I believe this book/author has been referenced more than once on this forum:
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility <https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/54828.James_P_Carse> by James P. Carse <https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/54828.James_P_Carse> https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/189989I agree that "play" is generally some form of "practice" (work, hunting, fighting) especially in the young or otherwise formative. On the other hand I think it can also be sublimation as with chess or rugby as "mock battle". My favorite anecdotal form would be young warriors of the horse cultures of the American Plains "counting coup" against European Soldiers, leaving them frustrated and flabbergasted at having been "tagged" in what they thought was a real battle. The ultimate mock?
I think some of what Nick and Jon might have identified here as "bullying" might actually be more in the spirit of "Counting Coup", but I'm not really clear on where the two fit together in the GrandUnifiedOntologyDuFriAM
On 10/29/21 2:58 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
When self-driving systems are trained in high-fidelity simulations, that seems pretty similar to mammals playing. Another word for it is practice. To me a `game' and `play' don't have an obvious connection. A game is a structured event that follows artificial rules. The tiger cubs wrestling are learning about their bodies in relation to each other and gravity. Those rules can't be avoided, at least on this planet, but in many real-world situations rules can be changed or ignored. In my mind people that like games like the process of navigating strategies relative to a much reduced space of possibility provided by rules. Why that is, I'm not sure. Maybe it is a social activity (ranking each other)? Or maybe there is the possibility of mastery? -----Original Message----- From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Friday, October 29, 2021 1:13 PM To:friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution) I've been watching warm blooded creatures a lot and noticing that in some sense, it is "all play all the time", though the youth are more acutely recognized doing such. Mammals and birds seem much more "playful" than insects and reptiles, though this may well be antropocentrism at work, it is just easier for me as a warm-blooded mammal to *recognize* the kind of play that a creature evolved to nurture and teach their young is likely to engage in. I'm a big proponent of "play" of all kinds even though (because?) I'm not very practiced nor good at it. On 10/29/21 11:31 AM, uǝlƃ ☤>$ wrote:OK. Well, whatever, I guess. I'm not talking about it *separately*, though. It's the embeddedness that makes it fun. You'd be right that it's boring if it's isolated out as an intellectual exercise. I'm definitely not doing that, despite your allegation that I am. I think maybe you don't play games much. Maybe you think gamers separate the game from their lives. They don't. Poker is intertwined deeply into a poker palyer's life, for example. They can't help drawing rampant (false) analogies to everything under the sun. The same is true of Minecraft or Fortnite fans. Those who might think that there are *gratuitous* games are probably trapped in some particular other game they mistakenly identify with the world, that they think completely covers the world. They're worse than the World of Warcraft master who analogizes everything to that game because, deep down, they *know* WoW doesn't map very well to the whole world, just like Harry Potter fans reluctantly admit their classification of people into the houses isn't real. There are no gratuitous games. Some may not interest others. But c'est la vie. That's the beauty of the world that is, as opposed to the world we think is. The true boor is the one who thinks their idiosyncratic game is complete. On 10/29/21 10:11 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:Well, it occurs to me I shouldn't have used the word eco-terrorist. Terror implies a desire for political change -- changes to the behavior of cultures. You are separately talking about individuals who are not invested in some deep parsing of some esoteric text versus those that are, and maybe making some judgement about the value of individuals who don't invest in that parsing. Snore. That's the gratuitous game that I am referring to, and I can completely understand why some individuals who you call ganks might just ignore or hold in contempt the activity. Someone like Greta might be thinking more along the lines of how to get on with depopulation so the species can survive in the longer term, and less about how to persuade people to volunteer to help make it happen. -----Original Message----- From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ Sent: Friday, October 29, 2021 10:01 AM To:friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution) Yes, it *is* in the spirit of gaming. That's the point. If she manages to pull that lever, she wins that round. Of course, you could argue that if she doesn't pull the lever, we'll all die and there'll be no more game. But that's not the way the world works. Even if we all *eventually* die, or we suffer untold pain and suffering along the way only to eek by in the end, it's still in the spirit of gaming. You can't really win. You can't really even quit the game. This is the world. Life sucks. Then you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it. If the Chicken Littles of the world are not enjoying this world, then it's largely their fault. To be clear, I'm on Greta's side, here, considering various different speedrun strats to get to the lever before the dying and suffering swamps us. But the objective isn't really the destination. The Journey is the destination. I pity those who don't grok that. On 10/29/21 9:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:What I was suggesting was that if Greta became an eco-terrorist, it would not be in the spirit of gaming. Just as the cats killing everything they can isn't in the spirit of gaming. If there is a lever (or trigger) should could pull to solve the climate problem, she might want to pull it. Such gankers could make the world a better place precisely by refusing to participate in these games. ----Original Message----- From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ Sent: Friday, October 29, 2021 9:40 AM To:friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution) Hm. You apparently *do* get it. There should be ganker ecologists. My whole essay was a defense of just such a thing, as well as more solitary games like cat's play. I suppose my attempt to layer the semantics failed. Oh well. To ruin the joke, I thrive on being ganked ... especially if I survive. My ecologist gankers actually thought I was defending Utilitarianism, especially when trying to explain how vNM rationality flattens the ontology into a calculus. (For context, I'd loaned one of them my copy of ToG&EB<https://bookshop.org/books/theory-of-games-and-economic-behavior-60th-anniversary-commemorative-edition/9780691130613> to one of them about a month ago. So if he'd only read all bazillion pages of that door stop, he'd have known my argument.) Were we not embedded in the context of the salon, my argument for letting cats outdoors would have taken a more banal turn toward measures for determining when a species is no longer invasive and becomes