Month: November 2021

“There are at least two kinds of games.  One could be called finite, and the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of play.”

-James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

Thus begins James P. Carse’s philosophical work, for which this post is named – Finite and Infinite Games.

The very concept of finite and infinite games is one I continue to explore, and to have an improved understanding of, a yet it’s important to explore the topic before we proceed.

This will not be my last, nor my best, exploration of finite and infinite games.

So, for starters, it goes something like this.

There are at least two types of games, finite and infinite.

Finite games are games with known players, rules, boundaries, and objectives.  The goal of finite games is to achieve a victory condition, and for an undisputed winner to be chosen.

Finite games are played for the purpose of ending play.  As long as play continues, the contest has not been resolved.

Infinite games are different.  They have both known and unknown players.  The rules, the boundaries and other factors continue to shift for the central objective — to continue the game.

Finite games are played for the purpose of ending play.

Infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing play.

While most of the things we think of as games (checkers, football, poker, etc.) are finite games, most of the situations we find ourselves in throughout life are better thought of as INFINITE games.

They are pursuits without a victory condition.  As author Simon Sinek asks, when does one “win” at the game of Geopolitics, business, or marriage?

As I approach my craft as a hypnotist, if my constant drive is to level-up and continue becoming a “stronger” hypnotist, until I exhaust my potential, then I am approaching it as an infinite game.  Infinite games continue until the player “loses the will or resources to play.”

There could be a time when either I am not interested in continuing the “level-up the hypnotist” game (losing the will) or where further improvement becomes impossible because of advanced skill level, or because of personal limit or capacity (losing the resources).

It could be that that a larger game becomes apparent — a larger frame that includes the original game.

It could be that a Greater Game reveals itself.

We’ll come back to this discussion of frames and contexts later.

For now, let’s take a look at an example we’re now overly familiar with, the “search for objective truth” that we discussed previously.

Now, search-for-objective-truth game can be played as a finite game, wherein the victory condition is the “discovery of truth” and the rules are agreed upon, more or less, by the participants.  And so to truly win this, as a finite game, there must be a point where play is stopped, the results are tallied, and the winner is declared. 

And yet the only way to definitively do that – to declare a winner – is to compare the contents of a player’s “discovery” to … well, seemingly to “truth itself” … to see if they match, wherein lies the problem of approaching the search-for-objective-truth game as a finite game.

How do we “recognize” objective truth when we actually find it?

If the victory condition is having a model of reality that matches “actual” reality, the finite game cannot actually complete because the achievement of the victory condition cannot be witnessed by the players.  It’s a shell game where you never get to lift up the shell.

I’ll suggest a remedy for this, but first, a diversion — back to my adventure of becoming the best hypnotist possible.

If I decided to hang up the role of the perpetual student of hypnosis, and it weren’t because the whole thing was swallowed up in a bigger, grander game — which we’ll get to later — and if it weren’t because of reaching my limit of advancement, than the likely conclusion is that I was playing the become-the-most-super-awesome-hypnotist-possible game as a finite game. 

It could be that I had some list of criteria — various certifications and trainings and the like — and that I reached the end of my list.  In this case, I was playing an finite game.

So then what?  The money-making game?  The surpass-all-competitors game?  To what end?

I suggest a remedy — an alternative to this.  Whenever you find yourself in a game, consider the possibility of playing it as an infinite game, and of whether you can envelop it in the context of one.  Infinite games can contain finite games.

This crazy truth-quest can be played as an infinite game of exploring these models of discovery and seeing what good things we can make from them — and they don’t have to look much different than they do now.  Discovering or creating a treatment or cure for cancer is actually a finite game, because there is an observable victory condition. 

That’s quite different for “discovering THE cause” because that particular claim excludes the possibility of another cause, that there could be more than one player with claim to being the winner.  In a finite game, that will not do.  It suggests that all victory parties should cease immediately.  It suggests that the game has not come to an end. 

