Finite and Infinite Games

to blow your mind content. Can I confess that I've considered reading them but have actually been hesitant because I want you to be able to keep explaining m banks books to me with me actually not knowing them in advance. Okay, well, then hopefully that's what's gonna happen right now. Because as we were researching the topic for today, I was reminded

of his nine book, The Player of Games. Okay, so this is a book that concerns the culture, which is of course an instellar, interstellar post scarcity civilization in which AI minds do all or most of the heavy lifting and humans live in a kind of uh uh, you know, utopian anarchy. Okay, so this is not the book that Tron was based on No No, but but it is

a wonderful treatment of games. Now, the people in the culture, they don't really have to do much beyond just enjoy life, and our protagonist in this particular book, Gurga does this by playing in and excelling at a multitude of card and board games and other related games. Yeah. So this is often the positive vision of the sort of post singularity future, right most A lot of the visions that you get in science fiction are very negative, I guess

because negative plots are more interesting to play with. But so this says, basically, you know, once humans aren't really needed to create the wealth that sustained society anymore, you can actually just do what you want. You can be creative, you can have fun, and that's what life is. Yeah, and uh or am I off base? Is that not how it is? Um in the culture? It is, but

with lots of dark caveats Okay. Now, some members of the culture choose to involve themselves in matters of greater importance, such as service in Special Circumstances, which deals with pending and emergent threats to the culture uh and general interplanetary stability, and they recruit Gurga and send him to the Empire of Azad uh to to master and play the game of Azad, which is a complex game that consists of various sub games that serves as the basic system of

all political and social order in the Empire of Azad. Okay, So what is is it? What like a big board game or something. It's it's like a board game built out of board games. It's a kind of like imagine

a board game that is just the center of all culture. Like, I guess it's kind of hard to to to pick out something like imagine if the Bible in say medieval Europe, if the Bible were a board game instead, if it was like Settlers of Ghatan instead of the Bible at the center of this, uh, this sort of Catholic world. And on top of that, it was not just settlers of Gatton, but are ridiculously complex settlers. Do you have

to devote your entire life to playing it? So a labyrinthine game that contains pronouncements of authority that is intermingled with government. Yes, And so they want they apparently need to send him there because they want to disrupt as odd and topple its current systems and bring about something more in line with culture values. Uh and and also because the the the the empire of his they also are a very brutal people given to spectacles of fatal violence.

So it's a great book and one I always recommend as a starting point for the culture and banks in general. But isn't it interesting how we see the mixture of different games here. So we see the contained and restricted board and card games within Gurga's life, so those are like normal games. We see the open ended game of Gurga's life, in which he essentially tries to fill a

lengthy trans human lifetime with pleasure and meaning. We have the complex but ultimately contained game of add we have the intricate game of special circumstances, various plots and operations. We have the greater game that's played by these minds that are operating, you know, on scales beyond anything human intelligence can can really comprehend. And then we have the looming possibility of the game of interplanetary war. Yeah, it's interesting the way games so readily serve as metaphors for

almost any kind of human endeavor or for life itself. Right, A game, in its more narrow definition tends to be a thing with rules that is done for recreation or for fun. And yet you can clearly see how that concept of a game gets mapped onto essentially anything humans do. Whatever you're doing right now, in one way or another, can be thought of as a game. I'm just gonna read one quick quote from from the player of games,

just to give everyone a taste. This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time just to play a game. The man is a game player called Gurga. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle and ends with a game that is not a game. And you have to read the book to get the rest. But but I, like I said, I couldn't help but think of this book

in uh in comparison to the topic we're discussing today. Right, So today we're gonna be talking about an interesting little philosophy book that I read within the past couple of weeks by an American scholar named James P. Cars, who for more than thirty years was a professor of the

history and literature of religion at New York University. Now, this book isn't directly about religion, though it addresses religion, and some of its parts it's it's a short, little philosophy book, and it's called Finite and Infinite Games, a vision of Life as Play and Possibility, and it was

published in nineteen eighty six from Free Press. Now, over the years, I've read several writers and thinkers who I admire in one way or another mentioned this book as influential on their thinking, and I recently decided to check it out. And ever since I started reading it, I have been captivated by the idea at the core of this book. And really, the idea is just a very interesting metaphor. It's not a scientific book. It's not a book really I think that is necessary for explaining anything

important about how things are. But it's a very interesting metaphorical framework for how to look at the behavior of beings like you and me using this metaphor of play, right, And I also want to drive home that it's it's not it's it's rather different from a lot of the books we've discussed on the show because it's not filled with a bunch of, you know, descriptions of various histories or mythologies or other philosophical topics. It's a very it's

