Hope

While on a train, I noticed myself hoping for something. But what does that even mean? When one says "I hope X", they are pointing to event X with some non-0 and non-1 probability, expressing their preference of this event over other possible events. Of course, having a preference for an event compared to counterfactual ones is a core feature of being a coherent agent, BUT.. What does the hoping actually do? It doesn't point to the probability of hoped-for event X, the p is there, but it almost doesn't matter for the hoper. It doesn't seem to help the agent achieve X, or does it? One could say that reality fundamentally doesn't distinguish between goals and beliefs, so agents created by natural selection would evolve to have those beliefs that are most useful for them. But how is hoping useful? Because X still has a non-1 p, so there's always a nonzero chance of the hoper getting disappointed. But it seems utterly useless. Is it hyperstition? Does hoping for X actually make X likelier? I don't think so. Hoping seems to have a sort of "resignation of power" quality to it. One hopes when one cannot change the outcome. One hopes for nice weather on a trip, something as close to randomness as mundane things get. One hopes for luck, the unaffectable chance of winning. One hopes for success, but only in the space left out by actual effort — hope belongs to the domain of that which we can't affect. Then why did we evolve to hope? Maybe it's actually the societal-scale interface of hope and responsibility that gives hopers selective fitness. Maybe it's precisely the delegation of responsibility that makes hope useful for the tribe. Hope must be fulfilled by the others. And if there's no one to fulfil the hope? Then the tribe together rationalises their lack of agency, and makes up rain gods, and whatever. The same societal expectations of hope and responsibility to avoid disappointment can easily be transferred to these random events, and made-up gods, since the mechanism is way too complex to easily see causality in it, even just within human tribes. As a whole, the hoping parts of the tribe likely did make the desires/beliefs of the tribe more likely to occur, creating a plausibly delusion-driven, but effective enough hyperstitional approach to the world. At the same time, hope is a mechanism to move reward across time, similarly to excited anticipation. The difference being that hope moves a possible reward in the future into the present, while anticipation lawfully moves only rightly expected reward. This makes hope more delusional, but also more useful, as it can make the originally unlikely event (to an outside non-hoper) more likely. If not, in matters of life and death, it at least serves an anthropic utilitarian purpose: the future reward of "good future worlds" is distributed into the current one, making sure all time-slices of existing tribe-members have a positive experience to some extent.