endemic. That tack plays well because one of them studies [and works to defend capitalist big Ag through the eradication of] murder hornets[' nests]. But we weren't chatting. So I opted for the more thrilling attempt to first defend, then refute, philosophical utilitarianism and, perhaps by association, economic utilitarianism ... all to a gank that has yet to seriously parse either. It is thrilling to try, and fail, at such things. I'm profoundly grateful another guy was not there for that because he fancies himself a philosopher and gets a bit pedantic when/if any one of us gets into the weeds of our own expertise. He would have shut down the whole game early on ... or got all offended and *canceled* us for our sloppy talk. On 10/29/21 9:22 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:Still don't get it. Why shouldn't there be thrill seeking ganker ecologists, or environmentalists, or people that an adrenaline rush sneaking up to Trumpers to inject COVID-19 vaccines (or to cough on them, etc.) What difference does it matter whether the behavior is demonstrated in a pack, or by individuals, in a deeply composition or not? I mean, really, who gives a damn about your video game? My companion Australian Cattle Dog has her own thrill seeking behaviors. It is, of course, the chase. She won't fetch a stupid ball or swim in circles. No, her thing is the stealth sneak-up, followed by a sprint, followed by a last second tear off before collision. It terrifies some humans and dogs, but if no one is watching I can't help laugh a little. (Like the Blue Angels doing low-altitude maneuvers over the bay a few weeks ago. How do they get away with that?) There is some danger because if the dog looks to be about the size of a calf, she will just go ahead collide with it. So there is a sort of predatory behavior but it is also inhibited. -----Original Message----- From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ Sent: Friday, October 29, 2021 7:14 AM To:friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution) Ha! Yeah. I think it's healthy for teenagers to think about killing people. Hell, it's healthy for adults to think about killing people. There's a problem for the monists, I guess. If it's healthy to think about killing. Is it also healthy to actually kill? Or is it a hallmark of health for there to maintain a methodological dualism, a (n admittedly fuzzy) line between thought and action? I've lost it, now. But my phone ringtone used to be the audio output of a coupled oscillator model with 4 oscillators. I've lost the PureData model, unfortunately. But they're trivial to write. We could imagine a fast cycle entertaining the thrill kills of one's favorite target and a slow cycle for the actual killing. But for a healthy person, there'd be many, many fast cycles. How many meetings do I have today? Did I respond to Bob about that quarterly report? Did I feed the cat? Shut off the coffee pot? Blah, blah, blah internal dialogue. The cycle that's entertaining killing Joe doesn't really have a chance of percolating up to the big cycles. But the sick person, the incel in the basement ranting on Gab.com about Jewish Space Lasers, doesn't have as many competing fast cycles. It's easy for a single cycle to resonate and later dominate that slow cycle. I suppose schizophrenia might be a counter example, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, too many fast cycles to allow for coherence in the slow cycles. Perhaps the only remaining challenge to the model is identifying the neural correlates? Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Theta. This lump, that lump. That tissue, this tissue. On 10/28/21 11:05 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:I imagine Greta Thunberg has some ideas pass through her head about thrill kills. So long as it is all good -- individually as a group -- I say fair enough. -----Original Message----- From: Friam<friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?>$ Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2021 9:40 AM To:friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Forum abuse! (was Revising the American Revolution) There's an opportunity to dovetail the pandemic-hastened restructuring of the work force, cancel culture, upward trends in socialism, and climate change. At the last salon, I was berated, yet again, for allowing my pet cats free access to the outdoors. The tack I took in the conversation, because we weren't just chatting, we were "in salon" (whatever that means), was a crypto-criticism of Utilitarianism. I chose this because my gank [🎮] of opponents are "ecologists", asserting the debatable devastation of domestic cats on biodiversity. Yes, this post is also about value alignment and the arrogant grand narrative of Societal Engineering for Biodiversity. I will not be able to retire, nor will most of the people my age or younger. Or, you could slip a little on the binding and say most of us have retired many times, from many different jobs, to clear space so we can launch a career in another dead-end job. What is it we're doing, as a society? If we buy that cultural evolution is a thing, what are the operators? Are we witnessing new operators or are these the same old operators, just percolating into our privileged space from their endemic home amongst the underprivileged classes. There are several essays on how tribal life was NOT "nasty, brutish, and short", but more laconic ... like a cat's ... explosive efforts of hunt or defend, punctuating periods of resting and futzing with the tools. Modern "anti-workers"<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/quit-your-job-join-anti-work-movement-elle-hunt> sound a bit like cats, to me. Of course, there is the stereotype of a solitary stray living under constant stress, scraping through dumpsters or hunting moths between desperate fights with other strays and their bacteria-poisoned teeth and claws. But this is, I think, a bit of a myth born of fallacious inter-species mind-reading by hedonic humans. Part of the reason cats are so devastating to "wildlife" is because they are not hedonic at all. They've all got a thrill-seeking death wish. Well, most do. We have a cat who has a mental illness, maybe many. She stays in her Princess Dungeon all day every day, only exiting to use the box or make the terrifying journey to the water and food upstairs. But every other cat I've ever interacted with is part of the nihilistic thrill-kill cult. Of course we'll take the rare opportunity to rest comfy in a dry puff of dirty laundry sometimes. But mostly, we'd rather be squinting in the cold rain, statue-still, waiting to pounce, chase, kill, and rend. So, like my cat-hating ecologist gankers, I don't feel pity for the homeless, suffering kitten scraping by out there. This is the world. Life sucks. Then you die. The trick is learning to enjoy it. I realize, at the end of my little essay, that it may not be clear how this relates to cancel culture or climate change. But, like a joke, explaining it ruins it. [🎮]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_video_game_terms On 10/27/21 1:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:It is confusing to me why retired people would be particularly cautious in their remarks. What difference does it make if they inflame? It isn't like they could be fired for it. Old habits die hard, I guess..-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - . 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