Played as an infinite game, science becomes a more lighthearted philosophy, always assuming that the latest “truth” will never be the last, and collecting treasures and achievements along the way.  Victors can be crowned at milestones, like a mighty deed in the world of medicine or space exploration, keeping the little joys that finite games can offer, while recognizing that — sometimes — dragons rise again.

Regardless of whether you are in a finite game or an infinite game, one thing remains the case of either: play is voluntary.  One who must play cannot play, because play is a voluntary act. 

To decide that you are going to play a game as an infinite game means you get to decide on the rules, the boundaries, and the objectives of play.

A boring job can be treated as a finite game couched within the infinite game of “exhausting my potential for creation, positive experience, and well-being” … in which the new challenge surpasses the old challenge.  It is no longer about getting to the end of the shift, so much as how you experience your time along the way, particularly when you are equipped with some of the technologies I will be sharing with you on this adventure.

A note about terminology.  I’ll be using the word “technology” a lot.  You can read this as “something that allows you to do something else” and you’ll be fine.  Hypnosis is a technology, for example, although it doesn’t necessarily involve circuit boards and things like that (not that one needs circuit boards).  Mind mapping would be another example.

There will be more about using games to help you level-up from your boring job, sometimes using the job itself to do it, but that’s beyond the scope of what we’ll be dealing with here.  A point I’d like to emphasize is this: that by deciding to play the boring-job game as a game about feeling good, instead of a game about achieving a company objective, then you are in a position of power.  And while one may need to do a thankless job from time to time, it is worth bearing in mind that the game of finances — consequential as it may be — is a part of the game of well-being, not the other way around. 

So, going all the way back to the beginning, “feeling good” is perhaps the great infinite game for those of us that are animals.  Everything else is done in the service of it.

In the spirit of infinite games, none of the above is complete, and there will be plenty more to explore.  That’s probably what we need to move forward, though, to get to what’s ahead.

To bring it all together, and to continue advancing in the game of “feeling good” and “becoming more awesome” that you’re on, if you choose to be, I invite you to approach this life experience from the frame of the Great Infinite Game, and to do so with a sense of engagement and purpose.  If you choose to, join me on this adventure and I’ll share my treasure with you.

So, before I wrap up this long-overdue and winding post, I have two parting gifts.

The first is a piece of what I might call a “gnostic technology” for your use.  Whenever you find yourself in a situation that could be thought of us a game, ask yourself: (1) if it is a finite game or an infinite one?; (2) whether it could be played as an infinite one?; (3) if it is a finite game, what are the victory conditions?;  (4) given the answers to the above, do you want to play this game?; and, finally, (5) if you are stuck on the game board anyway (more on this in future posts), can you reframe this game in terms of feeling good?

The second parting gift is something you’ve seen before, I’m afraid, but I wanted to present it again in case it has new relevance.

Once again, here is Alan Watts.  He doesn’t use the term “infinite game” in his talk, and yet you’ll likely get a sense of how this “goes with” what we’ve been talking about.

It is my hope that it will help you to further engage in this big, crazy, game, with a greater sense of joy.

Also, see if you get a sense of the link between what Alan Watts is saying, and all my droning on about Nietzsche, the Ubermensch, and all that stuff …

Until next time, fellow Adventurers!!

What is a game?

I can, and will, go on about this question, but it’s more important, now, to move the pieces forward.

For now, I will give an imperfect definition that goes something like this…

A game is a challenge to be completed voluntarily, competing against some other element to achieve an objective.

Games can take a literal form of board games or video games with very well-defined rules and components.

Games can also take the form of competition in business or between nations, the kind of games talked about in “game theory” and the like.

Competition of any kind, and to a large extent challenge of any kind, can be thought of us a game.  If it is a game with a victory condition, that end is often identical to the-thing-the-challenge-is-impeding.

Metaphors can act as a kind of frame.

The metaphor of “The Game” is a very useful one for approaching the world, which allows for iteration and ongoing improvement, encourages engagement, and has at its core the central drive to maximize positive and pleasurable experience.

Approaching the World as a game allows you the level of access to use the cheat codes in a way that is no longer cheating, but instead is a shifting of rules.

