'Games People Play' An Essay in Three Parts Part 2

Part 2

Civilization is a hard concept to pin down even in this powerful analytical frame. It appears to be the motivating psychological space, the coherent array of object/idea, of a given technology that generates productive behavior related to certain objects which such process produces. It is, then, a relation of object to idea, of symbol to canon, of sign to significance. Civilization is simply meaning and that is what generates nihilism as the narratives of one civilization give way to another, or following, civilization. Dark Ages are time of creative destruction of that motivating psychological space with its narratives. They are consequent to the failure of a psychological space and precondition to the creation of a new one, without darkness we would not know light, and they are solely concerned with material existence and the keeping of lore.
What is material existence? It is simply the total of the habits and paradigms used to feed, clothe, and house a given population, its material culture. It is no more than that. Material existence is incidental to the process of civilization. The two are disparate concepts. That one must first exist in order to be a part of a civilization which is only incidentally concerned with such existence is the paradox and the genius of human social existence.
What, then, of Good and Evil in such a secular analysis? Good is that behavior, including cognitive, ordained by the accepted psychological space and functional at such a level as to aggrandize that psychological space by object and/or idea. The idea of Good is both the evolution of Truth and a due respect for human limitation. A certain amount of managed innovation is Good. A glut of innovation anarchy is Evil. Civilization is a journey, not a destination. One does not rush headlong into the future without consequences. The Twentieth Century is a chronicle of unwise objects, unwise ideas, and false relations. The idea is that we can do better than Western Civilization by its own strictures. The lesson is that we can do worse.
Material existence has its own Good and Evil, being disparate, and these resolve around social utility and efficiency. Good is being, as one expects, economically useful. Good is being economically efficient. Evil, the opposite of these, includes the leisure to think, which is exactly what a successful material culture engenders. It cannot be ignored that civilization and material existence, however they complement each other, are disparate. They do not account for or understand the other. It is this dynamic, this opposing of Goods and Evils, which destroys civilizations and builds new ones, which generates new theory and new technology.
As has been indicated, true incommensurability is difficult to obtain. As disparate as material existence and civilization are, there must be some relational that will tie them together. That relational is game score. Game score is more than money. It is vocabulary, money, paradigms, and databases. It is talent, taste, and physical person. It is not just a score but an index of scores and it describes a hierarchy of levels of existence. This index I call social purchase.
Game score as an index is, at its highest level, the stuff of civilization. This is maximum social purchase. Next are the operational aspects of material existence and the games of material culture. Here are talent and arbitrageur. This is the milieu of money. Thirdly, there are the games of the flesh market where the physical person generates social purchase. Last there is the milieu of marginality, of low utility. There is little or no social purchase here except talent.
Social purchase, which exists as the relative attributes measured in the game scores that compose it, is social existence. The phenomenon exists in no other wise.

Part 3  tomorrow

"Games People Play' An Essay in Three Parts Part 1

Games People Play

The nature of the human life is an interesting subject for speculation. It is arguably too large a concept for the human brain, for logic and for language, yet it must be considered. It is the conceptual context of all our behavior. The contention of this three part essay, and that is all  it can be, a contention, is that human social existence is a game of market contracts.
Given this conceit, it follows that there must exist certain currencies, perception, language, mathematics, and money, which allow the keeping of a common score, 'game' being the commensurable element in otherwise incommensurable activities. The obvious questions are to be asked and answered to a high standard of current thought in this work. What is a game? What is a currency? What is a market? In what sense is a common score the arbiter of social existence? What is the relationship of civilization to social existence?

