Game B
= Game B is a loose network of individuals and group that want to help transition to a world civilization based on non-zero-sum games that can live harmoniously within planetary boundaries; it has a core of individuals involved like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Hall, Jim Rutt and others, connected originally through the work at the Santa Fe Institute.
URL = [https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447251258838263/
Definition
Keith Runyan:
"Game A is the myriad set of human systems/cultures that are incapable of coordinating to curtail civilizational arms race towards eco/anthro self-termination.
Game B is the set of as of yet unrealized systems/cultures that together inexorably subsume our technological evolution within the bounds of an ever deepening wisdom as we learn from and co-evolve with the rest of Life."
([1])
Characteristics
Critical questions from Daniel Garner:
“1. Raven brilliantly notes that Game B is missing conflict in either the form of violence or sex, which means it is missing plot. When plot and conflict are missing, there is reason to assume that ideology is ubiquitous.
2. If humans are indeed inherently hierarchical (Louis Dumont), sexual (psychoanalysis, biology, etc.), lacking (Hegel, Gödel), etc., then any system which cannot “channel” these realities into a constructive manner will be a system that has to fight them, and human realities always win.
3. To emphasize: a system which can only work by telling humans to change their drives and nature will fail. The trick is to figure out how to channel those drives and nature into a constructive direction which takes seriously eros, logos, and pathos (to use Bard’s excellent language). So far, if we accept the thinking of people like Hayek and Keynes, “the price mechanism” seems to be our best system for doing this (it is important, I think, to discuss “price mechanisms” versus Capitalism: the word “Capitalism” is too loaded now). Unfortunately, in line with Leopold Kohr’s Breakdown of Nations, the price mechanism might be broken…
4. Art is a unique glimmer into the horizon of the human (as argued by Gadamer), so the fact the art of Game B is “x way” suggests the ideology is also “x way.” This suggests the wisdom of Raven and Owen to critique “the art” of Game B, and I couldn’t help but think of Story by Robert McKee. In that masterful text, McKee discusses how “traditional plots” are the most successful at the box office, and McKee contrasts that with “Nonplot” films, which are generally more for “art houses.” The more a story moves from the traditional plot in the direction or the “Nonplot” or “Antiplot,” the smaller and smaller the audience becomes. That doesn’t mean a “nonplot film” is bad—not at all—it simply means less people will “get it.” Considering this, if Game B is “nonplot,” this might suggest a limited number of people will “get it” or be “helped by it.” This alone doesn’t mean Game B is bad, but if Game B is supposed to scale, it will likely have to take into account a more “traditional plot,” per se, which means it will have to take into account pathos (because the majority will likely not deal with pathos through Hegel’s “Phenomenological Journey,” as Dr. Last discusses and as will be expanded on).
To highlight two points from McKee that I think every system must take into account (seeing as story reflects minds):
‘Most human beings believe that life brings closed experiences of absolute, irreversible change; that their greatest sources of conflict are external to themselves; that they are the single and active protagonists of their own existence’
‘Classical design is a mirror of the human mind.’
I personally see McKee’s work as critical for philosophers to take seriously, but that is another topic for another time.
5. What Cadell said on temporal structure, ideology, and falling into history was critical, as also was magnificent the point that most philosophical ideas are manifestations of “intimacy” and efforts to avoid it.
6. If conflict is creative, can Game B create?
7. Following Hayek, the price mechanism can “trick” and channel pathos into bringing about a non-zero-sum outcome (though not necessarily). Conflict and drives (“pathos”) cannot be changed or erased, and thus must be “directed.” If a new “game” is to be serious and adult, it must explain how pathos can be directed toward making a world where toilets work and houses are heated (for example). To put this another way, the work must be a place where pathos helps us overcome the reality that “nobody knows how to make a pencil” (to allude to Leonard Read).
8. The point Cadell made that civilization arose in response to nature for a reason cannot be overstressed. Personally, I can’t help but think that if hunting and gathering was so great, people would have kept hunting and gathering…
9. Vegetarianism is a sign that totalitarianism is nigh because there is a refusal to face pathos—Very nice, Alexander Bard, Hitler’s vegetarianism is indeed highlighted by Ian Kershaw.
