gamegene.com - Game Gene Philosophy, Game Gene Theory, Gamegene Psychology

Not only is there no God, there is not even a surrogate purpose for living like a survival instinct, as Freud and Darwin believed. This is because we cannot see what choices will guarantee self-preservation - survival will not compute. Secondly, there are thousands of alternate ways to survive and a module in the brain will not be able to choose among them because each choice is new, unknown, and cannot be prioritized. Thirdly, with such a need, how can you be compelled to move forward and survive in the future if you are already surviving now? You have already arrived.

There must be another way to get around the unpredictability of life and an instinctive game playing compulsion is just such a way.

If you observe what elements are normally said to make up a game, there are six required elements: goals, rules, and play, as well as a need for progress, challenge and endings. Because these game factors are so widespread and universal they are the trace evidence of a game based psychology. They also become the template for further scientific investigations.

The six parts that make up games have the following purposes: A compulsion to make arbitrary goals is there to move us forward. A compulsion to select arbitrary rules is there to help us reduce distractions and confusions. A compulsion to play makes us get around the unpredictability of events. With games our emotions react and make values. Our intellect evaluates and ranks based on the strength of those emotional reactions, positive or negative, in order to help us choose further goals, rules, and plays. With that done, we need to see progress or we give up. A craving for some degree of challenge, or unpredictability, which is related to the D4DR gene, is there to make a standard level of game that may be attempted. A need for endings functions to create contexts for future relative meaning.

An example would be this: you might have the goal in your game of getting Brad Pitt's autograph at the film festival and on the way there you have the rules that you must not be hungry or be run over by a car before you can get to your goal. On the way there you play by selecting a restaurant and by actually crossing the road. (Survival was only a means of getting to see Brad Pitt, and that is what survival is about.) But suddenly you may get hit by a car driven by someone that later becomes the love of your life. By just moving to what may even be a trivial goal you do what it takes to get anywhere and on the way you will find completely unexpected values. In just the same way many great discoveries in science were unexpectedly made - in what were said to be by accidents but which were really the outcomes of games.

In the same way that the sexual emotion is a trick that helps reproduction, so the game instinct is a trick that helps us all survive.

The book expands this logic as scientifically as possible.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport. King Lear, IV,37-38 by Shake-speare

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, "And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum -- which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing -- stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him." p.319

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, "...her interest in the spectacle of the strange phenomenon got the better of her fear." p.266

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, "Every trifling emotion that her husband showed as he talked had its reflex on her face and lips, which moved as little duplictes to his." p.265

"I know it's a game, but its been my life." Amanda Kimmel, Survivor (two time runner up), Final May 11, 2008

CNN reporter to 'Naked Cowboy' in Times Square New York, December 31 2004 "How do you keep from getting cold?"
Naked Cowboy: "I pretend I'm warm and it works."

"...you're working so hard to be somebody special...what I don't see babe, where you go once you've arrived? Where we go once we've arrived?" Special to Me, Phantom of the Paradise, 1974

"We are entirely made up of bits and pieces...there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people...we must probe right down inside and find out what principles make things move...." Michel De Montaigne, On the Inconstancy of Our Actions

"...the life of man is nothing but a sport of folly...". Erasmus, Praise of Folly (116), 1509

Appian on Sulla's dictatorship of Rome, "...he was not afraid of having caused the death of 100,000 young men ... of having killed his personal enemies to the number of ninety senators and about fifteen consuls ... the bodies of many had been thrown out unburied, but Sulla proclaimed himself a private citizen .... I believe that sated with war, sated with power, sated with Rome, he finally fell in love with rural life." Book 1, 104.

Ghost in the Shell 2 - 2004

"If our gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then it must be said that our love is scientific as well."

"It's no use to blame the looking glass if your face is askew the mirror is not an instrument of enlightenment but of illusion."

"...what are children in the chaos preceding maturity? They differ profoundly from "humans", but they obviously have human form. The dolls that little girls mother are not surrogates for real babies. Little girls are not so much imitating child rearing as they are experiencing something deeply akin to child rearing. It is the way to achieve the ancient dream of artificial life. Descarte didn't differentiate man from machine, animate from inanimate. He lost his beloved five year old daughter and then named a doll after her, Francine. He doted on her. At least that's what they say.

"One need not be Caesar in order to understand Caesar."

"The world cannot live at the level of its great men" .

"What the body creates is as much an expression of DNA as the body itself"
Ghost in the Shell 2 - 2004

"Rob's strategy to quit worked and that just makes me sick. " miss South Carolina.
Amazing race, APRIL 6, 2005 RECAP

"For every one person who likes you you have ten people who have to criticize you." Avril Lavigne

"...Self-love was her [Nature's] greatest gift. Just let me add that no great deed was ever performed without my [goddess of stupidity's] prompting and no new art discovered unless I was responsible." Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 1509

"In 1914 as long as the German people thought they were fighting for ideals, they stood firm; but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Links

Game Theory
Game Theory
is very different from
Game Gene Theory Papers regarding Game Theory show its limits. As they say here "Games are a convenient way in which to model the strategic interactions among economic agents." It is all about finding the most probable way to win at games and that is basically all.

NOVA Science Now PBS TV, "Mirror Neurons"
Science misunderstands the game gene but still provides proof in this video.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
James Fieser, Ph.D., founder and general editor Bradley Dowden, Ph.D., general editor

Wikipedia
more accurate and interesting than Britannica

Wikinfo
More open than Wikipedia and allows cutting edge ideas.

Philosophy magazines
Google's list.

Buzzle.com
Get strange news because if it's really new it must be strange.

Muslim Philosophy
a good list of islamic philosophers and other information.

Philosophy Now Magazine