May 31, 2018 • 52 mins
How do you play the game of life? Do you play it as a finite game or an infinite one? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss the 1986 philosophy book “Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility” by American scholar James P. Carse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. You know, Joe.
I bring up the books of Ian M. Banks a
lot on the podcast um and and and generally, because
(00:23):
you know, these are really good books that that tie
on a number of different uh uh, sci fi, psychological,
you name it topics. They're they're they're rich with stuff
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,
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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,
(02:12):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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.
(03:40):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:45):
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
(05:06):
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,
(05:28):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:35):
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.
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:38):
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,
(07:59):
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
(08:20):
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
(08:42):
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
(09:04):
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
(09:27):
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?
(09:49):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:34):
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.
(10:59):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:39):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:47):
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.
(14:11):
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
(14:33):
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
(14:53):
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,
(15:13):
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
(15:34):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:00):
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,
(17:22):
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
(17:42):
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.
(18:04):
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
(18:25):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:31):
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.
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:36):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:40):
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.
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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
(22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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
(24:10):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:14):
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,
(25:34):
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,
(25:55):
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
(26:18):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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,
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:16):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:58):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:40):
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
(31:02):
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
(31:23):
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.
(31:45):
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
(32:05):
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,
(32:28):
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
(32:50):
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
(33:14):
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
(33:37):
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
(33:59):
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
(34:19):
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,
(34:41):
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.
(35:04):
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
(35:26):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:09):
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
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:12):
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
(37:34):
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,
(37:55):
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
(38:17):
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.
(38:39):
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
(39:02):
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
(39:26):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:10):
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
(40:31):
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.
(40:52):
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,
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:58):
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,
(42:19):
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
(42:41):
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
(43:01):
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
(43:22):
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
(43:44):
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
(44:06):
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
(44:28):
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
(44:51):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:35):
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,
(45:57):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:40):
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
(47:00):
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,
(47:23):
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
(47:45):
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.
(48:09):
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
(48:31):
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
(48:51):
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
(49:15):
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?
(49:37):
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,
(49:59):
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
(50:22):
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
(50:45):
number of episodes. But still, it's a long list of
episodes you can seek out at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. We have them all listed there, as
well as links out to our various social media accounts.
And hey, if you want to support this show, I've
said it, uh plenty of times before, but really, infinite number,
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(51:05):
times I have said, you can help us out by
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number of podcast websites out there that distribute our work.
Give us infinite stars, Yes, infinite stars. Insist on it.
I'm sorry if I was laughing while you were talking.
I was imagining already the infinite number of emails we're
gonna get where people are explaining the rules of football
(51:25):
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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(51:48):
at how stuff works dot com. We're more on the
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Workstop
column big Believe the bigg
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. You know, Joe.
I bring up the books of Ian M. Banks a
lot on the podcast um and and and generally, because
(00:23):
you know, these are really good books that that tie
on a number of different uh uh, sci fi, psychological,
you name it topics. They're they're they're rich with stuff
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,
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:28):
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
(01:49):
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,
(02:12):
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
(02:34):
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,
(02:58):
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
(03:20):
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.
(03:40):
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
(04:03):
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
(04:25):
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
(04:45):
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
(05:06):
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,
(05:28):
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
(05:51):
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
(06:11):
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
(06:35):
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.
(06:57):
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
(07:18):
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
(07:38):
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,
(07:59):
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
(08:20):
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
(08:42):
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
(09:04):
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
(09:27):
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?
(09:49):
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
(10:12):
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
(10:34):
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.
(10:59):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:39):
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
(12:00):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:24):
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
(13:47):
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.
(14:11):
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
(14:33):
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
(14:53):
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,
(15:13):
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
(15:34):
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,
(15:56):
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
(16:18):
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
(16:40):
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
(17:00):
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,
(17:22):
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
(17:42):
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.
(18:04):
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
(18:25):
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
(18:46):
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
(19:10):
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
(19:31):
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.
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:36):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:40):
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.
(22:01):
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
(22:22):
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
(22:44):
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,
(23:06):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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
(24:10):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:14):
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,
(25:34):
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,
(25:55):
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
(26:18):
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
(26:40):
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
(27:02):
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
(27:24):
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
(27:46):
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
(28:08):
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,
(28:33):
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
(28:54):
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
(29:16):
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
(29:36):
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
(29:58):
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
(30:19):
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
(30:40):
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
(31:02):
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
(31:23):
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.
(31:45):
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
(32:05):
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,
(32:28):
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
(32:50):
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
(33:14):
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
(33:37):
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
(33:59):
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
(34:19):
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,
(34:41):
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.
(35:04):
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
(35:26):
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
(35:48):
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
(36:09):
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
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:12):
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
(37:34):
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,
(37:55):
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
(38:17):
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.
(38:39):
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
(39:02):
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
(39:26):
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
(39:47):
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
(40:10):
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
(40:31):
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.
(40:52):
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,
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:58):
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,
(42:19):
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
(42:41):
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
(43:01):
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
(43:22):
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
(43:44):
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
(44:06):
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
(44:28):
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
(44:51):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:35):
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,
(45:57):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:40):
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
(47:00):
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,
(47:23):
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
(47:45):
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.
(48:09):
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
(48:31):
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
(48:51):
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
(49:15):
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?
(49:37):
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,
(49:59):
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
(50:22):
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
(50:45):
number of episodes. But still, it's a long list of
episodes you can seek out at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. We have them all listed there, as
well as links out to our various social media accounts.
And hey, if you want to support this show, I've
said it, uh plenty of times before, but really, infinite number,
an infinite number, that death of a finite number of
(51:05):
times I have said, you can help us out by
rating and reviewing the show at any of the finite
number of podcast websites out there that distribute our work.
Give us infinite stars, Yes, infinite stars. Insist on it.
I'm sorry if I was laughing while you were talking.
I was imagining already the infinite number of emails we're
gonna get where people are explaining the rules of football
(51:25):
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
producers Alex Williams and Tarry Harrison. If you would like
to get in touch with us with an email of
finite length, you can email us at blow the Mind
(51:48):
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