An Amoral Investigation of the Truth

Geoffrey Hamilton
May 10, 1997

1) Introduction

In the Greek myth of Pandora's Box 'hope' was the last affliction to escape into the world. This myth resonates into what is the foundation of my own affliction - a hope of observing and relating truth. Hope is an emotion and, as such, it becomes a sufficient premise to motivate me personally towards such an investigation. However, I believe the only way that truth can be observed and related well is in the absence of emotion. In other words, one should prohibit emotions in an inquiry as they lead to a prescribed value to any truth content. Unfortunately such a standard would be a prescribed value in -itself and, secondly, it would prohibit any investigation, as it has been recently shown that the absence of emotion in a human prevents an ability to make decisions and therefore it prevents action. As a consequence, some emotion is essential in the observance and in the relation of truth. As one emotion is all that is necessary to motivate people I return to hope. Hope is also an emotion which motivates a realization of a future through a game and, as such, is a reward for an attempt to realize that fantasy. What must be emotionally hoped, in this paper, is that truth can be observed and related for there to be a chance of an investigation towards any truth whatsoever. Therefore, with this hope as the only standard value/ethic necessary, and desired, it becomes the paradoxical ethical motivation for this amoral investigation of truth. Once this paradox is exposed, the truth then can be more optimally observed and related.

Thomas Kuhn said, "Nature and words are learned together" . Similarly, truth is, in this paper claimed to be two things together: first, a consistency of conventional knowledge and secondly, an observation consistent with the first, that there is a universe of content, without inherent contexts, which humanity then contextualizes in order to survive and which is a result of a genetic disposition to play games (game genes) which are rewarded and punished by emotions.

I will compare my theory to other texts in order to delineate my concepts from pre-existing ones, which, during the course of writing this paper, I have discovered are vaguely synonymous with my own. I would like the reader to keep in mind that the linear form of thought and language forces me to turn what is a matrix truth into a linear medium. This and the understanding that nature and words are learned together will explain the apparent circularity of some of my arguments. However the circles cannot be considered less logical than other arguments as all premises are expedients and deliberate incompletions of the circles which I describe. It will be seen that the arguments I use are meta-knowledge.

2) background

My 'hope' began in 1979 with my recognition of the relative quality of knowledge and a decade later I outlined the truth, as I saw it, in my novel The Thought. However, at the time I called game genes, The Trick; this idea was a generic answer to the primary concern of my quest: why does life come into being and then continue to exist?    The answer I decided in 1989 was that some genetic factor brought life into being and fooled it in order to continue to exist - hence The Trick.

In 1995 meta fictional theories of play suggested to me that a game gene is that trick, and this paper is a first draft of my whole theory to date.

Thomas Kuhn seems to have stumbled across the idea but ignored it. I will mention him later.

It also turns out that, in the 1930s, J. Huizinga, came close to recognizing this same theory, but perhaps as a reaction to eugenics he made two important mistakes: first he accepted the period's belief in a rational, deterministic cosmos, and secondly he could not accept a biological foundation to games. Huizinga's two mistakes are made clear later.

Before I come to the philosophical and scientific foundations of truth and the theory of a game gene, I would like to demonstrate how human behavior is best described as game playing. This description is the basis of my use of the word 'game' in regards to the idea of a genetically founded behavior.

3) Descriptions of human activities as being games.

Descriptions of humans as game players goes back centuries, and the list of the various human actions which are found to be games under standard definitions has grown with the accumulation of knowledge.

For clarity, games are made up of goals and rules and to act within a game is playing. Emotions related to probability of success assessments are important parts of a game. Goals are limited values. Rules limit the mode of action available. Emotions give pleasure and pain during a game.
Tiddlywinks and hopscotch are the basic expression of game playing and unexamined the list could stop not much further along. Gambling and Mesoamerican ball games extend the list into a context where there are serious repercussions to games. Solitaire and Mountain climbing extend the list into games against non-life. Scientific experiments, sex games for impotent men to reproduce, and effective learning methods extend games into utilitarianism. The 'sadistic' person who tortures a suspect for no useful reason extends games into the field of terror. Wiesel's Holocaust book Night uses the term 'game' as an analogy for horrific acts, but the irreducible quality of his usage demonstrates the unfigurative aspect to them. Many role playing experiments show that conscious role playing can become indistinguishable from 'real' life. The recent observations of animals playing, of plants mimicking animals, and of cell death processes shows that games are played by a full range of life forms.