a very easily consumed book. Um, I don't want to criticism. I don't. I don't want to relegate it to the bathroom. But this is a book that you could keep in the bathrooms. It's very much a casual read. Yeah, and you you can pick up any part of it, any page of it. Usually there will be a short section that you could read that that will, you know, make you think about things. That's kind of interesting and provocative. If it were kept by a toilet, I would call

it a butt number. You know the button numbers, button number books. No, I've never heard this terminol. They're the ones that if you keep them by the toilet, they're going to keep people on the toilet a little bit too long because you'd get interested interesting. I've I've never heard them described as such. I might have made that up. I'm not sure. I can't remember if I got that from the culture or from my own brain. Well, now

it's out there so everyone can use it. Okay, So what is this this core idea that James P. Cars talks about in his book. The main idea is that when we do things, we're playing, and the things we do are games. And Cars's main move in this book is to separate the games we play into two major types, finite and infinite. It's there in the title Finite and infinite Games. And to quote from the opening of the book, quote, there are at least two kinds of games. One could

be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. Okay, In fact, I could say that you could skip reading the rest of the book and just contemplate that sentence and get a lot of the same value. For instance, one example that probably comes to a lot of people's minds is that it's perhaps the difference between playing tennis and keeping score

and just batting the ball around, right. I mean, that could potentially be a good example where one is played with a finite definite outcome in mind, where the other is played to see how long play can go on. Well, let's get into a little bit. Let's flesh out the core concept here. Let's look at a few of the characteristics that Car slays out that that he thinks go along with the difference between a finite game and an infinite game. So, what are the characteristics of finite and

infinite games in cars? Is mine, alright. So a finite game must come to an end when a player or a group of players win. Now, what constitutes winning might be spelled out in some set of external rules or or you know, it depends on the judgment of a referee. But ultimately the only thing that can decide whether the game has been one is the players agreeing that, hey, the game is over in this person one or this

team one. Right. So if the players don't agree the game is over in practice, it is in fact not over right, It ain't over yet. And if the players agree the game is over in practice, they can't continue playing sort of by definition, maybe they could continue some activity, but they're no longer really playing the same game they were if they all think it's over, right. And then also there are temporal boundaries in place here. Time matters. Do you know when your game began? Do you care?

If your answers are yes, then your game is finite. And then, of course the game again is over is if someone wins, right. And by contrast, the purpose of an infinite game is not to win, but to prevent the game from coming to an end. And thus there really is no decisive way to win except maybe by indefinitely continuing play. Yes, and he says, quote, there is no finite game unless the players freely choose to play it. No one can play who is forced to play. Now.

One of the things he talks about with a finite game is that finite games need to have players agree on the rules before play starts. Right. If you've not agreed on the rules and advance, or players try to change the rules after play begins, the legitimacy of the outcome could be in danger. Players might not accept the outcome, they might not accept the winner. But by contrast, infinite games,

by necessity, tend to evolve over time. Sometimes you change the rules, the teams, the players, the play space so that play can continue and can get around obstacles that would impede play. Cars Wrights quote, Finite players play within boundaries. Infinite players play with boundaries, and finite games encourage players to create predictability and discourage surprise. So in an infinite game,

usually the very purpose is to be surprised. Right, Because if you're playing a finite game, you want to win. What gets in the way of you winning, you not expecting what comes next, right, Right, You want to control the conditions of the game when you're trying to win.

When you're playing an infinite game where the purpose is not to bring it to an end but to let it go on forever, you always want there there to be the potential for variation, right, Yeah, it's I think about role playing games a lot with this, Like playing Dungeons and Dragons. It's not a situation where the players are necessarily playing against each other, though there are games that play out like that. It should not be, in my opinion, a situation where the dungeon master is playing

against the players. Uh. Instead, it should be, in my mind, uh, a collective storytelling effort by the players and the dungeon master. And therefore it's not about which which a choice or which which role of the dice is going to her the other side the most. It's about what is going to create the most engaging situation. I want to come back to your D and D example in a bit, because that goes along with something I think I've observed when when I've been thinking about finite and infinite games.

One more characteristic I want to mention before I move on to an example is that car says finite games tend to engender an attitude of seriousness, focus, and single mindedness within the players. Meanwhile, infinite games tend to encourage a spirit of playfulness, exploration, and curiosity. Quote whoever must play cannot play well. That, of course, he says, applies

to both types of games. Right. You might not like the fact that you say, have to earn money to make a living, or have to eat in order to survive, but you must agree to play that game or you're not playing. Now, before we consider dungeons and dragons or dungeons and dragons at gunpoint any further, we should probably turn to a more you know, classically established a game as a model for this for this subject. Sure well.