For that … you’ll need to know about finite and infinite games.

Frames are cognitive tools — things we do in our heads — to make sense of the world.

To “make sense” of the world is to attempt to predict it, usually through the construction of some type of predictive model.

So, to avoid getting lost in the world of terms, we could say that frames are ways we have of explaining the world. In the world of hypnosis, and in NLP, these could also be referred to as “maps” and are basically our boiled-down understanding of the world.

Our frames determine how we interpret the information we encounter. Often what we perceive as a limit in our world is actually a limit in our frame, or map. Sometimes we need a better metaphor.

Metaphors can act as a kind of frame.

_{Note: this post previously appeared on my other blog at:
http://whiterabbithypnosis.com/blog/nietzsche-will-to-power-feeling-good/
I know … you’ve already seen the monkey video.}

In the last blog post, we had a brief, but probably sufficient, exploration of uncertainty.  It seems to be the case that uncertainty seems to be an inescapable epistemic feature or our world experience.  Beyond that, it’s difficult to make definitive statements about our predicament — we cannot claim (with any sense of certainty) that it is “impossible” to know things, and yet it can be argued that attempts to establish claims of “objective knowledge” have thus far been insufficient and there doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that we can get around the core obstructions.

The philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, while not quite the nail-in-the-coffin positions of Wittgenstein, portray the world as being devoid not only of certainty, but also of meaning.  Nietzsche’s oft-quoted statement that, “God is dead, and we have killed him,” is a statement about the ways we have coldly approached the world and carved it up into abstractions has left us with a world devoid of enchantment.

I agree, and it is a point to which we’ll return later.  And yet, this post is not REALLY about Nietzsche, but about where these ideas take us.  In the last post, I mentioned that our present discussion would start with a monkey in a lecture hall.  Note two things in this little video — the description of the bleakness of the world, and the optimism of the conclusion.

This little piece, from the movie Waking Life, is one we’ll return to again, but first, back to Nietzsche.

Nietzsche expressed the belief that a philosopher should live by example.  If philosophy is ever going to be useful, it cannot remain an academic exercise but must be a lived experience.  In the wake of Kant’s attempts at objectivity in Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics, Nietzsche “recommends” a different path.  Influenced by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche established a notion of the “Will to Power” that all living things possessed.  It was Nietzsche’s assertion that living things not only wanted to survive, but also to get stronger.

It’s probably a good place to take a pause before establishing another idea or two and finally bringing this back to our actual lives.  There are some problematic aspects to the way Nietzsche’s writings have sometimes been interpreted, not the least of which are this notion of “power” as well as the next bit, the Ubermensch, sometimes translated as the Superman.

Some have suggested that this kind of idea, as well as Nietzsche’s concept of the “inversion of morals,” encouraged notions of the “master race” and the “Nazi Superman.” While history is replete with examples of philosophies being weaponized through skewed interpretation, it is pretty clear from Nietzsche’s writings, from his obsession with literature, and his idolization of Goethe as something of a model for the Ubermensch, that Nietzsche viewed the Ubermensch, more than anything else, as an Artist.

The Ubermensch as a general concept is the person that strives and achieves greatness, who becomes their “fully expressed” best self at full power.  Any envy we may have of another’s “success” in the world serves as a message to ourselves that we value that thing, and therefore give us aspirations for achievement — a target at which to aim.

Nietzsche was drawn more to the Dionysian than the Apollonian.  Metaphorically speaking, he had an artist’s soul, channeled through the persona of the academic — not to create a false dichotomy — or perhaps it could be said that his intended audience was of an Apollonian, but the message was more Dionysian.

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

Okay — let’s take a little break from Nietzsche.  We’ll return to his stuff briefly to wrap up this “power” bit before we close out this little section, because it is a little bit problematic, the way it is commonly, as if it’s a thing that exists out there by itself, free of context.  But before that, let’s take a little look at a quote from Baruch Spinoza, because it brings emphasis to the core issue — the issue of how we live our actual lives.

