Finite and Infinite Games

Tags: #books #non-fiction #philosophy #system-thinking #political-science #engineering

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is a philosophical book. It is trying to model how humans model nature. It is an interesting but also quite a short read. Thinking in terms of finite and infinite games makes some decisions of humans and society more understandable.

🎨 Impressions

It was a nice book, I liked it. It felt like a less dense version of the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

How I Discovered It

Cannot remember, was in my reading list.

Who Should Read It?

People who like [[Philosophy#Denim Philosophy]]

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I think more about titles as the result of finite games, I found that quite interesting.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

• Only one person or team can win a finite game, but the other contestants may well be ranked at the conclusion of play.

• Began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time.

• Rules are not valid because the Senate passed them, or because heroes once played by them, or because God pronounced them through Moses or Muhammad. They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.

• If the rules of a finite game are unique to that game it is evident that the rules may not change in the course of play—else a different game is being played.

• Infinite players use the rules to regulate the way they will take the boundaries or limits being forced against their play into the game itself.

• —Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game.

• If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. “Life itself appears only as a means to life” (Marx).

• Titles are theatrical. Each title has a specified ceremonial form of address and behavior. Titles such as Captain, Mrs., Lord, Esquire, Professor, Comrade, Father, Under Secretary, signal not only a mode of address with its appropriate deference or respect, but also a content of address (only certain subjects are suitable for discussion with the Admiral of the Fleet or the District Attorney or the Holy Mother), and a manner of address (shaking hands, kneeling, prostrating or crossing oneself, saluting, bowing, averting the eyes, or standing in silence).

• We are not defeated by floods or genetic disease or the rate of inflation. It is true that these are real, but we do not play against reality; we play according to reality. We do not eliminate weather or genetic influence but accept them as the realities that establish the context of play, the limits within which we are to play.

• All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

• Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

• When Europeans first landed on the North American continent the native population spoke as many as ten thousand distinct languages, each with its own poetry and treasury of histories and myths, its own ways of living in harmony with the spontaneities of the natural environment. All but a very few of those tongues have been silenced, their cultures forever lost to those of us who stand ignorantly in their place.

• Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

• Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

• “We must learn the fine arts of war and independence so that our children can learn architecture and engineering so that their children may learn the fine arts and painting” (John Quincy Adams).

• We can imagine infinite players nodding thoughtfully at Rousseau’s famous declaration: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

• Like a finite game, a society is numerically, spatially, and temporally limited. Its citizenship is precisely defined, its boundaries are inviolable, and its past is enshrined.

• Society is abstract, culture concrete.

• Just as an infinite game has rules, a culture has a tradition. Since the rules of play in an infinite game are freely agreed to and freely altered, a cultural tradition is both adopted and transformed in its adoption.

• Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

• Title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them.

• All the principal museums in New York, for example, are associated with the names of the famously rich: Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan, Lehman. Such museums are not designed to protect the art from people, but to protect the people from art.

• For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon.

• Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous. The spirit of patriotism is therefore characteristically associated with the military or other modes of international conflict.

• War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.

• Speaking in purely causal terms, I cannot say I was born; I should say rather that I have emerged as a phase in the process of reproduction. A reproduction is a repetition, a recurrence of that which has been. Birth, on the other hand, in causal terms, is all discontinuity.

• Having once been insulted by Athens, the great Persian Emperor Darius renewed his appetite for war by having a page follow him about to whisper in his ear, “Sire, remember the Athenians.”

• Whatever occurs within a game is relatively intelligible with reference to whatever else has happened inside its boundaries, but it is absolutely intelligible with reference to that world for the sake of which its boundaries exist.

• NATURE IS the realm of the unspeakable. It has no voice of its own, and nothing to say. We experience the unspeakability of nature as its utter indifference to human culture.

• “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Bacon).

• “One may say ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility’” (Einstein).

• Indeed, the titled, as titled, cannot speak with anyone.

• The sicut dixit dominus (thus says the lord) is always a signal for ritual silence.

• Inasmuch as gardens do not conclude with a harvest and are not played for a certain outcome, one never arrives anywhere with a garden. A garden is a place where growth is found. It has its own source of change. One does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only out of growth.

• True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children.

• MYTH PROVOKES Explanation but accepts none of it.

• Fides ex auditu. Faith comes by listening, Paul said.

• A bell resonates, a cannon amplifies. We listen to the bell, we are silenced by the cannon.