To understand the simplest version of the difference I think between a finite game in an infinite game, consider a game of chess versus the game of chess. So, in a single game of chess, a player's goal is to defeat her opponent and become the winner. The game of chess doesn't have a set number of players who play against each other and want to win over another. It's it's an abstract space that allows individual games to keep on happening within it. It goes on forever. It could

have infinitely many finite games within it. You can win a game of chess, but you can't win the game of chess. It exists, so people can keep playing it now. I just want to throw in a couple of quick facts from a two thousand ten Popular Science article by Natalie Wolchover, in which she quotes computer scientists Jonathan Schaefer, who points out that quote, the possible number of chess games is so huge that no one will ever invest

the effort to calculate the exact number. Uh And in the article, she also points out that while there are only so many opening moves a player can make, the possibilities just quickly spiral out of control with each subsequent move. So in a sense, there are almost an infinite I guess, maybe not an actually infinite, but but a seemingly infinite

number of chess games that could be played. But even that doesn't in fact matter, because you could say that tic tac toe, which has a much smaller number of possible games, is in a sense an infinite game. If you're talking about the game of tic tac toes, you can't win the game. You could win a game that you play against somebody. Right. In fact, there's there's no excuse not to win a game tec if you play first. Now, wait a minute, I can't remember what is that solved

in the first player? Can always win at tic tac toe? Or can you always force a draw? I don't know. Playing against a child really kind of screws things up for me because I've had to throw games of Tic Tac toe, uh, to the point where I don't remember how it really works because I'm trying to win the infinite game of parenting. But that's a that's a bad strategy. You need to teach him the pain of losing. Well, yeah,

but I want to do that with games that are fun. Well, maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back, we can talk a little bit more about why we think this idea of finite and infinite games is interesting and and some more ways that can be applied. Alright, we're back, So let's let's get do some some more examples here. What are some examples of

finite games? Okay, well, we're totally surrounded by finite games and we're just you know, they make up the bulk of everyday endeavor right, competition among co workers for a single available promotion or among job candidates for a single position at a company. That's a finite game, right, You there's an end that you want to win. You want to be the person who gets that position, and you're competing for it. Another example would be an actual game,

like a game of football. You're you're trying to win the game. Yeah, and it has a it has a time even though times. See I don't know much about football, but it does seem like time works differently in football because the the time on the ticker there does not equal the the exact uh length of the game. Well, whatever the length is, there are boundaries. I mean, you could have a game that doesn't have a necessary time limit on it, but it starts at a certain time

and you know how the ending is decided, right. I'm not sure what happens in football if you don't have a winner, Like if you're just tied and you just keep going and you can't win, do they do they just call it a draw? Or do they play until somebody wins? Oh? Yeah, because you have other games where you have sudden death over times or a draw is is permittable? I I am not sure we're showing how cool we are here knowing all about football. Well, our

football fan listeners will have to chime in. Okay. So another clearly finite game would be a chase, an individual chase between predator and prey. Right there, there is somehow going to be a decisive conclusion. Either the predator might get a meal and the prey will die, or maybe the prey will escape and survive and the predator will lose and go hungry, and then there can be all kinds of sort of ranked intermediate outcomes, but there will

be an outcome, right yeah. And that's the one thing that's important keep in mind with the infinite versus finite games is you can kind of nitpick a lot of these. You can say, well, well, you know what if they both the predator and prey both die, that's finite. Yeah, I mean it's it's still finite. But but yeah, you have to the mind can help. But I said, I think pick at the distinction of finite and infinite, and you can kind of go down a rabbit hole with

any of these examples. In addition to predator and prey competition, of course, the other great competition of the natural world is mating. Oh sure, this is a finite game though mating and I would say mating and procreation itself is an infinite game, right It doesn't have a finite outcome. Reproduction is something that seems to be designed to go on as long as it can and just keep the

game going. But say in a more finite contest between two stags fighting for the right to mate with a female in the area, there is a winner and a loser. The winner gets to mate. There's no way to win the game of reproduction. On the other hand, it's played so that play may continue indefinitely down the generations. Yeah, but but but in terms of the actual encounter, Uh, it's gonna end. Attenborough is going to tell you when it's over, and then you're gonna go to the next

segment on the Nature documentary. Now, you actually pointed out something interesting about how it can get weird when you you think a game is one type, but then you can nitpick about ways that it could be the other type. One thing is that wars very often get presented as a finite game. Right there, there is a goal to achieve, we will win over the enemy. But it's interesting to consider the idea of war as an infinite game, as

imagined by George Orwell in ninety four. You know, in Orwell's Dystopia, in that novel, war is not fought for the purpose of ultimately winning over the enemy and achieving some finite goal. The purpose of war, you know, it's not like to control territory for the long haul. In the end, it is to be continuously at war, to fight continuously for political purposes. And in this circumstance, the purpose of war is not to win, but to be at war. And in the sense this makes war an

infinite game. Of course, you know, many critics have argued that there are elements of this in the rationale for some real wars taking place in the real world. Now. I've seen this example brought up before, specifically by motivational speaker A Simon Cynic, who used the Vietnam War as an example of of an infinite war. But but I kind of want to go with a different, broader example,

