www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

GAMES, NOT-GAMES AND CONSCIOUSNESS

INTRODUCTION

The word ‘game’ has a number of immediate connotations. One might think of a formal game like chess, or a more spontaneous game such as a child might play, where one ‘makes believe’ that something is something else and thus creates one’s own reality. Because of the total control that is inherent in games, there is no real danger, one is safely removed from the serious business of real life. ‘Real life’, unlike monopoly or hopscotch or a game of make-believe, is played ‘for keeps’: if you win or lose in life you can’t turn round and say “Oh well, it was only a game...” But because games are removed from real life, they is also the implication that they are of no real consequence, and this tends to detract from the enjoyment that can be had from them. One usually thinks of game-playing as something that is done for fun, for relaxation, or for passing the time, although it is generally understood that there also exists an unpleasant (or even sinister) side to game-playing, as implied for example by the term ‘mind-games’.

There also exist a number of more technical or philosophical definitions of ‘what is a game’, and these, whilst agreeing in some respects with the general meanings of the word that we have mentioned above, also have the effect of throwing a rather different light on its applicability. We will now make an attempt to explore more deeply the implications of games and not-games, but to avoid any possible confusion, it will be helpful to ignore or put to one side what we usually understand by such terms and pretend that we are starting completely from scratch.

LIFE-GAMES

To start off with we will take a look at a couple somewhat more technical usages of the term ‘game’. Eric Berne 1 has given the following definitions (which we have paraphrased to some extent):

1. A repetitive set of social maneuvers which appear to combine both defensive and gratificatory functions. -[p 23]

2. Sequences of behaviour that are based on social (rather than individual) programing which, although generally presented as being ‘adventitious’, actually follow unspoken rules and regulations. - [p 86]

3. ‘A recurring set of transactions, often reiterative, superficially plausible, with a concealed motivation; or, more colloquially, a series of moves with a snare or “gimmick.”’ - [p 104]

What makes any sequence of social interaction a game is the fact that it is carried out on the basis of some sort of plan, there are specific ground-rules that have to be followed by all parties. Something else that Berne focuses on is the idea that whilst there appears to be one thing happening (i.e., casual chit chat on some random subject) actually there is something else afoot (i.e., a coded or preprogrammed exchange of signals). There are, in other words, at least two levels of meaning to be considered. Something else that comes out of Berne’s definition is the idea that games are carried out for specific purposes. There is something in particular which one wishes to obtain as a result of it all. Berne sees the opposite to social game-playing as intimacy - this is what happens when all individual and social programming is dropped.

OPEN AND CLOSED GAMES

The next definition we will look at is that which set out by James Carse 2 in his book ‘Finite and Infinite Games’. Whilst Berne has obviously extended the meaning and applicability of the idea of ‘game-playing’ to beyond what we normally understood by it, Carse takes it further again. For Carse, any activity that has a specific aim in mind - an agenda - is a (‘finite’) game. We may take the liberty of trying to summarise Carse (his ideas do not easily lend themselves to a neat summary) by saying that a game is a course of action that is embarked upon for some arbitrary - i.e., freely chosen - purpose. This is a bit of a trick definition, since it implies that there is a class of purposes that are not arbitrary; purposes that are, in other words, inevitably generated by the circumstances that prevail at the time. The reason that this might be said to be a trick definition is because Carse’s argument is that there is actually no such thing as a purpose that is not arbitrarily selected, since all possible purposes are derived from game-playing! We will look a bit more closely at the implications of this a bit later on. Carse draws our attention to the crucial distinction between games that are played with a closed (i.e., previously decided) agenda and games which are played with an open (or undecided) agenda. The first type - finite games - are played with a definite aim in mind, which means that the aim is of absolute importance, it over-rides all other considerations. In the second type of game - which he calls ‘infinite’- each and every aim or purpose is only provisionally important and can be dropped as soon as something better comes along. Thus Carse says:

‘A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ - [p 3]

