So I was reading through the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, online of course, thinking about how much it’s sucked recently in comparison to the not so distant past. Being how I am, it kind of blurred together, along with random other texts I’ve read, and this article is the result of that. This article is about what I think of gaming culture. Or maybe it’s about the zeitgeist. Hell if I know, there’s certainly no reason it can’t be about both.
Anyways, I started off reading this shit and managed to go from start to finish without my brain engaging to pick it apart, as it normally does. I think that was mostly because I wasn’t paying attention though. It felt like a delayed reaction almost, like a blow that takes a moment to register, because as soon as the last sentence had filtered through my mind a number of confusions arose. “Is the proposed model actually different from prevalent folk conceptions about behavior, or does it just rename them in a way that sounds novel?”, “How does the fact we are made of component thought processes somehow contradict with a permament self?”, and “why are permanency and maturity given such de-facto association with each other?”
I guess as “a gamer” the idea that impulsivity and immediacy are tied so offhandedly to bad things by this model is threatening. Mostly though, the idea of different selves over time generates a number of extremely intriguing curiosities which I now feel the need to play around with. The article mentions Multiple Personality Disorders as an extreme form of what, it contends, is the universal manner in which the human brain functions. I remember not to long ago in “Intro to Psych” when the teacher, perhaps bored with the elementary nature of the curriculum, went off on a tangent about legal precedent. Apparently there was a case where two teens had been having sex in a car when one of them turned out to be, so we heard, more than one teen. Suddenly Ms. Not-always-home woke up right in the middle of something she hadn’t remembered getting herself into! So she freaked out and ran down the streets yelling rape. Since she wasn’t showing any superficial signs of madness, the man was promptly arrested and the case was set to go to court. Then the bombshell came and the trial turned into a regular quagmire of philosophical and legal ideas. Ultimately the judge just said “no” and the case was simply dismissed.
Now, this is rather unfortunate, because a precedent such as that would have given us some sort of logically formulated position to inspect, to turn over and to either accept or refute. It would have given us a starting place for our inspection of the article in question. Instead we just have the same question the trial itself posed, and we have to decide for ourselves whether or not to treat it rhetorically. If we accept that different selves exist within a single body, and deny that they comprise a singular self, what does that do for the notion of personal responsibility?
Now, being the smarmy world-upsetting sort that I am, I have chosen not to treat such a question as rhetorical. Indeed I remember raising it in response to another text, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market. Rothbard contended that any argument about the moral supremacy of investment (as opposed to expenditure) had to contend with the premium placed on immediate consumption. He contended that the soundness of investment depended upon individual and subjective time-preference. Some people might like one hamburger today more than they would like two hamburgers tomorrow.
“Question” I thought “what if someone decides they are willing to invest 20 years of their life and labor, effectively being an indentured servent, in the promise of some grand amount of money. Then, 15 years into it they change their mind. What if 15 years is enough time for them to become a different person [end italic text]”? Under Rothbard, a contract is a matter of personal arbitration, not subject to third party intervention or regulation.* What if the contract says that walking away after 15 years voids all obligations and debts on the part of the employer? What if the contract says walking away after 15 years mandates death? Can we throw out the contract on the basis that the person on trial is a different person from the one that signed the contract?
My answer was no, simply because shortening the time period enough otherwise makes a yes absurd, and without any clear delineation of significance between “larger” and “smaller” time periods I couldn’t reasonably approve of the exception. Now this speculative mess of an article comes along, taking it to the other extreme. I think now that not only does this other extreme seem unpalatable to me, but perhaps it thinks a bit too much of what it can even establish. So naturally I have to ride out and meet its pretentiousness with some of my own.
Dwelling on that business, I stumbled into my next article, a piece by none other than the Great White Gay Hero of the Blogosphere himself, Andrew Sullivan. It might just be that I’m very suggestable, but this article seemed to fit right into and promptly intensify my confusion with the previous article. Here is Sullivan, explaining how Blogging is an instantaneous medium, one which cannot be entered into with a mind for the long-term, one which the writer impulsively flows into. Yet, he argues, legitimate. Subject to greater scrutity than traditional media forms. Now while my personal biases, which are awesome, caused me to see a great deal of stupid in what he wrote, most of it made sense. Blogging is similar in format to Dialogue. Print media is similar in format to Lecture or text. The former is more immediate, impulsive, and impermanent than the latter. Would it be spoken of badly by the writer of the first article?
The writer of the article, along with some professional economists I’ve never heard of apparently, condones government intervention on the basis that “self-binding” would be more efficient if the government did it. I guess that flows pretty nicely actually, since if you restrict what “you” can do in the future on the basis that in the future it won’t be “you”, why shouldn’t the government be able to restrict the future Not-You. Both cases are instances of one person controlling a seperate one. My discomfort continues.
Mostly I’m just offended by the notion that our apparent virtuous traits; concentration, focus, complex decision making; are tied to long-term selves rather than short term selves. As a gamer, a blogger, an athlete, as all of those things and more it makes little sense. And I’m not even a very good any-of-those-things. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure concentration and focus can exist in a very profound sense in the short term, and that decision making can occupy a few seconds just as easily as it can occupy an hour or a day. Perhaps the short-term self can be developed just as much as the long-term self? How else to explain how an athlete can within a handful of seconds take signals from teammates, formulate a strategy, implement it, and implement it well, with sound technique? How many decisions go into this process? Where do the split-second spatial recognition and planning skills a master of Tetris demonstrate come from? How do I write these words in english rather than gibberish?
I think a better and more simplistic hypothesis would be: shit takes practice. I like dialog. I like games. I like blogging. The important thing though, is that in all of them there is room for improvement despite their short term nature.
I had a media professor who told us an anecdote once. “The western world” he said “has moved from one that told its stories impermanently, by lecture, and then by dialog, to one which found permanency in its stories in the written word, and then, with the birth of the internet, back to one of dialog”. This was grand irony to him. I suspect he considered the technological advancement to correspond to a cultural step backward.
I consider that bias foolish. Mine is much better. There are so many occasions on which I wish professionals had been trained in dialogue rather than in reflection, because there are just as many occasions on which their supposed reflection has revealed folly. Thinking longer is not always thinking better. Not when you use it as an excuse to never come to rest at a conclusion. Not when a moment of reflection turns into an infinity of reflection.
Sullivan said something else. He said that blogging was an inherently post-modern medium, because of its impermanency and propensity for exposing the error in the thinking of writers. I thought this was his error. Karl Popper wrote that it was the duty of all thinkers to seek out their errors. He also wrote that it was the duty of all thinkers to defend their positions as long as they appeared free of error. Everyone can be wrong, this isn’t unique to people who make decisions quickly. The important thing is that you actually make decisions, because otherwise I don’t think you ever become good at it. A person that takes an infinite period of time to conclude something, is a person that can never learn.
Discipline comes not from never committing to anything, or from committing to things only for some arbitrary period of time, but from committing to something for exactly as long as that something makes sense. If things always stop making sense to you at some point, or if everything always makes sense forever, then you just need more practice.
– Kilroy
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*(subject to third party enforcement in accordance with the terms of the contract, yes, but that’s something else altogether).
Infinity Injun no Chousenjou 