10. I agree that generationalism is a major problem, yet all people today seem to discuss is sexism, racism, nationalism…
11. “Where is human sacrifice in Game B?”—Great question from Owen.
12. “Patho signaling”—An interesting phrase from the audience.
13. On the idea the masculine holds the feminine so she can look into the void—Excellent point from Raven that makes me think of the feminine as “hysterical truth” (to allude to Freud).
14. Will Game B corroborate with Game A or compete? If corroborate, how will Game B not “enable” Game A? If Game B must compete, how will Game B not be Game A? (How will Game B overcome Game A if it doesn’t ultimately beat it?)
15. In his work, I appreciate the emphasis Mr. Rutt places on forming society around children, but another key of “the market” is that it figured out how to imperfectly but often effectively “trick” pathos in the direction of helping create stable environments for children. If childcare is provided, but pathos not addressed, whichever benefits childcare provides will likely be effaced by the unchanneled pathos. Again, pathos cannot be erased, only channeled, and a system that doesn’t direct it toward productive ends will thus leave pathos to channel itself. The chances of this being destructive seem high.
16. The idea of the price mechanism is not to fight or resist human nature, hoping it will change, but to “go with the flow” and use its force and energy “in and for it” (perhaps like some forms of martial arts). More incredibly, the energy of pathos is used to provide people with bottled water and basic necessities, all while possibly making pathos feel addressed and honored. For Game B to work, it will have to do something similar: if I cannot feel like my pathos, logos, and mythos are addressed while I work at a conveyor belt company, then the system will likely fail.
17. Please do not think I am a strong supporter of Capitalism: my concern is that I am not convinced we need Game B versus just fix Game A (a view which could be seen as more Keynesian). For example, whether than try to create a Game B (which could “unbound pathos” in horrible ways), we might first try to…
A. End the collect monopoly on credentials.
B. Reform intellectual property rights to keep the artifex from being captured by corporations.
C. Cultivate intrinsic motivation to smooth out business cycles and expand the artifex which “creates the means of production.”
D. End Federal Reserve policies like “the Greenspan Put” which enable business entities to scale to a state where they become “too big to fail,” as is rational and self-destructive. This also leads to “MAD Capitalism” and mixed market rationality.
E. Bind “the tradeoff of wages for hours” which causes an increase in the value of assets at the expense of income, which contributes to wealth inequality (as discussed in Piketty, though McCloskey’s critiques of him are powerful).
F. Breakdown the “healthcare networks” so that healthcare providers don’t have practical monopolies.
And so on. All of these are examples of “repairing Game A” to make it more “non-zero sum,” versus replacing Game A with Game B. Perhaps “reform” is ultimately all Game B wants to do (bringing to mind how Luther didn’t originally seek “a hard break” from Catholicism), which would entail keeping “the infrastructure” of Game A with some systemic fixes and adjustments of human values. In other words, perhaps we need Game B to be more Keynesian than Marxist? Hard to say…
Modern Capitalism is indeed worthy of critique, for it does indeed prove ineffective where there are monopolies. Considering this, the effort of Game B is justified, and I think it is problematic that Modern Capitalism (Corporatism, Banktocracy—we can call it many things) seemingly tries to contain pathos with deterrence, “too big to fail”-logic, and other methods which, if they fail, the consequences will prove dire.
18. To take pathos seriously is to take human ontology and epistemology seriously, which indeed seems A/B versus A/A. Again, any system which ignores, tries to change, etc. our A/B-ontology is doomed (as Dr. Last has warned).
19. It’s another topic, but I fear that the disconnect of literature and economics from philosophy is a reason why philosophy lost psychoanalysis (and in fact I think there is “proof” in literature and economics that philosophy today must indeed be psychoanalytical). As Bard noted, futurology must be philosophical, but philosophy cannot even be itself without taking seriously pathos, mythos, and logos. Without these three, philosophy is “non-dialectical thinking,” which means thinking becomes non-thinking—an effacement which might take the world with it, precisely at the moment when we think the world is saved.