GAME REALITY VERSUS NON-GAME REALITY

The last usage of ‘game’ as a rigorous theoretical concept that we are going to briefly consider is the one that was put forward by ex-Harvard psychologists Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert 3 . They give the following definition:

‘“Games” are behavioural sequences defined by role, rules, rituals, goals, strategies, values, language, characteristic space-time locations and characteristic patterns of movement. Any behaviour not having these nine features is non-game: this includes physiological reflexes, spontaneous play, and transcendent awareness.’ -[p 13]

We can try summarising Leary et al by saying that game-reality is a consciousness state in which it becomes more important (or meaningful) to see reality in one particular way than in any other way; whereas in non-game reality one does not see any one mental model of reality as being more important or appropriate or valid than any other. Relating this to what we have said about Carse’s finite and infinite game-playing, we may say that game reality is what happens when we take one description of ourselves-in-the-universe to have absolute or universal validity, whilst non-game reality is when we see all possible descriptions of reality as being equally ‘provisional’ or local. What all this boils down to is that in Game Reality one can readily accept that there is such a thing as absolute truth, i.e., an unambiguous description of reality that can be codified in black-and-white. When one is in Non Game Reality, ‘absolute truth’ is revealed as being no more than an empty phrase or just another conceptual tool. The reference in the above definition to that old-fashioned hippy concept of ‘transcendent awareness’ might conceivably put off a lot of scientifically-minded readers, but for our purposes we can happily redefine T.A. as ‘that state of mind in which no particular mental representation (or structuration) is any more indicated than any other mental representation.’ Transcendental awareness corresponds to the cognitive state in which no differentiation (or ‘commitment-to-structure’) takes place.

SUMMARY

What has happened now is that our understanding of what is implied by game and not-game has swollen to encompass all the possibilities that exist for describing anything at all. The domain of ‘game’ and ‘not-game’ has expanded from Berne’s programmed and unprogrammed social interactions to the Carse’s agenda-based and agenda-free activity to Leary et al’s adaptation of the universal Buddhist dichotomy of conditioned mind and unconditioned mind. The essence of each of these three models is the same, however: ‘game’ stands for the determinate mode of being or structure-based reality (= the particular or limited case) and not-game equals the indeterminate mode (the universal or unlimited case).

We can summarize everything that has been said so far in the following statements:
1/ Games are rule-based. These rules can be explicit or implicit, the game can be played overtly or covertly. The rules can also be conscious or unconscious - one can be aware of the existence of these rules oneself or unaware, or anywhere in between.

2/ Games have a particular outcome in mind. For the game player all outcomes are not equal, and for this reason only that information which is relevant to the attainment of these goals is of interest. Out of all the information that is constantly available in the game-player’s environment, only a tiny fraction is selected for consideration.

3/ Games are imposed by the player, we superimpose an agenda on a situation. Another way of putting this would be to say that we use our social and physical environment for our own purposes. The rules involved are extrinsic to the environment not intrinsic, they are allocated or assigned by the player. One might object that the environment - for example a house, a supermarket, or society as a whole itself has a built-in agenda that one has to conform to. This is true, but that does not alter the fact that someone assigned the rules (or values) that characterise that agenda. The rules are quite arbitrary and freely accepted (as Carse says) by all who wish to play.

PRAGMATIC INFORMATION THEORY

We can add a further refinement to these ideas by bringing pragmatic information theory 4 to bear. This allows us to bring everything together by saying that:

The game-player along with their social and physical environment (including other participating players of the same game) constitute an organizationally-closed system.

This means that the player and their environment exist in a constantly re-cycling ‘information loop’ in which the player’s information output leads to a corresponding change in the environmental feedback, which is fed back into the player. The important point that comes out of the pragmatic information is that the rules of organization that determine the information output of the player are the same as the rules that lie behind the organization of the information coming back to the player: the level of organization (or ‘complexity’) is the same for all of the information in the loop. This does not mean that the environment half of the circuit can only provide information on this level of organization, it can provide information of any order of complexity, but, in effect, what happens is that it only gives back what is specifically elicited from it. What we are looking at is therefore a mirroring phenomenon.

