Details: This book comes to some surprising conclusions: Cooperation is much more important than competition and conflict. Cooperation is everywhere. The whole world runs on cooperation. Cooperation is fundamental to all life. Cooperation is increasing, and will continue to increase. Our societies could not exist without cooperation.
Cooperation means working together and when two or more people are working together to do something they must communicate information. So information, communication, and cooperation are intimately connected.
Cooperation is a fundamental principle of evolution which increases information creation and communication. It‘s the glue that brings and holds simpler things together to create more complex higher order things like us.
While the concept of information and the inseparable ideas of communication and cooperation are fundamentally important, most of us don’t see this. We seem to be surrounded by conflict, violence, crime, fighting, war, killings, disorder, anarchy, selfishness, greed, the strong taking from the weak, suffering and misery. Why is this? It’s partly because these exceptions to cooperation frighten and remind us of our own individual vulnerability. Or it may be that we over emphasize conflict, violence, greed and so on because our ideologies say these are fundamental to our human nature and the basis of our social existence. They are not. Our human nature evolves. We are immersed in cooperation as fish are in water . And cooperation is increasing.
Early on in this book I describe what information is. Most discussions of information don’t actually say what information is. They may give a few examples and that’s it. Then they get mathematical. We will start from a dictionary definition and describe information and analyze it every which way with numerous examples. Then we will use and develop these ideas of information and the inseparable ideas of communication and cooperation over and over throughout this book t