Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

Thread re Finite & Infinite Games

created 2020-03-27 · edited 2020-03-27 · open in Roam
  • status: braindump
  • Finite & Infinite Games by James Carse
  • March 27th, 2020
    • chapter...3? "I am the genius of myself" struck me with a sense of
      • Qiaochu & RivalVoices want to read this
      • QC because it talks about sexuality in a way I think would really resonate for him
      • RV because... wholeness & healing, and his long thread by nosilverv, that talks about heidigger's present-at-hand and ready-to-hand and self-improvement requiring self-as-object, and 4chan
  • April 22nd, 2020
    • Finished James Carse's classic Finite & Infinite Games yesterday, & started writing a thread that was gonna be more of a summary, but got bored: I'm not a summary guy.

      Back blurb is an ok summary👇 rest of thread will just talk about connections I made & other thoughts
      • IMAGE
    • Oddly somehow @callumflack's tweet wasn't what got me to pick up the book🤔

      But I totally agree. Inasmuch as finite player & infinite player are ways of being, they map quite closely & beautifully onto what seems to be going on with the brain hemispheres.
      twitter.com/callumflack/status/1200801403683262465
    • As I've noted while reading, the style of the book reads like an impossible & impressive mashup of a syllogistic argument and free-verse poetry.

      There's definitely a kind of logic to it, but

      twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1243613332478844930
    • Infinite games are bothandy, finite games are eitherory

      twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1229894109181157376
    • Carse elegantly makes it clear that he's talking about both things that are widely agreed to be games (chess, sports, war...?) as well as many other human activities (business, politics, religion, conversation)

      twitter.com/gordonbrander/status/1008133787270635520
    • As I reflected to @rjgoodin a few years ago as we had a conversation while dynamically balanced on each end of a seesaw in a park:
        twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1262486092902735875
    • I hereby juxtapose 4 quotes about freedom, self-entrapment, struggle, suffering, craving:
      - from Finite & Infinite Games
      - from Already Free by Bruce Tift
      - from Dzogchen Teachings by Chögyal Namkhai Norbu
      - from @xuenay (partway down a long thread)
      twitter.com/xuenay/status/1248661944904699906
    • I'm pretty satisfied with having pulled together these 4 quotes. They seem to me to together form a kind of mutual causality loop:

      we are afraid to experience sunyata (freedom, infinite game-ness) because it feels like losing the finite game
    • I'm enjoying the art form of assembling these quotes. They seem to me to together form a kind of mutual causality loop:

      Carse: we veil our freedom so we can stay at the struggle
      Tift: we stay at the struggle so we don't have to experience our freedom

      twitter.com/Buddh_ish/status/1249155863987748864
    • And then Kaj's tweets start speaking to another layer:

      > dropping the craving feels like losing

      Kaj's saying "losing the money"
      I say it's also "losing the [finite] game"
    • In my work developing cultures of samesided non-naive trust-building, I've noticed a common schema many people have (that they may or may not be conscious of) that goes something like

      "giving up the power-over games is losing"

      (I'm one of the people I've noticed this in)
    • (There is, fwiw, a way to attempt to give up the power-over games that's self-understood as *winning*, as in "I'm too good for power-games", but that is fundamentally still hooked into that old value system—)
      twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1249762717654757378
    • something girard, something actual-martyrs, something ego death
    • propaganda
  • maybe tag this guy, maybe as an aside (outside thread)
  • April 21st, 2020
    • Just finished Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse

      Figured I'd write a thread! The book is remarkably well-summarized by the blurb, which is comprised of quotes from the book.
    • "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play."

      "The rules of a finite game may not change; the rules of an ∞ game must change."
    • Oddly somehow @callumflack's tweet wasn't what got me to pick up the book🤔

      But I totally agree. Inasmuch as finite player & infinite player are ways of being, they map quite closely & beautifully onto what seems to be going on with the brain hemispheres.
      twitter.com/callumflack/status/1200801403683262465
    • 13: "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."
  • Other tweets/sources