This mirroring means that the information that one starts off with (i.e., the set of rules that govern the organization of that information) is the same as the information that one gets back. There is no possibility of new information suddenly coming into the loop and the information content of the system is kept at the same level as long as the game continues.

A game is therefore a specified (or rule-based) interaction in which the information content of the overall system remains constant. From this we can see that game playing is synonymous with control and stability, and non-game playing with for lack of control and instability.

THOUGHT AS A GAME

Going on this informational definition of games, i.e., that a game is where no new information is let into the system, we find ourselves in a position from which we can assert quite reasonably that thought itself is a game. This isn’t quite so peculiar as it might first sound, after all, all of our mental objects or concepts are arbitrary conventions that only have meaning because we have agreed in advance what these meanings are. This is obviously true for words and it is equally true for the concepts behind words. For example we all know what ‘Tuesday’ is, but the fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as Tuesday, there is no intrinsic (i.e., non-assigned) entity of ‘Tuesday-ness’ to be found anywhere in the universe. We all get together and agree to pretend that there will be such a thing for the purpose of the game that we are playing.....

Another way of approaching this matter would be to say that model-making is a game, and so all mental activity is a game insofar as it is representational. Theoretical model-making is a perfect example of ‘make believe’ or ‘lets pretend’: one designs an over-simplified scenario in which all the variables are specified, and then one deliberately assumes that this abstraction is sufficiently close to concrete reality for the difference not to matter. This exercise may or may not be useful but it is a game because all the rules are specified in advance. As Heisenberg has made us aware, concrete reality can never be totally specified, and so it is not a game.

In terms of pragmatic information theory, conceptual thought is a game because it is an organizationally closed system. No new information comes in because information can only ever make sense to us if we can interpret it in terms of what we already know. This corresponds to what is commonly known as a circular argument, where the conclusion lies hidden in the premises. Another way of putting this is to say that we don’t deal with ‘raw’ information but only with information that has been categorized by our conceptualizing minds, so it is our categories that determine the limits of our thought. These categories or concepts remain (for the most part) constant. This is what Krishnamurti 5 is getting at when he says:

Thought, which is the response of memory, experience and knowledge, is always old, as is the intellect, and the old cannot build a bridge to the new. - [p 102]

Also contained in Krishnamurti’s statement is the idea that we cannot purposefully admit new information into the system, for the simple reason that all aims and purposes are derived from the old game-plan, they are extensions of the same game. This leads us to yet another formulation of what is and what is not a game, a formulation that is based on the notion of quantitative and qualitative change.

TWO TYPES OF CHANGE

All change is of two sorts: the controlled change that occurs as a result of applying rules, and uncontrolled change that occurs due to random or accidental factors. The first type of change is managed, it is based on certain definite criteria and involves goals. The second type is what Prigogine and Stengers6 term ‘radical change’, it is spontaneous and is not goal-oriented.

1/ QUANTITATIVE - Goal oriented change. Algorithmic. i.e., it can be codified and applied over and over with identical, predictable results. Information content of system stays the same throughout, i.e., no new information is brought in.

2/ QUALITATIVE - Aimless or random change. Also known as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘self-organizing’ change. Non-algorithmic, non-predictable and therefore impossible to intend or plan for. Information content of system will either increase or decrease.

Applying this to cognition, we can say that there must be two types of thought. The first is goal-orientated or what Jung called ‘directed’ thought, whilst the second is aimless or purposeless and corresponds to Jung’s idea of spontaneous thought. It follows that one cannot intend Type-2 mental change, since if one could intend it it would be purposeful and therefore Type-1. Thus, Krishnamurti says ‘the old cannot build a bridge to the new’. The information content of the system remains constant in the first instance throughout the cognitive ‘operation’, and changes in the second instance, undergoing a ‘jump’ either up or down. In the terms of the perspective that is being introduced here, activity that corresponds to ‘quantitative change’ is game activity, whilst that which involves ‘qualitative change’ is non-game.