just to to lay it out. So in any story that pits besiegers against the besieged, and you know, in terms of like an army that is besieging a fortress, Uh, there are two games at play, So you can argue that the besiegers and attackers are playing a finite game. They are playing to take the castle. Their game ends when they actually conquer Troy or gond Or or gall got Rath. But the besiegers that offenders, their game is

more infinite. Their game is survival, so they don't have to conquer their enemy, they just have to avoid being conquered. They have to survive. Well, yeah, that's interesting, because Cars ultimately says, though I think this sort of undercut some of the interesting parts of his metaphor. He says in the very last chapter of his book, there is but one infinite game. So therefore he's implying that life itself really is the infinite game, and the things within it

are the finite games. But I think it's useful to imagine the other types of infinite games there can be within life. But of course, the way you point out there, there's sort of like levels that a finite game can be close or distant from the infinite game. The the attackers on a city are playing a finite game to achieve a finite goal, and for the people within the city, what's at risk in the finite game of defending the city is ultimately the viability of the infinite game of

getting to continue living. Yeah, if you, if you really sort of pick it apart enough, you can you can bring a lot of these games back to the infinite game of survival. So we discussed the game of war. But how about one of the other great games that is continually covered by the media, the game of politics. Well, sure, I mean there are ways of thinking about politics as

a finite game or as an infinite game. There are lots of obviously finite games within politics, like an election, you know, as a clear outcome there's a winner and you're trying to win, or an attempt to pass a bill. Uh, these have finite win loss outcomes. But the entire political structure itself should be designed primarily to allow the continued

existence and evolution of a civil society. You've got people and they want to live, and the goal of of a politics should be allow them to allow them to live and allow play to continue. But sometimes, of course, you get political actors who seem to lose sight of the infinite nature of the game, right, and that they have a kind of more finite total orientation towards politics. It's almost like you can win the game of politics.

And I guarantee no matter where you are listening to this episode, you're gonna be able to find examples of that in your own political sphere. Yeah, I mean when we see it, that's like one of the most troubling and distasteful things we tend to see in politics, right when you see somebody who's who doesn't seem to have a an infinite view of what the future of their political system could be, but almost like they want to conquer it as a single act with an end goal. Yeah.

Though I will say on the buffet of distasteful things about politics that that does cover a number of the different steamer trays that are available. Yeah, that's the whole seafood section. On the other hand, it's you think about the infinite game, and you think about how you interact with the infinite game, and a lot of that does

come down to breaking it up into finite games. Right. So, and even with politics, it can you can see where it can happen where it's a situation of like, well, yes I want ultimately I want this, but in the short term, I need to get this bill passed and may and getting that bill passed is a part of the infinite game, but it is a finite battle, and yeah, I guess it comes down to you lose sight of the infinite in pursuing the finite. This is where I want to come back to your D and D example.

So I think this is true about what I'm about to say. I think it's true about politics, but I think it's true about all kinds of things, and I'm sure it's going to be somewhat relevant to your D n D example. One of the things I keep thinking about ever since I started reading cars is how so much of our frustration with other people in life comes as a result of our belief that other people are not playing a game under its correct finite versus infinite distinction.

And so when you're trying to play a finite game and other people engaged in the same activity or treating it as an infinite game, it can feel very annoying and tedious and pointless and frustrating. Right You're like, I'm trying to get this done, I'm trying to get this outcome, and other people around me are just playing around as

if they don't want to get to the point. And then on the other hand, when you're trying to play an infinite game and other players around you are treating it like a finite game, it can feel cruel and hopeless and depressing and unfair. And there are all kinds of games that are gonna have mixed players within them, right, some people treating a certain type of play space is

finite and other people treating it as more infinite. And I bet you get that kind of conflict within a D and D game, right, You've got some people there who would be happy for the campaign to just go on and evolve forever and just continue being fun, versus other people who are very goal and outcome oriented within

the game. Would you agree, Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, luckily, I think a game like Dungeons and Dragons tends it has stuff in it for for both types of players, Because on one hand, some may say, yeah, I just I want to finish the story. I want to finish this campaign. I want to I want to beat the game like it's a typical video game, or they might they're they're they're thinking about leveling up. I want to get to that next level because then I get more

more powers, more stats, you know, what have you? Or I want to get more loot, So you can think of all these sort of finite levels within what is ultimately in an infinite game. It's about the the storytelling and the experience and the possibilities within this, uh, this, this mutually created world. Though. That highlights to me in an interesting way, the differences between finite and infinite storytelling. Um, I mean, they're there are very different ways that you

can approach telling a story. Do you ever think about how different it feels to be in the hands of, say, a well written movie that has a tight plot, you know, well well conceived story structure, versus being in one of the opening seasons of a TV show where you're you know, you're in one of those first couple of seasons and the writers very likely do not know how the show

is going to end yet. Um I mean, we must assume, based on the laws of physics and of economics, that at some point the show will come to an end, but it's not being written that way yet. It's just going on and expanding, and that can feel very different and almost more enticing in a way, because it feels like it feels more like life itself, like this could

just go on. Yeah, I mean I feel that definitely with the game of their own series right now, because the the earlier books and earlier seasons, everything everything is possible. You don't know where it's going. But at this point in the in the TV series at any rate, it's become very finite, Like you know, everything is wrapping up in a set number of episodes, and there's so there's only so there are only so many battles that can happen, there are only so many shocking twists that can occur.

