Intriguing ideas. I'm having to do mental gymnastics to think about the metaphor between antlers and communication.
Your comment does make me realize I have implicitly assumed that taking of resources through deceitful communication must be bad for the group, but this is not necessarily true. Perhaps bringing resources to the most clever liars does raise the groups fitness in a variety of plausible ways.
The kind of antler analogy I think of is if you had some very clever but not very strong moose who learned how to stick a log in his antlers making them more effective than they were without the log, and thus got to mate instead of a more physically fit moose mating. It is quite possible that this cleverness only helps him get laid, and does not trump the lack of strength he passes on to his offspring in terms of avoiding predators, and so the moose population is weakened by such cleverness: tricking girl mooses into sleeping with your gimpy self just makes mooses gimpier. But of course that kind of cleverness might also help a moose against predators, it would be up to the environment to decide that one, and so clever lying mooses (meese?) would just be another variation coming out to be tested in the population. Sexual selection always results in some variations with an obvious cost to the group winning over their alternative which is obviously better for the group: presumably sexual selection wins out because it speeds the process of variations being tested, you look at the world and all the non-sexual reproducers are SO MUCH SIMPLER than sexually selected.
In any case if I were to seriously pursue my truth/useful falsehood/parasitic ideas in evolution of language I would need to rethink them fleshing them out in light of these antler-induced thoughts. Thanks!
Mike
You're quite welcome.
However, you seem to be overthinking the metaphor. An "honest" moose lacks antlers altogether; the metabolic cost of synthesizing antler-material is the cognitive cost of developing a coherent "story," antler-related musculature is the social skill necessary to "sell" it, exhaustion and injuries inflicted by mating duels are the externalities. With no mating duels and the same resource inputs, an antler-less moose could be better at every other aspect of being a moose, including gathering additional food and running away from predators or trampling them to death, but would have no pressure to improve beyond subsistence.
I asked this question on IRC before and got some surprising answers.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, you get cryo-preserved and eventually wake up as an upload. Maybe meat->sim transfer ends up being much easier than sim->meat or meat->meat, or something. Further suppose that you are not particularly averse to a digital-only existence, at least not enough to specifically prohibit reviving you if this is the only option. Yet further suppose that sim-you is identical to meat-you for all purposes that meat-you cared about (including all your hidden desires and character faults). Let's also preemptively assume that any other attempts to fight this hypothetical have been satisfactorily resolved, just to get this out of the way.
Now, in the "real world", or at least in the simulation level we are at, there is no evidence that telepathy of any kind exists or is even possible. However, in the sim-world there is no technological reason it cannot be implemented in some way, for just thoughts, or just feelings, or both. There is a lot to be said for having this kind of connection between people (or sims). It gets rid of or marginalizes deception, status games, mis-communication-based biases and fallacies. On the other hand, your privacy disappears completely and so do any advantages over others the meat-you might want to retain in the digital world. And what you perceive as your faults are out there for everyone to see and feel.
As a new upload, you are informed that many "people" decided to get integrated into the telepathic society and appear to be happy about it, with few, if any, defections. There is also the group of those who opted out, and it looks basically like your "normal" mundane human society. There is only a limited and strictly monitored interaction between the two worlds to prevent exploitation/manipulation.
Would you choose to get fully integrated or stay as human-like as possible? Feel free to suggest any other alternative (suicide, start a partially integrated society, etc.).
P.S. This topic has been rather extensively covered in science fiction, but I could not find a quality online discussion anywhere.