“After experience had taught me that the common occurrences of daily life are vain and futile, and I saw that all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad, save in so far as the mind was affected by them, I at length determined to search out whether there were not something truly good and communicable to man…”

–Baruch Spinoza, De Intellectus Emendatione

This central observation — all the objects of my desire and fear were in themselves nothing good nor bad, save in so far as the mind was affected by them — is stating, essentially, that it is the way the mind is “affected” by the objects of our desires and fears, not the objects themselves, that drives our “vain and futile” pursuits in daily life.

Stated differently, in the words of our friend David Snyder — everything we do, we do because of a feeling : a feeling we want more of, or a feeling we want less of.

As I’ve stated before, this blog is about living an amazing life, and about the tricks and secrets that can help you do it.  As we’ll explore in posts to come, we have much more power over our world experience than we may have been led to believe.  And that brings us back around to that problematic word — POWER.

The word “power” has an etymology rooted in the Latin word “possum.” We may more easily recognize another form of that word, “potens” — translated as “to be able to” — as it forms the base of the word “potential” and “potent” among others.  Power, like meaning, is always context-dependent.  Power is the ability to do … something.  But what “something” is worth doing?

I humbly suggest that, in actuality, our primary pursuits and drivers in life are of an aesthetic nature.  The feelings we have are the result of some level of aesthetic experience.  In the most direct sense, we have all kinds of stories about our experience, about who we are and what we’re capable of.  We have stories about what people “deserve” or what’s “fair” and things like that, and when things don’t match up with those stories we experience some kind of sense of injustice, or “narrative dis-satisfaction” in how things are playing out.

We naturally pursue the aesthetic experience — the feeling of rapport of enjoying a dance with friends, foods and beverages that are pleasant to the body and mind, pleasant things to look at whether people or paintings or sunsets — and that pursuit is itself formed and informed in an ecosystem of symbols and stories that tell us what things mean and how to value things.

Nietzsche’s hint of “that which we envy” in others, and by exchanging a word, maybe suggest a target.  What inspires you in others, or in the world.  What do you find beautiful, and, on that note, what kind of beauty do you want to bring into the world?

Ultimately, power is the “ability to” feel good, because all action seeks that same end — to feel good (better) or to feel “less bad” (um … better). And while we haven’t gotten into the secrets of mastering your own emotions yet, it’s easy to see the preference for the “positive” ones. What percentage of tomorrow would you like to spend being angry or resentful or whatever, if you could choose to feel blissful or amused or something else? We resort to these less-than-pleasant emotions because we feel we have no choice.

Power, best expressed, always maximizes good feelings and circumstances, and allows you to have more good feelings and circumstances in the future. And, the secret that’s not much of a secret : you always have more power when you work with others. The best way to increase your power is to distribute power to those around you, increasing the power of your allies. There will be much more to say about this in future posts — In fact, it deserves a post of its own.

The clockwork universe that replaced the living one, notably with the rise of Newtonian physics, is missing a crucial ingredient — what I’ll call … SOUL.  This world is in need of Re-Enchantment, and it begins with re-enchanting your own world, learning to wake up in your own life and become lucid, and being fully engaged in the dynamic experience of your own will to power — to become the most beautiful self you can be, and live a beautiful life.

Life can be lived at the level of Art, and I want to help you do it.

The next stage in our adventure will largely move on from Nietzsche and these philosophers, although we’ll be dropping a reference in from time to time.  Our next post will discuss the Nietzsche-an idea of Self-Overcoming, but move very quickly into something I believe has a little more “juice” for my own aesthetic drive — and that’s when we’ll talk about what it means to Do It With A Don!!!

So that’s where we’ll be going next, with a little discussion of “Finite and Infinite Games” on the way, which will be a key to further liberation.  Perhaps first you’d be interested in this little teaser from the delightful Alan Watts (animated by After Skool) which can act as a bit of inspiration (or propaganda) for the adventure you’re on.

Best wishes on your ongoing Adventure.

_{Note: this post previously appeared on my other blog at:
http://whiterabbithypnosis.com/blog/welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-doubt-uncertainty-and-possibility}

This is a blog about living an adventurous life. It is about the tricks and secrets that can help you do it. It is about taking sovereignty, and deciding to surpass our limits.