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS GAMES

Having gone into the theory-side of game-playing, what we now want to do is come down to earth and see what bearing these ideas have on the practical psychology of everyday life. Out of all the possible angles mentioned in our summary we are going to pursue only one, and that is the one in statement 1 concerning our awareness (or otherwise) of the fact that we are following game rules. What we are going to suggest is that there exists a continuous spectrum of game-plans ranging from the deeply unconscious to the completely conscious, which we are enacting more or less simultaneously. Biologically determined games (such as courtship behaviour or ritual aggression, for example), tend to be on the unconscious end of the spectrum, whilst what Berne calls social programming is generally somewhere in the middle. Personal programming may also be in the grey area - the area which can with varying degrees of ease be brought into consciousness - and it may also be totally voluntary and aware game behaviour.

On the whole, we don’t think of our behaviour as being a voluntary game, we think ‘it has to be that way.’ If we happen to be a nationalist, the chances are that we don’t think that we are playing at being a nationalist, we perceive ourselves as being really committed to this viewpoint that our country is greater than any other. If we are a policeman , we may think that ‘we really are a policeman’, on the other hand, we might realise perfectly well that it is only a role (a theatrical performance) that we are carrying out, we are not really that role. There are a lot purposeful actions that one undertakes in the full knowledge that it is merely the exercise of arbitrary choice that is going on. When you put the kettle on you realise that you did not have to do that, you could equally well have not done so, or opened a can of coke instead. Despite the ‘awareness-of-arbitrariness’ that is the hall-mark of conscious game-behaviour, the action of making a cup of tea is nevertheless invested with meaning from other, deeper, levels of game-programming. As a rule, full consciousness of game behaviour as being a ‘game’ is an extraordinary state of affairs, it only comes in a strictly limited form - or perhaps in a flash of awareness every now and again.

GAME AND NON-GAME MEANING

This brings us to another point: meaning as we usually encounter it is game-derived. An action or way of looking at things is perceived as meaningful because it has meaning with the context of the game that is being played. It is assigned (or arbitrary) meaning. This is not to say that all meaning is arbitrary or ‘made up’ as the existentialists have asserted. Not only existentialists but indeed the majority of orthodox scientists would be happy to concur with the view that ‘assigned meaning is the only meaning’ but this viewpoint is no more than an intellectually derived formulation, and the intellect has no chance of coming to any other conclusion of the matter. Orthodox science, one might say, has no interest in experience as such - only in the rational interpretation or manipulation of that experience. The position that we are adopting here is that all intellectual or rational activity is itself ‘game-based’ and that for the game-playing intellect non-game is identical with the null-set, i.e., the absence or cessation of game-reality is construed in game terms!

The actual experience of the state of non-game is a real and well documented reality, and all accounts seem to agree on the point that the experience is not a meaningless one, but on the contrary it comes across as a most profoundly meaningful experience, and one which, through comparison, totally dwarfs the normal experience of assigned or game-meaning. Carl Jung, for example, referred to this non-assigned meaning as ‘numinosity’. Jung saw numinous experience as the result of direct (i.e., not intellectually mediated) awareness of an archetypal content; it related the fragmented ego-personality (the particular) to the Self (or universal). This type of experience is synonymous with what is called ‘religious’ experience and for this reason Jung 7 sees no reason to doubt its authenticity:

That religious experience exists no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic props. - [p 90-91]

The only thing that one can really say about intrinsic meaning (i.e., meaning that isn’t assigned) is that it makes no sense in terms of any game. It is, as Jung says, completely ‘other’, in just the same way that the Self is completely ‘other’ with regard to the familiar world of our limited (or particular) game-playing self.

SELF-VEILING

The fact that we are playing a game and yet do not ‘let on’ to ourselves that this is what we are doing is called by Carse ‘self-veiling’:

To account for the large gap between the actual freedom of finite players to step off the field of play at any time and the experienced necessity to stay at the struggle, we can say that as finite players we somehow veil this freedom from ourselves.