I believe the Chinese logician, Hui Shih, 2500 years ago may have been the first to call humanity 'the game player', but according to the records I could find, the first to put such an idea on paper were two Hungarians.

The list of what activities are games expanded greatly with Homo Ludens by J. Huizinga in the 30s. He showed that war, law, religion, ritual, learning, art, literature, language, and civilization were fundamentally about play. Interestingly he claimed sports were endangered by the excessive structuralizing of play which made sports too serious. He tried to define play as adverse to purpose, and parallel to animal play. However, he nevertheless concluded that all culture is play. He stopped short of saying all human action is play, like eating, and denied it could be so.

His aversion to purpose and structure, and his belief in the normality of 'freedom' and 'innocence' within play confused his understanding of game playing. He demonstrates that confusion when he says, "Roman society could not live without games. They were as necessary to its existence as bread" . Frequently, when he used the idea of play, he meant playing games. His disbelief in purpose was a confusion between ultimate purpose and limited purpose. There is no demonstrable ultimate purpose to any act (I will show this later), but to have fun, or to win, is purpose enough for most games. Nevertheless he added most human actions to the list of games.

Concurrent with Huizinga was, John von Neuman, who likewise gets credit for pushing the description of human activity as games into new territory. It was coined Game Theory during his period.

He and others attempted to created a mathematical system to predict human activity by using games as a template. The assumption was that people interact as they would in any game. The results of his mode of predictions were profound, and he was hired by the US government to create economic and political systems of prediction.

His faith in rationalism prevented his ideas growing towards cooperative games, irrational games, games in ignorance and chaos games (until others worked on these in this last decade). The list of what human actions are games was extended until today game theory is conventionally used as one mode of understanding evolutionary science, social science, economics and politics.
However no unified framework for understanding why games describe human action has been developed to my knowledge at this time. The game gene theory will account for the descriptions of human activities as games (and with further observation and description should account for the activity of all life forms).

4) Relativity of knowledge and truth

The root of understanding my theory is in comprehending the relative nature of knowledge and of the unacceptability of the idea of absolutes. Words, equations, photographs, or any other representations, are made meaningful solely by their relationship to other representations, memories, histories, senses, etc.... The consequence is that knowledge is dependent on the consistency of the relationship between relative representations within individuals.

Semiotics is another description of that relationship. Logical circles are normal constructions when the relativity of meaning is acknowledged. The only way to avoid circles is to leave first principles unexamined (try examining all one's premises and it will be noticed). As a result of this need for internal consistency, it is the perception by individuals and coalitions in various communities of a consistency between representations which constitutes knowledge and therefore it becomes the first truth and first point of comparison in this investigation of relative truth.

5) Unacceptability of absolutes

Secondly, not only can an idea not be grasped outside relative constructions, but those constructions cannot create absolute ideas, no matter how well one is conceived. The reason is that different rules of construction will have different absolutes. Any claim to an absolute is dependent on the rules used in construction -- anyone could select postscripted rules to confound that absolute at any time. Absolute zero is a case in point; the complete absence of atomic movement is determined to be 0 Kelvin (or   -273.15 Celsius). However, movement itself is determined by relative position: if anything else in the universe moves, the particle is moving. Secondly, it is theoretically possible to have minus zero Kelvin. These manipulations of absolutes shows why understanding the rules, or the relation of content and context, is vital.

6) Content

What is the particle and what is the universe? It is what I call content. Content is also synonymous with nature, and the concept of everything. This concept can be seen as a problem when the idea of a Big Bang or an expanding universe is proposed. These ideas claim borders on the universe and hence exclude whatever is outside those borders. However, the universe is not defined with limits, and neither is the concept of everything; whatever is outside of the Big Bang is also the universe. Scientists who talk about the Big Bang equivocate on the universe: they mean to say the known universe when the talk about the beginning of the universe. Besides that problem, the red shift argument which demonstrates the present expansion of the universe does not rule out a breathing universe and only suggests a Big Bang, it does not demonstrate it. Therefore a discussion of borders is irrelevant and a logical leap.