You know. I couldn't help but think about Fallout four in all of this, I can't. I can't recall if you played the Fallout games before. For you, okay, so you know in that game, you you you level up, as is typical in these role playing games, but the higher level becomes, the more work it requires, more time it requires to reach that next level. For people who

have played, can we basically say what it is? It's a post apocalyptic ultimately, I mean, there's a there's a set storyline in it, but it's also a sandbox world. It also has this open aspect and you can keep playing it no matter where you are in the various big and small storylines, so so there's a finite storyline in the middle of it. But you can just keep going around and doing different things, and you'd never run

out of things to do. It's just sort of a limitless world, yes and no, right, because you can run out of worthwhile things to do, you can run out of interesting things to do. But there will always be some sort of rand. There will always be random monster encounters there will, you know, and I imagine there'll be a sort of a repetition on some of the random quests that pop up. But I was looking into this and according to the Fallout wiki, Fallout for does not

have an actual level cap. So you can keep becoming more godlike. Yeah, you can keep you can tend to you. Essentially, you can keep playing forever. However, they say that there is a hard limit at level sixty five hundred and thirty five. If you try to level past this point by any means, uh, then you'll crash the game due

to the value overflowing back to zero. Oh that's so that seems like a kind of um, maybe not well articulated, but finite limit on something that seemed like it could be infinite, right, but I maintain that you would you would either go insane or just becoming just increasingly bored before you got anywhere close to level say sixty. Yeah, well, I don't know how you can get past, you know,

level thirty. If you if you were in Stephen king short story of the Jaunt, and you were like sucked into the timeless nether realm between the fabric of reality, and you happen to bring your Xbox three sixty with you, then then I think maybe you could get close to that level more tedious than you think, more tedious than

you think. Well, this, this doesn't make me think though about the fact that, on one hand, you could actually say, if we accept the laws of physics, there is no such thing as any infinite game in an objective sense, and that objectively no game will go on forever. Right, You'd run out of you'd run out of energy, you'd run out of useful energy, you'd run out of the ability to do work at some point an entropy in

the future. But so that makes me think that I still think the idea of infinite games is very useful, and it reflects not really like what the actual potential future of the game is. But what the mindset of the player is that an infinite game could in fact come to an end within an hour. But what makes it an infinite game is the way the players treat it. They're treating it as if it could never come to an end. Right, So in that respect, fallout for is it's it's it's an infinite game as long as you

have an infinite gaming attitude about it. Yeah, and that and that difference in attitude can come through in all kinds of other things. I Mean, one example that I keep thinking about is the distinctions in how you might approach running a business. Now, I don't want to you know, this isn't gonna become a business podcast. Robert and are

not known for our insights in business. But just one thing to think about is does a business exist in order to create things of value, employ people, live and grow and keep on doing stuff in the economy and for its employees, or does it exist on a sort of path of financial conquest with a terminal end goal. Uh. Does the leadership of a business think about like, Okay, we're going to grow this until the point where we, you know, can sell or something like sell our position

or something like that, or dominate the market. Uh. And this can get even more complicated because a business is usually going to be run by multiple leaders at various levels who might have somewhat different ideas about this, and the unspoken conflicts between the finite players and the infinite players in a business can create dysfunction. Yeah, I can see that. On one hand, someone saying we we created

this company to change the world. This other player in the game is sing, well, actually, we created this company so we can sell it to Microsoft, uh next quarter. Now, in both cases, the company may continue existing after a certain point that's being perceived is finite by the players, or a company may not continue. In fact, there is probably no such thing as an infinite company right that that will go on for the rest of time. But

again it's about the mindset of the players. Are they thinking about this as something that is designed to be continuous and continue going on or something that has a winning condition? Now, Joe, you turned me onto a two thousand fourteen interview with Cars on CBC's Ideas with Paul Kennedy. Yeah, I actually haven't listened to that, but I saw that Cars did it, and I know you're big into Paul Kennedy and his Optimist Prime, his Canadian Optimist prime voice.

Uh so, I I let you know about that, knowing that you would go investigate and find out if it was worthwhile. Was it? It is? It's it's very interesting. The title you can look it up and I'll try and link to it on the landing page. It's definitably your mind dot com. But it's titled After Atheism, New Perspectives on God and Religion And it's a wonderful episode.