Some self-veiling is present in all finite games. Players must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.

From the outset of finite play each part or position must be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see themselves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother. In the proper exercise of such roles we positively believe we are the persons those roles portray. Even more: we make those roles believable to others. It is in the nature of acting, Shaw said, that we are not to see this woman as Ophelia, but Ophelia as this woman. - [p 12]

THE PARADOX OF GAMES

Herein lies Carse’s paradox: a game is only a game if one doesn’t have to play, yet if we actually experience perfect equanimity with regard to the outcome of our actions, it robs the game of its reality - there is no point in it. We can tie this in with what we have said about rules and games:

A game is based on rules. All actions that take place must be in accordance with these rules. When Carse talks of ‘experienced necessity’ he is talking of rules: a rule is a compulsion: you have to do this, you have to do that. A law is the exact opposite of arbitrariness; a law is an absolute bias whereas arbitrariness is the lack of any bias. Another reason that a game is a game is because it is based on assigned meaning, we say that such-and-such will mean this and such-and-such will mean that. In other words a game can only be a game if it is based on arbitrary rules, it would not be a game if the rules were absolutely valid under all circumstances*. This is where the paradox lies because if a law is arbitrarily chosen it is itself an expression of arbitrariness: it appears to be a law but when we look at it it vanishes in a puff of smoke. In other words, what was previously seen to be absolutely true, subsequently becomes experienced as being only provisionally true.

* One might ask whether there are such ‘universal valid rules’, and if so, what are they? Common sense says that there are, that gravity or the speed of light (or the mathematical constants) do not vary in their applicability. Nevertheless, we cannot assert that gravity is applicable across the board, because it only comes into effect when there is an unfolded physical/energetic universe for it to operate in. Without the ‘context’ of mass and energy what is gravity? Approaching the matter from a different angle, it is now recognized that we can only determine the structure of the universe by first selecting a basis from which to measure it, as Prigogine and Stengers (1985)explain: “Bohr always emphasized the novelty of the positive choice introduced through measurement. The physicist has to choose his language, to choose the macroscopic experimental device. Bohr expressed this idea through the principle of complementarity, which may be considered as an extension of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations. We can measure coordinates or momenta, but not both. No single theoretical language articulating the variables to which a well-defined value can be attributed can exhaust the physical content of a system.” -[p 225]. What this means is that no level of structuration can be seen as absolutely true, since what we see depends upon the arbitrary choice that we make as observers. All measurement is thus ‘a game’.
THE ‘DEFINITION’ OF CONSCIOUSNESS

It is at this point that we come to the crux of this whole game/non-game business! Only a minute ago we were blithely bandying about words such as ‘conscious’ and unconscious’, these are words that (as has often been pointed out) we feel we understand whilst being unable to define exactly what it is we understand by them. In a sense, this is perfectly legitimate, since it is this ‘consciousness’ that is doing the defining, so a meaning ‘loop’ is created that cannot ever be untied. Yet we can relate what we mean by ‘consciousness’ to games and not-games in a series of definitions that are surprisingly satisfying. This is not really as definition in the sense that of ‘completely explaining something’, but we will call them definitions none-the-less.

DEFINITION #1

GAME = UNCONSCIOUSNESS; NON-GAME = CONSCIOUSNESS

DEFINITION #2

UNCONSCIOUSNESS IS PROPORTIONAL TO ORGANIZATIONAL CLOSURE (DEGREE OF ISOLATEDNESS FROM TOTAL SYSTEM)

CONSCIOUSNESS IS PROPORTIONAL TO ORGANIZATIONAL OPENNESS (DEGREE OF CONNECTEDNESS OR INTERACTION WITH TOTAL SYSTEM)

DEFINITION #3

UNCONSCIOUSNESS = STABILITY, MAINTAINING A RELATIONSHIP WITH FIXED POINT OF REFERENCE

CONSCIOUSNESS = INSTABILITY, LACK OF ANY FIXED REFERENCE POINT (GROUNDLESSNESS)