20. I liked the movement Bard described from naïve nihilism to cynical nihilism, and finally affirmative nihilism. That was excellent.
21. The question on if marriage arises primarily from a desire to “sexually own” someone, or if it arises in response to the reality of childrearing, the biological fact that “your sperm and my egg” gave rise to this child (and thus we are responsible for the child and by extension have responsibilities to one another), is utterly critical.
22. I’m curious why Game B chose “game” versus “story” or “community” as a metaphor—is it a Wittgenstein allusion?
23. The problem of society is the question of how to manage people with different ideologies so that they don’t kill one another. Considering this, will Game B only work if everyone believes in Game B?
24. As the portfolio of a photographer is only as good as its worst image, the quality of a system is only as good as its worst failure."
(February 3, https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/intellectual-deep-web/)
Discussion
A critical discussion by Daniel Garner:
" Collaboration is something many people talk about (perhaps because they know they should), only for collaboration to turn out to be a source of pain and hardship once the idea becomes “concrete” (to allude to Hegel). What happens in collaboration is a version of what can happen in marriage: people who are excited about something find out that it is purgatory, which is to say it is a space of great training and difficulty for the sake of “elevating us” to a higher state. I would argue that this “elevated state” can be associated with Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” (or A/B), which Dr. Last explores well in his work. A “dream community” might combine work, love, family, and the like, and arguably we all perhaps subconsciously want something like “a dream community” (hence perhaps why “Heaven” and “Platonic” realms are often sought), but the catch is that assuring a community becomes “Heavenly” versus “Hellish” requires all members to be in touch with Absolute Knowing (A/B), and that requires for each member to have gone through “the Purgatory” of what Dr. Last describes in Hegel as “The Phenomenological Journey.” If it is the case that not everyone can handle this, that the possibility of “a community of Absolute Knowing” (or what I’ll call “Absolute Community”) is inherently for a minority, then that means “at scale” we will require systems which can manage, direct, and even “trick” pathos toward constructive ends. This is no easy accomplishment, and I believe is a significant concern of economists like Marx, Hayek, Keynes, Marshall, and so on.
Though some descriptions of Christian theology describe heaven and hell as separate (as “A vs B”), there are other understandings of both Heaven and Hell being located “in God” (after all, if “God is everything,” there must be something about Hell which is God). If I understand Dante correctly, God is Heaven to “those who love God” and Hell “to those who hate God”: it is our relationship to God which determines if God is Heaven or Hell. Likewise, it's our relationship with ourselves and others which determines if community and collaboration are hellish or heavenly. Considering this and how God is “the Supreme Good,” we could have the best socioeconomic system imaginable, but if we “in” the system are not people of Absolute Knowing, the system could be hell precisely because of its potential for good. In Christian theology, because of a “disordered relationship” (versus being “in the wrong system”), it is the highest angel in “the best of all possible places” (heaven) who became Satan.