Dealing mostly with the ideas presented in Cars. Cars is two thousand and eight book The Religious Case Against Belief, and he makes a compelling case that belief is actually the enemy of religion and that the true beauty of religion is its ability to foster new ideas and approaches to life. And this all ends up tying in with with this idea of finite and infinite games as well. He argues that when you start walling religion up in belief,

you rob it of that power. I believe this, and by the extension, I do not believe in that it becomes a dogmatic exercise and authority and pits us not only against our fellow humans, but against ourselves. He makes the case that the closed mindedness and hostility of belief has corrupted religion and spawned violence all over the world. Yeah,

that's interesting, I've encountered this type of belief before. Like the idea that um that at its core, if you go back far enough in history, religion may not necessarily have been about about dogmatic beliefs like here is what God is and here's what you must do, but instead was more akin to a type of culture, like it involved settings and practices, ways of giving getting people into a certain state of minds, a contemplative state of mind

or a thankful state of mind. Yeah, and and Cars touches on some of these ideas UH in Finite and Infinite Games as well, particularly the topic of myth and religion. So chapter seven UM in Finite Infinite Games is titled Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it. So the idea is that a culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths. He says that stories attain the status of myth when they are retold and persistently retold solely for their own sake, so that essentially the core of

a myth is a is an infinite storytelling tradition. It's the infinite game of telling a story. Yeah, yeah, I mean he he points something out that I think this is rather obvious to anyone who's ever crafted, or or or consumed any amount of fiction or art. But he says that whenever you stop telling the story for the story's sake and tell it to drive home like a clear social or political message, then you're no longer a storyteller. You've become a you know, a preacher or a propagandist. Yeah,

it is weird how stories. I feel like a stories can demonstrate values. I wouldn't argue with that. But at the same time, when you start to get a sense that a story is being told to make, say a political point or an educational point or something like that, it becomes immediately far less interesting as a story. Yeah.

And and the thing is, even kids, little kids can tell when a children's book has an ax to grind, when it's clearly about it's it's not about the joy of sharing a story, it's about driving home some point about how they should clean up their room. So Car says, quote, great stories cannot be observed anymore than an infinite game can have an audience. Once I hear the story, I enter into its own dimensionality, I inhabited space at its time.

I do not therefore understand the story in terms of my experience, but my experience in terms of the story. Stories that have the enduring strength of strength of myths reach through experience to touch the genius in each of us. But experience is the result of this generative touch, not its cause. So far is this the case that we can even say that if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.

I love this. I mean I if you're a listener to the show, you'll probably know that we have generally a pretty healthy respect for the mythological storytelling tradition, and yet at the same time can can take plenty of issue with what dogmatic religions and stuff like that due to the world, especially when you've got a specific destructive belief that's being insisted on. Right. But the yeah, the

mythological storytelling tradition is a wonderfully generative thing. Because one of the things that I think doesn't get broad up enough in discussion of creativity is how experience of the creativity of the others spawns the creativity within yourself. That people are inspired to tell stories because they consume stories, and that a lot of times the way stories happen is that you hear a story that's been told many times and you want to tell not exactly the same story,

but a variation on it. Yeah, what would have happened if this had happened, or what if this character had thought this instead of what we've merely assumed to be the case. But of course, variation on the mythological storytelling tradition is great if that's allowed. But if you're insisting on a very finite point of view that the myth must convey, then variations on the myth are not going to be accepted. Right, And this is where he gets into the idea that ideology is the apple, it is

the amplification of myth. He gets into this concept in the Ideas interview as well, that that belief in sacred text fix fixes the past and the future. He says, quote, it is the assumption that's since the beginning and the end of history are known, there is nothing more to say. Uh So, it's it's it's a treatment of myth that no longer promotes infinite interpretation. Uh, it's it's no longer

a situation of saying, hey, what do you think this means? Instead, you're saying, this is the Mets message of the Holy Word, this is what the text means, and nothing else. So he proposes the use of religion as the necessary template for interacting with the world, for imagining the cosmos, etcetera. Uh. And I really like this, this treatment of myth and religion.