Before we can get onto the tricks and secrets, however, it’s a good idea to get a framework that makes all of this stuff useful, and that serves as a philosophical foundation for how I proceed with hypnosis, and all kinds of other amazing technologies.

Fellow hypnotist David Snyder often makes an observation that everything we do, we do because of a feeling : a feeling we want more of, or a feeling we want less of.

Our strategies for getting that feeling — the behaviors we exhibit or suppress — determine the outcome, but the desire and direction are set by the imagination. Every decision we make, it’s been said, is a prediction about the world we think we’ll be in when the results materialize.

The philosophical foundations of everything that follows begins with doubt, and questioning. So, in a sense, this begins not so much with establishing foundations, but more of a “clearing out” of things that might get in the way of those foundations. As the title of this post suggests, we start in a place that is pretty bleak and barren. Be encouraged: this bleak and barren place leads to Treasure.

So, it begins with doubt — and specifically with rattling the illusory sense of certainty we project on the world around us. When we know that we do not know everything, we’re free to change our strategy. Freedom begets possibility.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki

Let’s start with the dominant operating system in the west. Science is the measuring stick by which much of society decides what is real, true, etc., and it has dramatically shaped our approach to the world in general, and also dramatically shaped the world, itself.

We have this idea, as Rupert Sheldrake puts it, “that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in.” Sheldrake contests this idea, in his book Science Set Free (US title. Also published elsewhere as The Science Delusion), where he lists assumptions that are somewhat the “dogma” of current science. I imagine we’ll return to his assessment in future posts, but for now, let’s just deal with the essentials.

The common story of current science tells a tale of a world outside of our skin, captured by our sense organs, and finally rendered into coherent experience in our minds. This story rests upon some core assumptions — that there is a “truth” out there, that it is a “know-able” thing, and that the sense organs — combined with human reason — reveal that truth. Truth, in a sense, is considered to be the “product” of science.

And yet what does it mean to truly know? In the way we commonly use it, we mean that we are incapable of being mistaken about a given thing. I know I am sitting in this chair — I cannot be wrong. I have reasons for believing it — the sensory experience I am currently having, and the story I tell myself about what things “mean” when they emerge into that experience — these things tell me that this is real.

The world is a very strange place. The same science we use to map the limits of reality tells us another interesting story — that what we experience in our consciousness is barely a percentage of what our sense organs take in. (We’ll leave any discussion of the observer effect and quantum physics aside — They’re a bit outside of my wheelhouse, so to speak.)

To further complicate things, research has shown that eyewitness testimony is actually a very unreliable record of reality, and that memory is incredibly malleable — in fact, that any time we recall a thing, we often make minor (or major) alterations to it before “re-consolidating” it.

This can be an unsettling idea for some of us, and yet I assure you that good news is coming. Memory expert and researcher Elizabeth Loftus has a TED talk dealing with mistaken and false memories in greater detail, for those that would like to explore it further. Be aware that this video begins with the very brief non-graphic mention of a particular sexual assault case, for those who wish to avoid the topic.

Human perception is malleable, and yet we don’t tend to think it is. While eyewitness testimony has been repeatedly shown to be relatively unreliable, as mentioned above, it is among the most convincing for the jury.

So if we can’t be certain about the past, what about our present experience?

And so, right now, I seem to be in this chair. And at some points in the past, I’ve seemed to be in a chair, and it turns out I wasn’t — experiencing a dream, hypnagogia, or some other hallucination. Can you truly know a thing if you can also doubt it? What is the difference between knowledge and a belief?

Now, to many of us, this is an old story. Rene Descartes opened this can of worms in the early 1600s, but the seeds of this questioning are present even in the pre-Socratics. Likewise, the question of how much of this reality we can truly know has been played with even in our popular culture, being a central concepts in movies like Total Recall, The Truman Show, Inception, and The Matrix.

