XplanaZine

There is an increasing influx of new gadgets in the market all the time. Well, I like gadgets. They are useful, fun, interesting, they help me to learn and also help me in my work. I can be more efficient, more creative; in other words they are part of my life. Many people call them toys and the appellation is accompanied with either an affectionate smile, or a smirk, or a glimmering desire in their eye, or even a cold dismissive stare. I understand why they call them toys but I never saw them that way. I just never categorize them. Giving them a single label would be so unfair for they touch too many areas of life. But attaching many labels is inconvenient because it would require an intricate cross-indexing method. Nevertheless, the toy label itself inspires several philosophical thoughts.
Wittgenstein believed there is nothing that all games have in common. For example, we can’t find one or more properties they all share to make us say whether something is a game. What do chess games, card games, or ball games have in common? There is a family resemblance, Wittgenstein claims. Different games are related to one another by common characteristics. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions that make us place an item under the game category.
I am not the only one who doesn’t embrace this interesting view. After all, most of the time, in spite of the fact that I know several families, I can’t know ahead of time if a new person I meet belongs to one of them - unless of course someone informs me about it. In contrast, I am quite confident I can call an activity a game without prior knowledge of this game. How do I know that it belongs to the family of games? It may have some common characteristics with another game I know, but it may also have common characteristics with some other activity I know about which is not a game. How do I know which characteristics are relevant?
Then I thought that perhaps we use the word for (primarily entertaining) activities that produce nothing of an apparent survival value. (Apart from the fact that games enable professional players to make a living). However, I believe that the prevailing view, which can be also detected in our natural languages, is that our human race would not be extinct if we all stopped playing games. Other things could be also considered to have no strict survival value, for example, singing, painting, watching tv, but they fall under different categories, as, self expression or creative expression, relaxation, etc., but these are treated and valued differently.
It is this belief about the survival value of games that I would like to focus on and explore here, and not whether things belonging to the same category have something in common. Similarly and via their association with games, toys are believed to have no survival (pragmatic) value. Games and toys are highly desirable because they bring joy. After all, no one plays a game to feel bad. And yet, in the hierarchy of values they are only second-class citizens, second to the heavy-duty precedence of our survival. We can see how the words ‘toy’ and ‘game’ are used to demote, or sometimes even ridicule, an activity or person in the appropriate occasion. We hear people say, ’stop playing games’, ‘I am (just) toying with the idea’, ‘this is not a toy’, ‘I have no time for games’, etc.
It is probably through their unfortunate association with children that games and toys earn their relatively lower status. Children not only love to play but it is impossible to imagine a normal child who doesn’t play feverishly as a full time ‘job’. Later on, their jobs replace their games. So, how can the predecessor of our labor have no pragmatic value, and in some cases even indicate something unfit for sensible, adults? Could it be that this is just a reminder of responsibility for grown ups? But lack of responsibility is never part of any game, whether it’s a child’s game or not.
Ah, but then it could be the specific responsibility of earning a living, because this is what children don’t have. So, in a very confused and fuzzy way the absence of earning a living taints the universal value of everything else children do (which may be still good for them, but for them alone). Adults are encouraged to have as few similarities as possible with children except for those very basic human functions that can’t be helped. Adults must eat too but they can get by without toys. It is a confused and unfair association. It is similar to other confused associations we humans make. A more well know example is the halo effect. Studies show that a person who exhibits a good trait (say beauty) is believed to score high on other unrelated areas as well (for example intelligence). It is the same type of confusion (rather like an ‘unhalo’ effect) that instills the belief that since children don’t survive on their own then most of their other behavioral traits and preferences have no pragmatic value. But it simply doesn’t follow. It could be true, but if we already assumed it is with no proof then we’ll never know if other, independent reasons make it really true.
Today, in order to sell technology we must sell functionality. It convinces most people, sensible people. Being sensible is a great thing but it also presupposes having a good sense of everything, which in turn requires a commitment to improving it in time, that is, a commitment to becoming more conscious of existing fallacies and to making amendments.
In the computer world we need increasingly better software. But there is always a limit to how much a program can improve if everything else remains the same. To transcend this limitation we must improve the hardware and the operating system. This is obvious to those who are in the business but the general principle is applicable in other areas.
Unfortunately, most people when they think about improvement in the abstract they perceive it as a linear, upward movement. It is like adding one more pebble, one more inch. But this straightforward movement is bound to reach a limit, a dead end. But it doesn’t have to. One can go back and improve the foundation and all of a sudden the limit on the other end is pushed further out. If we want a taller building we also build a more solid foundation, we can’t just keep on adding floors on the same old foundation. The human realm has many foundations including rationality. Rationality is a capacity that we all have. So how does one improve a capacity? Well, it’s not the capacity in the abstract we improve but the way we apply our rational powers to a larger number of objects, ideas and their relations and thus we create a better foundation. In this way we also transcend our limitations for visible achievements on the other end.
For example, when I’m about to buy a new gadget I am prompted to be rational and pragmatic. I hear others and/or my own silent voice ask: “Do you really need this?” Well, let me put it this way, if I just needed food and shelter I would go live in a cave. Or, even better, I could try to find ways to devolve. I don’t need gadgets to glorify my cave, or just to make it more comfortable, or just to gain an advantage over who knows what. I need them to know more about what this world can do, I’m referring to both the human mind and ingenuity and the natural world. I need them to know more about myself and how to transcend my own definition. I need to buy them in order to give their makers the opportunity to explore the same principles. I also need art and better movies and all kinds of things I see in a similar light and that define me as something other than a member of a limited scientific taxonomy, let’s say, a Homosapiens.
Functionality, use, pragmatism, games, toys, etc., are inherent aspects of our thinking and being. But their meanings should evolve if we are to evolve. And, evolution is neither optional nor accidental, it is existence. So, in the end, it is about survival but in a more ‘evolved’ sense that Sisyphus wasn’t able to conceive.