7) Infinity is most acceptable to the first truth

A new problem arises from the alternative to borders: infinity of space and time. Though it is a difficult concept to fathom, the human ability to accept relative knowledge can allow an understanding of space and time as being in existence now, and we can extend that concept more easily than we can the concept of the existence of non-existence outside of borders. As a result, content is also defined as infinite as it makes better relative sense in human experience. A borderless universe is more acceptable than the alternative - unbeing. As Hamlet says in order to challenge the unbelievable ghost of his father, "I'll have grounds more relative than this". As there is no greater context than everything, the most relative context for people, and for this paper, will be everything imaginable. This is the content and it is singular.

8) Context as relative 'universe'

What an infinite content does not offer, in addition to the lack of frontiers, is a single 'natural' context (or rule or criteria) with which to view it. It might seem that a planet is a natural context, but like Jupiter, where does it begin? At the top of the visible clouds? At the harder surface? At the molten level? Should the context begin where any matter is in orbit, as the moons are? Then the sun would be the natural limit too, as the sun wobbles in a mini orbit in relation to Jupiter. It is quite possible that Jupiter is only 'itself' in relation to the galaxy. Such problems extend to understanding all content, even life. A human is, for example, a specific DNA, a body (with or without appendages) or a group of bodies of indeterminate size.

How context is determined by humanity is primarily through at least ten senses: the five well known senses as well as balance, internal regulation, body position, consciousness and unconscious processes. These senses are not all the possible senses available to life and many are not available to life. Therefore accident also plays a part in context construction.

Any context is equally valid to human knowledge - whether Jupiter is divided in two or excluded completely - all that matters is the relative uses which a context is eventually put to. (Both self created and accidental contexts are useful.) As Brandenburger says in Co-opitition: "There is only one big game -- extending across space, over time, down generations. But that's in principle. A game without boundaries is too complex to analyze. In practice, people draw boundaries in their minds to help them analyze the world. They create the fiction that there are many separate games" .
Often what is claimed to be a natural context is an attempt to manipulate (amorally used here) people towards one context. Perhaps it was to counter the weight of these 'reasons' that Montaigne said, "We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be". The equivocating use of nature to be both what humanity is a part of and to stand for 'the rest of nature' outside humanity has led to the erroneous use of 'nature'. What is claimed to be natural is not a significant claim (unless someone buys into it) as all in the universe is natural -- even human thinking and culture.

Regarding the context of ethics, as Hamlet says "there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so" . Thinking is a dualistic process of seeing similarities and distinctions and this results in seeing dualisms -- the world can turn black and white in the mind, and when individuals see what hurts them or harms them it will tend to be looked on as respectively bad or good. There cannot be a single natural context of good or single natural context of evil as something always gains when something else loses, and so all acts are good and bad. I will say more on this below regarding Co-opetition.

9) Life as context: 'solipsistic life forms'.

The interrelatedness of content, then, makes any division into context arbitrary, but on a relative scale potentially useful. The terms, arbitrary and useful, I will return to presently, for now they imply there is a living being who is a context. My two original questions must be asked next: why is there life and why is there a need for life itself to reproduce contexts?

Life is constructed of the matter and energy within the universe and so it is no different from other matter and energy. Accidents or Chaos Theory can account for its original construction -- if life's existence is not also infinite in time.

Regarding my first truth, humanity's intellect created a context called life, which it identifies itself with; I will use that idea as acceptable and define it.

Life is the periodic self contextualizing ability of matter called a form. These forms maintain solipsistic awareness which defines their own context while being directly unaware of the constituent forms which they are made with and which they make up. For example, the white blood cell is a solipsistic form which makes up a solipsistic human which in turn makes up a solipsistic matrix individual called humanity (demonstrated when the loss of human males to war is compensated and balanced automatically by a mysterious matrix connection).

10) Identification game as extension and the usefulness of all contexts to life

Fundamentally, what accounts for life's continued being must be something more than a solipsistic automatism or structural soundness, otherwise humanity could not differentiate life from non-life, and humanity could not even see itself. It is life's ability to contextualize, or relativize, the object, the food, the self, the group, etc... to itself which differentiates, life and non-life.