Part 1
Games are everywhere from chess to video games to sport. They are an inextricable element of human social existence. However, a closer look at 'game' such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, took in the last century reveals an impenetrable mystery. It appears that while everyone knows a game when they see one, a definition is impossible [Wittgenstein, 1953]. That leads one directly to the work Immanuel Kant did in the Nineteenth Century on the subject of the unknowable. According to his thought there are unknowable a priori concepts we are born with, the 'thing-in-itself', which we employ in the analysis of perception to form 'categories of understanding' which are in language [Kant, 1781]. 'Game', being unknowable, appears to be such a 'thing-in-itself' which, interacting with perception, creates 'categories of understanding' such as chess or football. It works perfectly.
Supporting this view are the findings of researchers that chimpanzees exhibit game skills [Jensen, 2007]. 'Game' thereby seems to be wired into the primate brain, however that happened. It therefore has all the characteristics of a thing-in-itself. Exploring current game theory research for estimates of the power of this conceit we find that games, no matter how well designed, will not play without a moral imperative that no player will do unto any other player without their consent [Murray, 2007]. From the nuts and bolts of human behavior to morality, the contention that 'game' structures human behavior is one powerful conceptual argument.
Now it is time to turn to the nature of market games and contracts. A market is a locus of buying and selling. It operates on contracts of performance and consideration, the classic model. It is, however, nothing more than an arbitrage game, arbitrage being the simple process of 'taking' plenty to scarcity. All markets operate on a basis of arbitrage. That is where profits are made and losses suffered and score tallied.
Money, while itself subject to arbitrage, enables the establishment of the relative value of disparate products such as apples and oranges on a basis of plenty and scarcity. Money markets define the operating constraints of all other markets and enable the establishment of a common score. Inherent in this view and fundamental to it is the stricture that only humans are players. Markets do not allocate resources to means of production. That is a clever analytical trick. Markets are games of arbitrage resulting in scores, profit and loss, accruing to individual human beings, players. They only incidentally allocate resources and then, not to means of production, but to talent, human beings, who transform those resources into products themselves capable of arbitrage [Smith, 1776]. It is simple. It is complex. Markets are an expression of human social existence. They can exist in no other wise.
Obviously, an examination of currency is needed. First, one needs the concept that true incommensurability is difficult to obtain [Kuhn, 2002]. Apples and oranges are disparate but they can be compared on a basis of enough/not enough which is a countable proposition and therefore in language and mathematics. Such an analysis results in the capacity for arbitrage and results in the establishment of relative value or a sum certain of money. Being contained in perception, in language, in mathematics and in money deems an object socially real.
So, there area four currencies in operation. What common feature defines the category? They are all 'relationals' having the intrinsic ability to establish relations between elements of a class. If I see you standing to my left, that is a relation. If I say that you are taller than I, that is a relation. If my $5 buys more than your $3, that is a relation. If I prove that 3 is greater than -3, that is a relation. However, if one shares a currency, then the simple relational aspect of it becomes an entanglement as the concept applies in physics. If you are to my left, I am to your right. We are entangled. If my $5 buys more than your $3, your $3 buys less than my $5. We are entangled. If 3 is proved greater than -3 to you and I, than surely -3 is less than 3 to you and I. We are entangled.These relations are shared by convention and elevate the 'relational' to an entanglement. This is the stuff of social existence.

Part 2 tomorrow

'Games People Play' An Essay in Three Parts

I have been away from Blogger for almost a year while working on many projects including this precise little essay. This post is simply the author's note for the essay and is self explanatory. I apologize for not posting the second part of my last post but must plead intellectual overreach. It wasn't good enough to post.
So read, think, and enjoy my latest production which will be the basis for the content on a novel in progress, 'Forbidden'.

Author's Note
This essay is the result of a six year project which began as an idea for a reading list worthy of study. Having noticed that times had changed and my paradigms and databases had not, I felt the need of amending the body of knowledge that I had mastered. I did so. The reading list ran to some fifty serious volumes and included some at the introductory college level which I find invaluable for understanding what is being said in the context in which it is said. The first incarnation of processing, of integrating this new information was a collection of monographs and schemata of over forty pages. I made several attempts at rationalizing an analytical frame from this material of which the most successful was a difficult essay of some thirty pages.
I continued to refine the ideas this new material generated as I integrated it into some kind of coherent and comprehensive whole. The end result, which is the final form as far as I am concerned, however incomplete, is this essay of which the body runs some seven pages. That is integration! For those who possess any kind of the knowledge represented in this essay, it is intended to provide vocabulary and concepts for the intelligent discussion of contemporary thought.

Part One tomorrow.

A Pragmatic Postmodern Approach to Communication Part I

    If one rejects the Grand Narrative of Western Civilization, one is belaboring the obvious. The Grand Narrative and in a large sense, the values of Western Civilization are in significant abeyance. However, if one therefore reduces history to a picaresque chronology holding no meaning, one is not a postmodernist but definitively a nihilist. They are profoundly not the same thing.
   As I examine the last century I see the Grand Narrative being replaced by a Grand Design created by the Invisible Hand of the market deploying technology developed by the petite narrative of science. This process is totally pragmatic and operationally amoral. The Grand Design is not in its essence Western Civilization even though Western Civilization developed the disciplines, with help from other civilizations, that produced it. It is a spectacularly different animal that we traditionally  label the Industrial Revolution and casually reference, in an intellectually nonstandard usage, as Modernism.
    To be a postmodernist one must recognize the lessons of both the petite narrative of science and the logic of technological development. To do so is to recognize that postmodernism is 'after' modernism in the sense that it means one is ahead of the curve of the petite narrative and the technological logic, not behind them. The 'beyond' of postmodernism lies in the sense that one is grasping a wholly new phenomenon describing a universe as different from the 18th century as the 13th was from the 10th. It is, as Thomas S. Kuhn described, a paradigm shift, a different world, and if one knows Kuhn's work, one is acutely aware that one does not author a paradigm shift, one authors a superior model that causes a paradigm shift.
    We are in possession of enough new theory and enough new technology to destroy the Grand Narrative, but then we had those in the 1920's. What we haven't demonstrated is enough of both to create a new world of narrative and values sufficient to allow empowerment and quality of life across a broad spectrum of society. We still operate economically as too zero sum, too La Belle Epoque, to establish a sustainable basis for legitimate social existence. We are, to the point, too nihilist.
    The object of this particular exercise is to reference significant intellectual developments created by the clash of the Grand Narrative and the Grand Design over the last two centuries and to establish the basis of a model of communication. It would not be too far off the mark to say that social existence is communication. If we are to create a new model to supersede the Grand Design which, by the way, has been estimated by everyone from Schumpeter to Von Neumann to have a logical terminus, we should, I believe, begin with communication and so I have made this attempt to be described in Part II.

