The Cognition of Conflict: Ontology, Dynamics, and Ideology - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 21

or Y will. They objectively and unknowingly are interacting socially (in an ahostile
way), but not subjectively: their actions are not social actions; they just have unwit-
ting social effects. However, if there is selection or learning, then the function of that
action is social (their success and adaptive character are due to the harm to the other).
Let us call competition that unintended and objective relation and situation where
there is a potential unintended bellum omnium contra omnes .
Let us call on the contrary a fight or war a situation where the competition
becomes explicit, and in the minds of the agents, the action becomes truly social, and
harming the other is intended and even motivating. X knows about the competition,
the objective negative interference of/with Y; thus, not only does she perform her
actions calculating the harm to Y and adapting them to anticipate Y or to prevent
Y's countermoves, but she might add to her plan specific actions against Y that
would not be part of the plan just for P but are there in order to block or harm the
other. This is a real war consisting of intentional (anti)social actions (hostility, as
stated in Sect. 1.5 .).
Note that the goal of harming the other is not an end per se, a motive, but is
rather simply instrumental to P. 9 Of course, there might be intrinsically hostile or
aggressive goals (motives): X is motivated to kill or harm Y. Can one say that
homines homini lupi in this sense? I do not think so, except perhaps against the
barbaroi (out of diffidence or fear), the out-group people, or for terminalization
(a subgoal that ultimately becomes an end goal) because of learning or culture: the
goal of competing, previously instrumental, becomes an end in itself.
In this view, the main function of prosocial behavior or positive sociality is
the multiplication of the power of the participating agents. 10 Unlike Huberman
and Hogg ( 1994 ), we do not assume that the greatest advantage of (cooperative)
sociality is that it speeds up the search for solutions to common problems or leads
to better solutions to those problems, but rather it multiplies individual powers :
any agent, while remaining limited in its capabilities, skills, and resources, finds
the number of goals it can pursue and achieve increased by virtue of its “use” of
others' skills and resources. In a sense, any agent's limitations with regard to power
and its differences from others in the kind of power it is endowed with become an
advantage (Durkheim's perspective): although not omnipotent, the agent is allowed
to overcome its cognitive and practical limits through sociality.
However, we can not only exploit others' powers by cooperation and exchange;
we can try to obtain what we want/need by acting aggressively, harming others, or
fighting with them. Moreover, we can not only derive benefits from others' powers
and actions; we can be damaged or exploited by them, and we need to block/prevent
their interference.
9 Thus, perhaps bellum omnium contra omnes is not really synonymous with homo homini lupus .
10 It seems that the less the level of individual self-sufficiency (the number of self-realizable goals
out of the number of needs) the more sociality is useful and can multiply powers. (But the
function is complex because we need agents with a high “power of” - skills, resources - and
low “self-sufficiency”). In other words, the more individuals are dependent on each other, the more
sociality multiplies their power. This is one reason why division of labor and specialization are so