Each solipsistic form uses that derivative of solipsism, the game of identification, to relate the self to a larger context to serve its own solipsistic interests without directly experiencing the others' context. Identification is the primary game of life and can be demonstrated by you, the readers', lack of direct emotional, intellectual, and physical attachment to other life forms, and by the inability to have a sense of attachment with people who you have not played with, and by your ability to have a sense of attachment to people you value because of the ideas you create about them during games.

The advantage of this flexible arrangement to the survival of life is analogous to a cable versus solid steel tension bridge: a solid steel span fails easily, but a thousand smaller strands fails less easily, as the individual strands cannot pass on crack stresses from strand to strand. The holocaust likewise gives many examples of how all sides were employing the flexibility of identification to their advantage - according to one survivor, Wiesel. When 'other' people could be useful, there was empathy -- when 'other' people were detrimental, there was criticism and separation. The action of identification is a game which is able to separate life forms while allowing for cooperation according to the 'needs' of individuals. The usefulness of semiotics, and of the premises of this paper are additionally justified by this rational.

Contexts overlap like the circles in a spirograph and exist without the exclusion of other possible contexts. As infinite as the content is, so is the number of contexts with which to view the content. Context, whether it is called, a solipsistic life form, frame, distinction, similarity, paradigm, team, game, rule, or any other minor category of context, is potentially useful as it is our rational for deciding what is useful.

And what is useful cannot be determined exactly due to the chaos of the universe. As a result the PH.D. or the body builder may employ their contexts against a problem and doing their best could kill them, while the sick and feeble minded escape. Wiesel's description, of how he and his father could have been saved in the death camp if they had only been sicker or feebler minded, serves as an example.

The claim by anything to a superiority in terms of useful knowledge is only a claim of a higher 'probability' of success towards all potential games, and it's only 'real' until it is tested in a specific game.

11) The lack of a relative reason for life to continue. The arbitrariness of life.

A problem arises: if identification by solipsistic life forms makes the universe rational, then a reason for existence is dependent on life's existence a priori (God being defined as a life form). There is no possibility that ks could be, so why would life continue to exist if there is no a priori reason to do so? The answer is generally considered elusive.

A reason for life would seem to require an unequivocal premise, an absolute, and as I pointed out earlier, contexts cannot create absolutes. However, the answer is, relative to necessity, quite easy to answer: there need not be a reason for life to continue to exist. There must be, however, a cause for life's continuation, and for a gene as a substitute for a reason by its employment of contexts; and there is a main behavioral cause which can account for the difference between life and non-life: that is a theory I call the game gene. It is a behavioral gene which substitutes for a reason to live. It is the top of a hierarchy of inherited behaviors which account for life's continuation - though any missing portion of that hierarchy might end life. What the game gene is, in its expression, is a 'desire' to play games with the contexts which it identifies. Such could be the case from the single cell organism to the whale. No reason for existence is required as long a genetic behavioral desire to play lasts.

Neither experience, nor education, could teach such a survival mechanism to a solipsistic life form in time to motivate it to live through its first necessary act of survival in the purposeless chaos.

12) Game gene's function is to look for value.

What results from the existence of the game gene is life's self motivated energy, its crying for nourishment, its growth, sex, fatness, heroism, death and experiential values (as opposed to genetic values). The most important problem with the longer term existence of life is how a life identifies any value in the chaos. To find any value, all life must play games with the chaotic systems of the universe using contexts to identify content which individual life forms match up with predisposed and discovered desires. No amount of intelligence can determine the outcome of an action taken by a life and relatively more ignorance can be an aide to survival. The employment of imagination to picture the future is invariably inaccurate, and the methods used to achieve that fancy are unpredictable. Probability is all that can be assessed. Even the outcome is rarely an end and even the most fanatical idealist will find a new horizon - a Che Guevara, for example. Something makes life play the games described above; it is a general human behavior.

13) Alternatives to game genes

If the desire for games were not the motor for existence, but instead carrots were, or a split level apartment, then when those values were no longer available due to chaos, those motives, which are in the place of purpose and reason, would lead life to a speedy end. Games are the best cause of continued existence as they make motives flexible to the values all life has at its disposal - in the light of chaos.