We often discuss “the problem of systems,” but not “the problem of people,” because we seem to think that “the right system” will fix people. This is a significant assumption, and I fear that there is very good reason not to believe it is so (we can see many economists as being in the business of “managing” this unsolvable problem). If A/B or Absolute Knowing was scalable, then the system which made that possible would indeed (“practically”) “solve the problem of people,” per se, by creating a scalable and widespread incubator of AK. But we have very good reason to think this is not possible (based on the raw and necessary difficulty of “The Phenomenological Journey”), and thus though small “Absolute Communities” are possible, beyond them, something else will be needed to deal with pathos. This is where “the pricing mechanism” comes in, a tragic system which accepts the unavoidability of the majority being controlled by pathos versus AK. Unfortunately, if indeed “the pricing mechanism” is broken or doesn’t apply to digital assets, we have a big problem…
Though it is another subject, Absolute Knowing is “the nonrational solution” needed to avoid Nash Equilibriums, “conflicts of mind,” “internally consistent systems,” etc., which emerge in individual lives when following “autonomous rationality.” What I mean by this is discussed extensively with Dr. Lorenzo Barberis Canonico, who basically works on how neurodiversity and collective intelligence can be used in service of incubating Absolute Knowing; I also spoke recently with John David and Davood Gozli on Benjamin Fondane, who can also be associated with “nonrationality.” But to be very general: without Hegel’s “dialectical thinking,” we end up stuck between “rationality and irrationality,” which means we cannot avoid Nash Equilibria. We need “nonrationality, rationality, and irrationality”—all three—to avoid ending up in “suboptimal results.” Unfortunately, if only a minority of people will incorporate “nonrationality” into their thinking, then only a minority can participate in Absolute Communities; for the rest, a system like the price mechanism will be needed to manage “pathos” (which requires “nonrationality” to be directed into AK). But what if Corporatism and/or the Banktocracy has ruined “the pricing mechanism?” Then we are in trouble, which suggests why I am very open to the question on if we need to “replace Game A” or “reform Game A.” The debate is critical.
If Absolute Communities cannot scale, then a system which “channels” pathos in productive and constructive manners is necessary, and this is the role of “the pricing mechanism.” No, Modern Capitalism doesn’t do this well, hence the need for “reform” as mentioned above, but my point is that the very fact Absolute Communities “practically” cannot scale is reason to think we should "reform Game A" versus "create Game B" (though I have to think more on this). If it is indeed true that every system eventually becomes hellish without AK, then “the best possible system” will be one which makes room for Absolute Communities, while at the same time managing pathos on a larger scale “toward” productive and constructive ends (a model which sounds Federalist, though unfortunately Madison doesn’t seem to have known about Hegel).
It’s another topic, elaborated on in Book Three of The True Isn’t the Rational, but all systems must ultimately prove incomplete. This alludes to the work of Kurt Gödel, but basically it means that “no map can be its territory,” and it is precisely at the point where “the map” is unveiled not to be “the territory” that we find the human standing with all his/her pathos, logos, and mythos. The human subject is why all systems are ultimately incomplete, which means what happens to the system is ultimately up to the human (“a flip moment”). So, if the human chooses to seek A/B and Absolute Knowing, the “essentially incomplete system” can practically (“as long as the human so practices it”) be “(in)complete,” which means the system or community “finds completeness in incompleteness,” a Hegelian state.
“The Gödel Point” (as I’ll call it) in which the human subject stands is precisely where we decide if the system or community is “hellish” or “heavenly.” Same system, as God can be Heaven/Hell based on the relation, but based on what we do and become in this Purgatory (this place/point of Hegel’s “Phenomenological Journey”), everything is defined and changed accordingly (and will seem as if it “always already” such, which is the strangeness of “flip moments”). This hints at the wisdom of Alex Ebert’s thinking on death and relations, because if in “The Gödel Point” we fail to accept death and prioritize the individual over relations, both “the map” and “the territory” will become cancerous and exclusive, which is to say we will die alone. The only way to make death good is to accept it.
Another way to put this is that “The Gödel Point” is where we decide if we will undergo “negation/sublation” or “effacement” (as described in “Negation Versus Effacement” ). “The Gödel Point” can be our “entrance way” into Absolute Communities or the beginning of our effacement if we do not design mechanisms for dealing with pathos at scale. If mechanisms today which deal with pathos are now failing, I am of the opinion that we should look to fix them unless Game B can replace these mechanisms with something better. That certainly might be possible, and my work with Anthony at Intrinsic Research Co. explores this possibility, but a possibility that never undergoes negation and concretion (following Hegel) is hardly even a possibility.
It would seem that no system is forever “the right system” which lacks Absolute Knowing: all systems in which people are not A/B will eventually fail. Thus, in the end, we might ask: Are Absolute Communities scalable? Well, perhaps to the degree each individual engages in “The Phenomenological Journey.” Will that be most of us? Hard to say…” "
(February 3, https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/intellectual-deep-web/)