House Wins!

    The theoretical structure of zero-sum two person games ignores a basic fact that anyone who has visited a casino will tell you. Everytime a game is played, the house, the socioeconomic context of that game, wins. Poker is thought of as a zero-sum game but the house always gets its cut.
    If I buy a computer from you, it is a guessing game and a negotiation as to what the value of the computer really is since at any given moment in the economic picture there is a cost/benefit value to that computer in terms of what I will do with it and this value can theoretically be computed ex post facto. That is the nature of market transactions. I cannot know the value of the computer and neither can you so we reference similar transactions, a game in itself, and make our best guess.
    When the sale is complete, taxes are paid, paychecks are honored, corporate bonds paid, and profits, point of sale and up the line, are generated. The house wins. Zero-sum two person games are amenable to mathematical modeling. The question is, are they amenable to reality. Can we extrapolate the behavior and the model to actual market activity?  A few months ago I proposed a simple systems theory model that would context the transaction game. Add in a cut for the house, the political economy, and that model would fly as a replicated building block of an actual economy. With a scaled out computer doing parallel processing, the computation is doable.
    Are the mathematics of a transaction game with a cut for the house doable? I don't know. I'm not John Von Neumann. I am just suggesting a possible systems model that is easily in reach of reality.
    Do well and be well!

Sumer, Greece, America, and Conan

    Having abandoned a writing project because the ideas which I was trying to illuminate with the story were a little unclear to me, I went for a bike ride into desolation because I am always alone in the wild when I see the world and decided to linebacker my databases and paradigms by filling the gap of a relatively new subject, Sumer and its civilization. I began to read in things Sumerian.
    I found there a mythos and art of civilization that surpassed the Greeks. The Sumerians invented civilization and significant elements they originated were given to the Greeks by way of succeeding societies. Sumerian myth is like getting civilization from the horse's mouth; Greek myth is like reportage. Let me qualify this bold statement by saying that if I were to be stranded on an island and given the task of recreating civilization using one written work, it would be 'Prometheus Bound', the Greek classic.
    However, I find in my acquaintance with Greek myth no succinct statement of the essential act of civilization, the ethos of the whole milieu we so label, as the Sumerian: 'The good things from the pure sheepfold are why man was given breath.' It is all there, stewardship, husbandry, and artisanship, the essential roles of civilization. I find nothing so real, so illuminating as the story that Enki, the god of wisdom, was drunk when he decreed the arts of civilization. It probably was not a particularly wise thing to do as the Sumerians found out when Conan, I am being metaphorical, had their lunch.
   Civilization proceeds at a measured pace in a world of great risk. Exceed your wisdom, La Belle Epoque, and you risk losing everything, the First World War and all that followed. Hubris, as the Greeks termed the sin of pride, is as true now as it was then. Do not tempt the gods, Conan is waiting.
   There is a shiny new world being born today that smacks of hubris, from the highways to the cell towers to Amazon.com, there is that pride in taking risks and reaping rewards that does so tempt the gods.
Be Well and Do Well.

Towards an Integrated, Comprehensive Systems Theory of Economic Behavior

Key to this discussion is the assumption that human economic behavior is a self-regulating ecosystem of material existence. This assumption is made on the basis of observable facts involving market economies where resource scarcity leads to higher commodity prices and those prices modify economic decisions and behavior. That is definitely a feedback loop and that is where this paper begins, with a definition of the feedback loop in human economic behavior.
The feedback loop consists of five elements:
1.Discriminating disjoint system
This is a special usage of disjoint from mathematics and means no more than that a human being in the role of economic agent is possessed of integrity and judgement.
2. Entanglement
Taken from quantum mechanics, the usage is here simpler and more intuitive. Human beings, in other words, are entangled by language, monetary system, and quantifying methodology which provide the common basis for the measurement of economic behavior.
3. Information operations
This is simply the codification of the value adding task which involves a modification of information.
4. Discovery
This is the point at which markets define the feedback loop. A market is a game in which the relative value in currency of a value addition is discovered. Markets function under conditions of imperfect information and are therefore approximate and mercurial in the moment and efficient over unspecified time periods defined by changing conditions of material existence.
5. Feedback
Discovery information applied by an economic applied by an economic agent to future economic behavior.

The element of interest in this discussion is that of entanglements since that is a term from another discipline applied in a novel fashion through information theory to systems theory. Entanglements involve no more than roles and relationships. If I am another human being standing directly to your left, then you are a human being standing to my right. We are entangled. Similarly, language involves roles and relationships in any communication as does the more or less of a monetary system.
Human economic behavior, then, consists of an information loop involving modification, discovery, and feedback among disjoint discriminating systems. It is no more or less than that. Economic behavior is the primary social behavior of human beings and is conditional upon meaning defined psychological space, integrity, and informed mental discrimination, judgement.