The emotions are not a sufficient cause of continued existence of life, though they play a role in rewarding and punishing life in games. Emotions are genetically founded as well, but they become relevant only to an individual's experience and so they are too susceptible to chaos. Emotions are only the currency of values; otherwise the punishing side of emotions would demonstrate a desire to die as effectively as the rewarding emotions would demonstrate a desire to continue living.

Emotions, even physical pain and pleasure, exist to reward and punish . This can be seen in a completely useless game like tiddlywinks which can be as punishing or rewarding as risking death in a knife fight. Hope, as an emotion, is a reward for the desire to play a game. Fun is a reward for playing. Complete hopelessness would end a life, and it does frequently when the value of game playing becomes too specialized. As the lack of emotional centres in humans can prevent action, the lack of emotion can kill - as it cannot reward the action needed to survive. The dog, or spouse, who dies soon after the death of a partner, is a frequent example of how the experientially acquired value of a particular game atrophies the gamegene into disfunction. (Or, in other words, emotion punishes the loser of a game to death, unless he can find a new game so that his emotions can reward as much as punish him.)

Love of anything is the atrophication of the game gene's function towards one game. In the case of the lover who desires to commit suicide immediately after a break up, the game gene usually continues to function and remains flexible enough to give the lover a new game option in time to prevent the suicide.

There is no direct survival gene:
the hero that gives her life for her country, or the male black widow spider that gives his life to his mate, are both examples of the primacy of the game over survival -- life's value towards games, over a value for the survival of life. A survival gene could not be an adequate primary cause of life's existence as it could not motivate life towards an engagement with other contexts: this is because no life form could predict the value of that engagement, due to the chaos of the universe. Reason breaks down due to chaos. Only a game (like an experiment) can uncover the value of one context for another.

J. Huizinga unintentionally gave this argument for the game gene: "...a world wholly determined by the operation of blind forces...play would be altogether superfluous. ...an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos ....in play there is something 'at play' which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something". As evidence derived from Chaos Theory has demonstrated a lack of absolute determinism in the universe, his argument now supports the need for a meaning creating mechanism for life, and that is play within games.

Meaning and value (and the disvalued) are the same to a context. The more value-constructed the game, the more meaningful the game is, and so the better a life form can know how to survive future games.

Recently (April 16-17, 1997) the CBC program Ideas ran "On the Edge" which proposed a 'risk gene' or a 'sensation -seeking gene' to account for the extremely risky games people play. In the program there was scientific evidence showing that the high risk takers had a "genetic predilection" to take greater risks than other people. Two different independent studies came to this same conclusion.

I agree that this conclusion is so, however, this research was using two insufficient terms: risk and sensation- seeking. These scientists noted themselves that the high risk seeking subject receives the same effect as another person who watches the activity, or relative to a third (control) person who is simply eating normal food. No discernible risk may be perceived by the witness or by the eater, yet they all are emotionally rewarded at a similar level with dopamine. A subject risk level is a secondary concern to the effect of the dopamine reward received during any game.

Sensations too were not a significant factor. The researchers themselves demonstrated that the complete absence of stimulation and external sensation could produce the same effects of emotional stimulation, and that this effect came from the mind games that the test subjects themselves created. If the scientists were saying that people need sensation they again would be wrong, as boredom and suicidal tendencies are sensations that few people need.

These studies become useful evidence when the observation that behavior is game playing is used as the frame of understanding. Further scientific evidence for a game gene comes from recent science involving twin studies.

14) Twin studies and scientific conclusions

The nature versus nurture debate became slanted towards the nurture side with the post WWII reaction to Hitler and racism. However, the absurdity of the slant has been demonstrated countless times in genetic research done in the last fifty years. As one scientist remarked, "...the very processes of growth, namely maturation and development can now be seen to have inherited ground plans" . The most recent evidence shows that a genetic predisposition exists beyond the superficial attributes of appearance, and includes taste, political beliefs, neatness, intelligence, and many other areas.

The idea today is that human genes offer a range of predispositions for experience to finally determine. The Neubauers say, "When a supportive, nurturing environment was available to the child, the true power of his inherited tendencies and susceptibilities revealed themselves". So far the only limits to genetically produced behavior and personality are in the area of rules of conduct and emotion. This allows a range of personality to be finally determined by experience , or in other words, by the use of games.

