements, who acts and interacts. Every choice of every element have a power to change state of this system. Some elements have more power (let's call it a Whales :)), and some have less.
First of all, to define a choice as 'aright' or 'wrong' we should compare it with something like standard. But what is the standard?

One thing we should consider is a scale of decision, or a size of a society that decision can influence to. System has many subsystems with different laws within.
Family, school/job, state, humanity: there are many different rules of the game on each level of scaling. Also, we have many cultural clusters within each level. Just for example, in families we have parents, children and other relatives, we have different sub-cultural groups in our school, university, different rules in between chiefs and subs, political parties in the state, nations, states in the world.

Moral values are different on the different levels of scale. Some of them are the same for the most of people around the world, some of them are the same only for Europeans, etc. Some people's choice based on religious traditions, some people motivated by their political views. And 'right-ness' or 'wrong-ness' can change with a changing of scale.
Decision would be right in case of it give positive result for me and also for objective society we scope. (Here you can remember The Game Theory and The Beautiful Mind movie.) But, as we know, there is no objective things. Any 'Objective' is the sum of 'Subjectives'.

(Here I was confused a little, some parts didn't fit to holistic picture.)
Then I recalled one principle I tell a little later. It is simple: decision should be positive as for the element as for everyone in majority of elements subjectively in the scoped out system. And if I want to take a 'right' decision in a scale of humanity, I just have to satisfy a majority of humans by its result. Just do it, huh? :) Why 'majority', but not the all? How about societies with different moral values?
That principle is familiar for everyone who knows about blockchain. This is Consensus. And we are living in a big Humanity Moral Consensus. This Consensus keep our beautiful system in sustainable state.
(After this enlightening I've started to look at the idea of blockchain with another sight, like at the natural and humanity-like algorithm.)

But let's back to minorities. When the some choice as 'right' show the 'better' state of subsystem it start to sharing through the bigger system and become a new 'aright'. It could be done by a community of elements with less influence or by a 'whale'. As you know, notion of 'right', any moral laws and rules are changing all over the history, standards of beauty, economy concepts, political regimes, even diets and other.

But what about evolution I've told at the beginning?

Let's look closer a single element of our system. Every choice give a feedback to us: it could be 'liking' or a 'disliking', and we consider it in the our next decisions. We call it a personal experience. Our 'like' and 'dislike' are emotional reactions, and emotion, as you know, literally, are biological thing. All of our personal experience, in fact, is a binary reaction to each part of environment (from a hot pan we touching, to a love we feeling): or we like, or we don't. Why we are feel this? Because of life. Meaning of life is to continue itself. It make it by collecting (forever changing) information about the (forever changing) world, analyse it and use it to adapt and survive. Our path of 'liking' and 'disliking' all around is the path of surviving and reproduction of our organisms. Most optimal way for each one of us, most optimal for our species.

In a global way, when we making some choice, we comparing our personal experience with collective experience of our species to find a better way to keep Humanity alive.

Also I did some conclusions about our future and will write about this in the next blog.
If you have similar thoughts or you want to discuss -- welcome to comments!
Thanks for you attention!

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