I mean, I think back on stories that I grew up with, be it you know, the Christian Bible, or Greek myth the Lord of the Rings, or or my dad telling me the story the Battle of Hastings and Stanford Bridge. You know, I can't help but carry those with me and summon them in consideration of new myths

and news stories and new ideas. So when I reached the point in my life where I started learning about Hinduism, for example, I could look at a character like Krishna and say, oh, well, you know, he kind of lines

up with say this Jesus character in some respects. Uh. You know, as far as A, B and C are concerned, like you bring the story, these stories with you to make sense of new stories and interpret them, but not as a like finite text about what is true and what should be believed, but as a sort of like generative mechanism. It causes you to be creative to think about things, right, Yeah, And he argues that the appeal of Christ and of Buddha both come down to the

infinite nature of their quests. So God it becomes human in order to listen to humanity, immortal prince undertaking a spiritual quest to release everyone from all forms of bondage. And he says, quote, those Christians who deafened themselves to the residence of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not

kill the myth. The empty divinity, whom they have made into an instrument of vengeance, continues to return as the Man of Sorrows, bringing with him his unfinished story and restoring the voices of the silenced. WHOA. Now that is a sermon. So yeah. I wouldn't have necessarily originally thought how to apply the framework of finite and infinite games to types of mythology and religious storytelling, but that's a

really interesting place to take it. And I, you know, when he does get into that in the book it it does make sense because he is a scholar of religion. But when I first encountered the idea, I originally started thinking about it in terms of technology. All Right, we'll hold that thought, Joe, because we're gonna take one more break and then we're back. Thank thank Alright, we're back. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the idea of conceptions of technology in terms of finite or

infinite games along cars is framework. So we've talked on the show before about Jarren Lannier, right, Yes, I believe so. Yeah, he's so. He's a computer scientist, technology philosopher, one of the most important minds behind the history and development of virtual reality. And interestingly, though he says that in his earlier years he was in many ways kind of a techno utopian guru, in recent years he has become increasingly critical of the role of digital technology in our lives

and of the techno utopian mindset. Though I think you can still sound very positive about the potential of virtual reality when you get him going on it while acknowledging the dangers as well. But he was very critical, for example, of the crowdsourcing trends of Web two point oh in his two thousand tin book You Are Not a Gadget, Robert, I know you remember that crowdsourcing era. Oh yes, I do remember it well because it, uh, it does. It reared its ugly head in our own business here. Why

should we write the articles. Let's get the people to write the Yeah. Yeah, let's you know, free content coming right out of the mouths of the mass. Yeah. And I mean I and I say that as someone who loves Wikipedia and I love browsing crowdsourced articles about various things. In case you're wondering, I did mean to say mass singular and not mass because it is a monolith, isn't

at once you're you're monetizing it. Yes. So. Lanier has also been very critical of the role of social media, the advertising driven model of digital content, with the idea that you know, advertising driven media platforms like social media tend to trend toward manipulation and the stoking of negative emotions, degrading the quality of relationships. One example I found is that he writes that if you can say you have thousands of friends on Facebook, quote, this can only be

true if the idea of friendship is reduced. I think that's pretty true. He's also been really critical of singularity type thinking, which he's called cybernetic totalism, a sort of you know, reduces humans and human creativity towards this single achievement sort of point in history that we can get to and then the machines will be able to take over, and really everything that humans can do now, and all human creativity and culture and all that can ultimately be

represented by computing power. Anyway, I found a section on his website that is a sort of cut chapter. He called it a deleted scene from his Q You Are Not a Gadget, where he talks about the idea of his old techno utopian guru talk and uh, in some ways in which he still agrees with it, in some ways he doesn't agree with it anymore. So he's talking about this idea of post symbolic communication, which is something

that he envisions in the world of virtual reality. So, Robert, imagine you've got a virtual reality machine where you can use it to essentially, at very high fidelity, translate the contents of your imagination directly into some digital space that can be shared with other people without having to use symbolic encoding of things like words. Okay, so instead of writing a short story about a world that I've imagined, instead of painting it on a canvas, I am just

like brain blasting it right in your face. Yeah, you can transmit the contents of your imagination in a very high fidelity and convincing way into a place where you can experience them in sensory way, and other people can experience them as well. And that's sort of what he

calls the idea of post symbolic communication. It's like you can get around having to use things like digital encoding of of you know, like drawings and words and stuff, all these things that are sort of bottlenext towards sharing creativity.

He contrasts that path towards post symbolic communication with other types of quote ramps or visions of the progress or visions of possible progress in technology, like singularitarian thinking, where the power of technology through computation and artificial intelligence will will sort of cross an event horizon of power and progress.

And here's where he brings in cars. He uses cars is framework of finite and infinite games to think about types of ramps or visions of technological progress, and this is a major reason some ramps are better than others. He argues, quote Here's how I like to put it. Good technology connects people in new and deeper ways, while

bad technolog g merely grants people more raw power. Once you have the fastest car, the biggest bomb, the most capacious computer, what then it is an empty form of ambition. A drive for pure technological power is not only a finite game, but often a destructive one. And he writes, quote improving computation for its own sake instead of for the cause of empathy results in misfortunes like the plague

of fragments were now enduring. Uh and also quote an approach to any underlying technological capability that solely expands human