As some values are inherited, some goals in games are inherited. Most goals are specific to the environment so inherited values are molded by experience.

Rules are also environmental and must mold the games people play. Though rules themselves are beyond genetics . That still leaves open the possibility that the desire to use rules is inherited.

So it appears philosophically that a game gene can function to substitute for a reason to live, and scientifically, that a genetic factor of some description predisposes human activity which is itself described as game playing. Therefore it would be fair to call that narrow margin a game gene. The way to test the theory would be to identify a gene or group of genes that when removed from the DNA/RNA would prevent a human being from contextualizing and playing games, and would create confusing emotions -- while that person would be kept alive bodily through forced feeding and other servicings of the body.

As that experiment seems unlikely to occur, the argument I employ is as valid as the method found sufficient in the search for black holes: it is not by saying 'what something is' that determines whether it is there, but the effects which that thing must cause, by which it can be said to exist.

15) Larger contexts - assimilation - coalitions ( and matrix life as single context)

Larger contexts are relevant as they vaguely indicate greater power. Two systems of creating larger contexts from a basic genetic construction exist: the first is assimilation, the second is coalition.     Assimilation is the growth of the solipsistic context by identifiable experience through all games. This involves learning and exercise (both at times games in their own right) whether incidental or not.

The expansion of a solipsistic context builds relative knowledge of useful contexts and how to get value, as well as building physical and emotional strength. There is also a loss of context through games and by other means - but I am concerned with power building here and it is the relative increase of context that builds power.

Coalitions are built up specifically to increase the power of individual solipsistic life forms for future games and coalitions function hierarchically to allow for the momentary imposition of one solipsistic life form's context over the others in the coalition. This factor separates a coalition from a matrix. A matrix of individual life forms does not require, or have the knowledge, or consent, of its constituent forms - it is its own solipsistic life form (as with the earth in the Gaia Hypothesis).

16) Coalitions . Cooperation

A coalition can work simultaneously with other coalitions. For example, a man can be a member of a club, an employee, a professional, a party worker, a family member, a hockey player, an entrepreneur, or any other possible coalition, informal or formal. Each coalition increases the power of the individual in each separate game. In turn each separate coalition is strengthened by the various individuals' reliance on other coalitions. Many totalitarian societies act as though there is only one game and so lose the benefit of the other games.

All games, like all contexts, can exist simultaneously as long as no conflict occurs between them. This is an overall view of the cooperation 'side' of game playing.

When a coalition is not formed from a group, when one coalition prevents its constituent forms from playing the other useful games available, or if a coalition is in conflict with another power for the same value, competition ensues. Competition with another power, whether living or not, is unavoidable given the unpredictability of the universe. As the order of things reacts to the order of other things, it is the relative power of the various individuals or coalitions which decides the outcome -- and that is with all types of power such as intellectual manipulation or any other form of influence. Games are the only way to recognize power, as power can only be measured during a game and only against another power of some kind, living or otherwise.

David and Goliath is a classic story of that attribute of power measurement. Henry V's victory at Agincourt is another example. A third example was the incident of a young man who tried to rape an old woman near York campus in 1996 - she defeated him in a game of his own choosing when the mathematical methods of measuring power could only say that he was the more powerful.

In coalitions it is evident that the game determines the power. As Kuhn describes ln The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , "Scientists solve puzzles by modeling them on previous puzzle-solutions.... As a result, the superiority of one theory to another is something that cannot be proved in the debate".

Games can still decide a kind of superiority: who's the more powerful. Teaming up in coalitions is one way to be superior in power. Thomas Kuhn described this kind of coalition and he called it a 'paradigm'.    Paradigms are teams who support a world view of beliefs and values. These various teams play games which they come to love and so they atrophy in that team. These teams play games within and without the individual teams.

The team structure offers power, beliefs to define the teams, and values to maintain direction and order. In addition, it is my view that values or ethics is the systemization of a paradigm's love for itself, which explains the problems Kuhn has described with agreement between different paradigms. He said reasons end up standing for values and values for reasons, which implies ideas cannot be argued without a perception of an attack on those values.

