The principles that explain why some genes are transmitted more successfully than others also explain why some beliefs are transmitted more successfully than others. ... If a particular belief has some property that facilitates its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an increasing number of minds. ... Any belief -- even a false belief -- that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again. False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. That doesn't mean that we should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.
1. Data: symbols
2. Information: data that are processed to be useful; provides answers to "who", "what", "where", and "when" questions
3. Knowledge: application of data and information; answers "how" questions
4. Understanding: appreciation of "why"
5. Wisdom: evaluated understanding.
I don't know why the economy works, but I'm sure it isn't because brilliant people are managing it. My guess is that if you sum up all the absurd activities of management, the idiocies somehow cancel out, thus producing cool things that you want to buy, such as Nerf balls and Snapple. Add the law of supply and demand to the mix and you've pretty much described the whole theory of economics.
Perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow trasmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then uses this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality. "The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing," Kant wrote. "Only through their union can knowledge arise." The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant's point in a single sentence: "The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost -- one might say -- a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli." Kant argued that a person's perception of a floating head is constructed from the person's knowledge of floating heads, memory of floating heads, need for floating heads, and sometimes -- but not always -- from the actual presence of a floating head itself. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.
For thousands of years, it had been nature -- and its supposed creator -- that had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.
But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.
Nature, meanwhile, had become an object of concern and pity, like a former foe arrived at one's gates, bleeding to death. No longer standing as a symbol of all which surpassed us, the natural landscape instead everywhere bore the scars of our quixotic powers. We could look up at the diminishing snows of Kilimanjaro and reflect on the ill effects of our turbines. We could fly over the denuded stretches of the Amazon and perceive the rain forest to be no more robust than a single flower in our hands. We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt toward glaciers.
I fell into an unexpectedly melancholic mood, perhaps inspired by the realisation of how much of life was set to continue as it had always done, prey to the same inner inclemencies, gravitational pulls and depressions as those our cave-dwelling ancestors had known. Our bodies would disintegrate, our plans would be blown off course, we would be visited by cruelty, lust and silliness -- and only occasionally would we be in a position to recover contact with the speed, elegance, dignity and intelligence evidenced by the great machines.
I felt keenly the painful psychological adjustments required by life in modernity: the need to juggle a respect for the potential offered by science with an awareness of how perplexingly limited and narrowly framed might be its benefits. I felt the temptation of hoping that all activities would acquire the excitement and rigours of engineering while recognising the absurdity of those who, overly impressed by technological achievement, lose sight of how doggedly we will always be pursed by baser forms of error and absurdity.
"Seeking" is the perfect word for the drive these designs instill in their players. You want to win the game, of course, and perhaps you want to see the game's narrative completed. In the initial stages of play, you may just be dazzled by the game's graphics. But most of the time, when you're hooked on a game, what draws you in is an elemental form of desire: the desire to see the next thing. ...
If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you'll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they're made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It's not the subject matter of these games that attracts -- if that were the case, you'd never see twenty-somethings following absurd rescue-the-princess storylines like the best-selling Zelda series. It's the reward system that draws those players in, and keeps their famously short attention spans locked on the screen. No other form of entertainment offers that cocktail of reward and exploration: we don't "explore" movies or television or music in anything but the most figurative sense of the word. And while there are rewards to those other forms -- music in fact has been shown to trigger opioid release in the brain -- they don't come in the exaggerated, tantalizing packaging that video games wrap around them.
Probing the limits of the game physics is another oft-ignored facet of gaming culture. ... There's something strangely satisfying about defining the edges of a simulation, learning what it's capable of and where it breaks down. Some people find this kind of exploration appealing in ordinary life: they're the sort that actually enjoys looking under the hood of the car, or memorizing UNIX commands. But video games force you to speculate about what's going on under the hood. If you don't think about the underlying mechanics of the simulation -- even if that thinking happens in a semiconscious way -- you won't last very long in the game. You have to probe to progress.
I didn't have a word for it at the time, of course, but I now realize that my tour through the universe of dice-baseball was a way of probing the physics of those early games. I'd learn the explicit rules for each simulation, but the really fascinating moment came when I'd start rolling the dice and generating results. Only by playing the simulations could you get a sense of their realism. ... I was detecting flaws in these systems, but there was nonetheless something profoundly satisfying about the experience. Bringing those imperfections to light felt like solving a mystery, looking past the surface illusion of player cards and charts to the inner truth of the system.
Take a moment now to pause, step back, and consider just what was going on here: Every day, month after month, a man was coming home from a full day of bone-jarringly repetitive work with hammer and nails to put in a full night of finger-numbingly repetitive work with "hammer" and "anvil" - and paying $9.95 per month for the privilege. Ask Stolle to make sense of this, and he has a ready answer: "Well, it's not work if you enjoy it." Which, of course, begs the question: Why would anyone enjoy it?
The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disappointed; you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problems you've been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, it's a strangely masochistic version. Who wants to escape to a world that irritates you 90 percent of the time?
My nephew would be asleep in five seconds if you popped him down in an urban studies classroom, but somehow an hour of playing SimCity taught him that high tax rates in industrial areas stifle development. ... Why does a seven-year-old soak up intricacies of industrial economics in game form, when the same subject would send him screaming for the exits in a classroom?
The quick explanations of this mystery are not helpful. Some might say it's the flashy graphics, but games have been ensnaring our attention since the days of Pong, which was -- graphically speaking -- a huge step backward compared with television or movies, not to mention reality. Others would say it's the violence and sex, and yet games like SimCity -- and indeed most of the best-selling games of all time -- have almost no violence and sex in them. Some might argue that it's the interactivity that hooks, the engagement of building your own narrative. But if active participation alone functions as a drug that entices the mind, then why isn't the supremely passive medium of television repellent to kids?
Gameplayers are not soaking up moral counsel, life lessons, or rich psychological portraits. They are not having emotional experiences with their Xbox, other than the occasional adrenaline rush. The narratives they help create now rival pulp Hollywood fare, which is an accomplishment when measured against the narratives of PacMan and Pong, but it's still setting the bar pretty low. With the occasional exception, the actual content of the game is often childlish or gratuitously menacing -- though, again, not any more so than your average summer blockbuster.
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — Forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time. —
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives
Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —
Marry — Marry — Marry. Q.E.D.
Nothing more than feelings? What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace may come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? If war didn't cause pain and anguish, if peace didn't provide for delights both transcendental and carnal, would either of them matter to us at all? War, peace, art, money, marriage, birth, death, disease, religion -- these are just a few of the Really Big Topics over which oceans of blood and ink have been spilled, but they are really big topics for one reason alone: Each is a powerful source of human emotion. If they didn't make us feel uplifted, desperate, thankful, and hopeless, we would keep all that ink and blood to ourselves.
As Plato asked, "Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?" Indeed, feelings don't just matter -- they are what mattering means. We would expect any creature that feels pain when burned and pleasure when fed to call burning and eating bad and good, respectively, just as we would expect an asbestos creature with no digestive tract to find such designations arbitrary.
Moral philosophers have tried for centuries to find some other way to define good and bad, but none has ever convinced the rest (or me). We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.