Some see uncertainty as a bad thing. I don’t. I find it incredibly liberating. Every thing or experience you want, that you have not yet had, is acquired or achieved by stepping into an uncertain future. What you pursue lies outside of the boundaries of your comfort zone — a comfort zone that is based on the foundations of past experience. And yet, to borrow a question from Richard Bandler, “Do you want your future to be squarely pointed at your past?”

It reminds me of a line I heard from author Scott Grossberg, that went something like this : Magicians don’t walk through the walls they see. They walk through the walls YOU see.

How do we know the boundaries of our cages, especially if we never test them?

When a person is asked how they know something, there really are only two justifications that are ever offered: (1) Because somebody else told them, and, presumably, that person provides truth; (2) They know it from there own experience.

There is a third accounting that is sometimes offered as well, although not really a justification per se — “I just know.”

So where does all of this leave us? What is to be taken from it?

I don’t have the perfect answer for that, but I have an idea I’d like to share. It starts with a brief summary: The quest for an objective truth — what can be known with certainty — is problematic. It has also been largely unsuccessful. (As I’ll extrapolate on later in our exploration, I humbly suggest that we’ve been picking the wrong target. First, let’s finish nailing this coffin.)

A philosophy professor of mine once shared an observation — That the philosopher Immanuel Kant made a last, valiant attempt to establish (rescue?) certainty from the dustbins in three works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment — Dealing with Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and Ethics, respectively. The works are amazing intellectual accomplishments, but they do not resolve the core of the problem, which is one of Epistemology – how we claim to know things.

And without going down the path of “a priori” knowledge or a “categorical imperative” — let’s just say that Kant’s exploration of metaphysics in Critique of Pure reasons leaves us in a quandary: there is the Noumena, or world “as it is” and there is the Phenomena, or world “as it appears” to the observer. This is similarly problematic, dividing things into appearances vs. reality. Kant’s approach does not suggest way to close this chasm, or otherwise determine what is “true” beyond the appearances we perceive.

Okay — so enough of this for now. What’s needed now is a “real” experience, that you can have, of seeing just how much our minds are shaping the so-called realities around us. In this case, it presents itself in an undeniable display — the McGurk Effect.

Check this out:

This demonstrates how a piece of visual information (the shape of a mouth) changes the way we perceive sound. Given that the sound is constant in the experiment, and one can alternate at will between the two visual representations, it’s a real-time example of our minds distorting our perception to match other models, at the expense of accuracy.

So, it’s important to pause here and mention this : I’m not against science. I think it does wonderful things. It’s just that the product of science is not “truth” — it is technology. It is “stuff” we use to alter the world around us, in the pursuit of that thing we mentioned all the way at the top : a feeling.

The world we experience is not reality itself — but a map of the reality that deletes, distorts, and generalizes information to maximize the function of the organism. Some of the most intriguing research out there suggests that, not only do we NOT experience the “real world” — seemingly, it is to our evolutionary advantage that we do not!! Donald Hoffman does a remarkable job at demonstrating this in his book, “The Case Against Reality,” as well as in several long-format interviews available on YouTube.

Reality Shmeality? What the heck is left?

Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Sure, I’m stealing a Matrix line and using it out of context, and yet — it’s fitting. If we can’t separate our “perceptions” from “reality” then it seems we’re left with perception. What we call “reality” is largely populated by the offspring of Imagination. And our greatest destiny is made largely possible by the stuff of Dream. The stories we tell ourselves, the maps we make — they are the Dream Things that inspire us to do mighty deeds.

In the absence of hard, undeniable certainties, there is comfort to be taken in the words from the wild mind of Robert Anton Wilson.

Even the title of his talk hints at it — The Universe contains a maybe — and the talk itself brings some much-needed levity to our predicament.

“I would like to propose the world would might go stark, staring, sane, if people used the word ‘maybe’ more often.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

If you’d like to watch the full talk, it is located here. Some people find some of Bob’s rants to contain offensive elements — he occupies a space somewhere between philosopher and a comedian.

Okay — It’s time to breathe. We have reached an oasis.

The good news is coming — Our next little piece begins with a monkey in a lecture hall.