The power of a game of cooperation against the competition from other games is the 'might makes right' that is talked so much of.

17) Co-opetition

The complex inter-cooperation of life and also the unavoidable competition of life demonstrate that competition and cooperation are linked. But what needs to be seen is the cooperation of competition and the competition of cooperation in order to see that life does not progress as evolution implies (Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought), but life is only reconfigured.

Co-opetition is a recently coined word which describes, via economics, the new contextualization to which I refer (Brandenburger). One example comes from business. American and United Airlines are in competition for passengers; however both need to cooperate with Boeing to design aircraft that meet their mutual needs. Also, what one does to win business from the other can be imitated by the other and so both can gain in business over a certain business period. What is often called bio- diversity, or the web of life, or the balance of nature, is another example of co-opetition. Each solipsistic life form generally gains and loses simultaneously, until its form is reconstituted in circles.

18) Simolution

Once the co-opetition idea is grasped, the conclusion that life does not progress but simulates itself, begins to be glimpsed. I call this process simolution and it is analogous to a boiling pot of water: the water coming up the middle is more powerful (life) and pushes less powerful water (life) down the sides. The water coming up the middle seems more powerful only in the context of the middle, but the whole system is not actually going anywhere (universe). Simolution's fundamental energy is from behavior and games are the best description of that behavior

19) Boredom and interest

Game genes create more than desires, they create desperations for games as profound as hunger. Within the context of human life, expressions of boredom are the equivalent to hunger for the game gene (though the pacing lion in the zoo demonstrates boredom is not limited to humanity). Boredom strikes anyone when they do not play a game, no matter how powerful, fit, satiated, or bloated they are, or think they are. The higher the probability of survival for an individual in daily existence, the higher the boredom and the higher the need for the more obvious games like hobbies or skydiving depending on the individual.

Interest is the opposite of boredom and is a behavior dependent on games. Hamlet is considered an interesting game to watch, but if the rules of language are not acceptable to a modern student, or if the play becomes trite after seeing it a dozen times, then it is not interesting and will not be played (watched). Interest is maintained by an acceptable degree of difficulty matched to a sufficient amount of unpredictability.

The only aspect of a solipsistic life's actions which needs to be clarified is the question of whether rudimentary actions are games. The answer, is generally, no they are not -- but they are the playing of games. To play a game requires eating and rest (if they are not themselves already made into the game) and many other rudimentary actions to be performed.

The overall arbitrary nature of chaos, and so of choice, can make any activity a game, and the hunger for games will force a game on a solipsistic life even when it is in a reduced context: for example, mind games when someone is in shackles in a prison.

Dreams are another expression of the need to play games in a limited context, as the only thing consistent about them is the game playing aspect -- with the down- time between dreams as the working out of the next game.

Sex is primarily a game as the desire for sex is contingent on its gaming qualities. A close observation of the way people and other life forms search for mates will show that it is the demonstration of a powerful game playing ability to the sex partner which will succeed.

Humour can only function in a game; for example, a joke without a set- up is not funny.

Huizinga's confusion over play and games led him away from these conclusions. But his confusion can be clarified by a WWII experiment by Kurt Lewin which showed that group play with a coalition goal and with individual freedom to play towards that goal is more useful and productive than either a dictatorial system, which inhibits smaller games, or a free system, which is devoid of goals. As Jerry Sienfeld said on Sixty Minutes "That's the game. Without the rules it's not fun."

20 ) CONCLUSION

The oft made observation that life is a game succeeds as a cliche‚ but not as an investigation. The search for human nature may have been bread out of fashionable society, but not out of a section of game players. The acceptance of the arguments given above - that truth is relative, that the universe is infinite, that there is nothing out of context, that simolution by games describes human activity, that genetic disposition towards game playing is fundamental to living - also means that an investigation and exposition of truth is generally irrelevant to the universe. However, as I am so bold as to presume I know the truth, I believe there are applications of this theory which can be useful - and destructive as well.

The only problem I see comes from the frequently use motif of modern melodrama - the villain knows that life is a game and is only trying to win; this while the hero perseveres through moments of doubt about life to transcend the game into meaningfulness. I somehow sense that I may be put into the villain's camp one day soon.

GRH