These ‘definitions’ are of cause all saying the same thing and we could continue indefinitely adding definitions to the list, for example ‘increase in consciousness is proportional to decrease in experienced necessity’ or ‘increase in consciousness = increase in unpredictability of system’, and so on.
We can also tie them in without any difficulty to other ‘systems’ definitions of consciousness that a few people have been bold enough to put forward. Eric Jantsch8 defines consciousness as ‘the degree of autonomy a system gains in the dynamic relations with its environment’. Autonomy equals self-directedness, which is the same thing as ‘freedom from external compulsion’. Itzhak Bentov 9 defines consciousness as ‘the capacity of a system to respond to stimuli’, which is clearly a measure of organizational openness.

DO THESE DEFINITIONS ACTUALLY TELL US ANYTHING?

It is quite probable that a substantial proportion of people reading this will not find the above definitions of consciousness very satisfactory at all. The reason for this is that it the wrong type of definition, it doesn’t explain anything! On the contrary, consciousness is actually linked to an intrinsic lack of definition. What most of us want from a ‘theory of consciousness’ is an explanation that lets us into a great secret of nature, so that we are able to go away saying “Oh - so that’s what it is!” One imagines that such a theory would be highly scientific, quite possibly full of all sorts of technical stuff that we wouldn’t entirely understand, although this wouldn’t necessarily lessen our satisfaction.....

The type of explanation that we want is in other words a closed one, a model that explains the world in terms of what we already know, so we can happily carry on with our game. An open explanation, by contrast, is one that does not confirm our expectations. It expands along with our understanding. This sounds all very fine and philosophical, but there is at the same time a down to earth, practical use to be had out of definitions such as the ones given above. We can, for example, apply them to mental illness.

CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

There exists a class of mental illnesses, along with what might broadly be categorized as a class of mental ‘problems’, to which this type of perspective can be fruitfully be applied. What we are talking about here are all those conditions in which compulsion or a sense-of-necessity is the root of the problem. Obsessive compulsive disorder is the most obvious one, but it takes just a little thought to realize that all neurotic disturbances are of this same nature. Mild neurotic conditions generally involve some slight sort of ridiculous or non-rational embellishment to our responses to what would otherwise be straightforward problems or hurdles in daily life. Simple things become unnecessarily complicated...... Thus, we say “Oh, I couldn’t do that....”, or “I can’t see him just now...”, or “I should never have said that!” There are less obvious states of mind that are equally compulsion-based, such as political extremism or paranoia. In both of these there is a powerful compulsion to see the world in a particular way. We simply don’t realize that we could equally well interpret things differently, and this is the cause of our problems - although it must be admitted that not everyone would agree that seeing the world in very clear terms consitutes a problem!

The suffering engendered by these conditions is due to lack of perspective, to unconsciousness. If consciousness is expanded, the difficulties become less oppressive. Techniques for doing this, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, already exist and are used for precisely this type of condition. CBT has as its ultimate aim the questioning of what was previously taken to be self-evident truth, the relativization of what was previously taken to be absolute, or, in other words, the realization that one is playing a game.

REFERENCES

1. Berne, E (1961) Transactional analysis in psychotherapy. Souvenir Press.
2. Carse, J (1986) Finite and infinite games. Penguin Books.
3. Leary, T; Metzner,R; Alpert,R (1964) The psychedelic experience. Citadel Press: Carol Publishing Group.
4. Weizsacker, Ernst von (1974) Erstmaligkeit und bestatigung als komonenten der pragmatischen information in Jantsch, E (1980) The self-organzing unverse. Pergamon Press.
5. Lutyens, M (ed) (1970) The second Penguin Krishnamurti reader. Penguin.
6. Prigogine, I and Stengers, I (1985) Order out of Chaos - man’s new dialogue with nature. Flamingo.
7. Jung, C (1958) The undiscovered self. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
8. Jantsch, E (1980) The self-organizing universe. Pergamon Press.
9. Bentov, I (1978) Stalking the wild pendulum. Wildwood house.