powers will probably lead to evil. And I really think about this in the context of the conversations we had earlier this year about social media, Like think about how the pure, open minded drive towards expanding the power of a social media platform like Facebook ended up manifesting in terms of horrible finite games like get as many users as possible onto the platform and then monetize you know, like that is a finite game, and that is a

very destructive finite game ultimately, right, because it's it's in so many ways limiting of what good is actually possible through technology. So, ultimately I think Landier is saying that if we want technology to serve us, we can't just make it more powerful, because technology that, in a blind way is just made more powerful will tend naturally towards becoming a tool in a series of increasingly destructive finite games played by the people who have the most power

to wield the technology. Instead, as technology progresses, we have to have an ethic of progress, and the ethic of progress should be one where the considering technology as part of an infinite game must be built into the technological advance itself. Okay, so it's not just about say, I can't help to think of it like a loud speaker creating a powerful loudspeaker. But then you have to also

think about the message that's going through the loudspeaker. Yeah, there must be a way of shaping the progress of developing louder and louder loud speakers so that I don't know, so that it's used for purposes that make people's lives better, Maybe for playing loud concerts and public that people would enjoy or something like that, and not to be used as a sonic weapon to pacify crowds of protesters or

something like that. Because if you just say, well, it's just raw, you know, it's just increasing our power to do whatever. It's a tool, it could be good or evil. You know. He's pointing out the many ways that if you just give people more tool power that's morally neutral, it will just tend to get used for evil purposes, even unintentionally. People at Facebook or other social media platforms that have created all these things we've been pointing out

and complaining about. Again, I want to emphasize I don't think they're necessarily evil people. They're not trying to do bad in the world. They just allowed a process to have evil consequences. Yeah, I mean, because basically, finite players are going to flock to whatever your technology is. Yeah. To think about another way that technological power could effect

the balance of finite and infinite games. Um, you know remember that distinction we were making earlier about how you can win a finite game of an individual chess match, but you can't win the infinite game of chess itself, right, you can't walk out and say I just won chess. Everybody, I'm done. But what if you're a computer program like

Alpha zero? That might actually change things, because then, you know, so Alpha zero is, as of the time of recording this, I think, currently the most powerful AI chess engine, but even a generation beyond that, maybe a chess engine that can just win without question a hundred out of a hundred games against any human player or any other player of any type. At this point, could you actually say that you've not just won mini games of chess, but

the game of chess itself. You have reached a level of mastery within the game where you literally cannot be challenged by any conceivable player. So if you are able to do that, have you turned what was supposed to be and infinite game into a finite game? Yeah? I mean, you can make an argument that this is a case where you've broken the game by becoming too good at it. Yeah. Uh. And of course, you know, card counters are in a way accused of that all the time in uh, in

the in Vegas game houses. Yeah. And under this scenario, it seems like like the new incarnation of the game could actually be designing better and better AI chess engines, right, Like, maybe human players can no longer participate in this infinite game as chess players against them, but they can still play the meta game of working on designing AI players. I guess until the AI AI designers outstripped the human

AI designers. Well, you know, Banks got into that a little bit in the player of games, because Gurga is a master gamer, but he's no match for any of the minds he's He's practices some of these games on the way to the Empire of Azad and Uh, and he's no match for a powerful AI. But there's this distinction between the games that humans play in the games that the mind's play. Well, maybe that's an important distinction to keep in mind as we consider technological progress and

how that affects human endeavor. I mean, there's a lot of talk about like will humans become obsolete? People always ask variations on that question, like, as you know, automation becomes more productive, you know, suddenly, well, we have an economy where humans can't really do any meaningful work. You know, there's not much we can do that can't be done better by a robot. There are a lot of critics of that idea by the way, um, and I think

Jared Landier is one of them. But if there's anything to that idea, one wonders like, does that even undercut our motivation to participate in the infinite game? You know? Uh? And how do we have to adapt ourselves to think differently about the infinite games we play and that make life worth living if we can't really compete in any

of the smaller finite games within them? I agree, And I think in in the culture books you do again, you see computers playing more of the the infinite game, but leaving space either for the finite certainly for the finite games in which humans may play and the infinite game of their lives, but also realizing where they can play a pivotal role within these these overarching schemes. If you will, may there always be a place for us within the schemes. Yes, that's all. That's all I ask

of our future AI overlords. Just let me. Let me have a role in your scheme whatever it is. I'm sure I could do it. I can smuggle some sort of sensor into a factory. I don't know. I leave it to you. I'm not the the artificial intelligence here. Yes, our power is finite, and so is our is our episode length because once more we have reached the end of an episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. But that's not the end, because you have well a finite

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I was imagining already the infinite number of emails we're gonna get where people are explaining the rules of football to us. Yeah, well, I'm I welcome it, uh and more and more emails about finite and infinite. Really, anytime you start breaking down infinity, it just it complicates everything, doesn't it. Yeah, anyway, infinite thanks to our excellent audio

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