Redux: I’d like to game an idea entering a mind
[ by Charles Cameron — another angle on the whole idea of qualitative node-&-edge graphs for concept mapping ]
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Image of a virus letting its DNA loose in a cell, from the Bjork app-game-song
The other day I found myself re-reading a comment I’d made on Zen’s post The Games People Play back in January 2008, which I’d been searching for in the back of my mind for months — too attic-like and cobwebbed, probably not the best place to look for it. In any case, now I’ve found it I’ve dusted it off and offer it here for your consideration:
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Ideas can be infectious. We know this, and thus we can explore the spread of ideas using models drawn from epidemiology, an approach which Malcolm Gladwell takes in his book Tipping Point. Ideas can also be viewed as existing in an ecosystem, and thus what we know of genetics can be applied to them, as Dawkins suggested in coining the term "meme". Having said that, I’d still like to game an idea entering a mind.
Specifically, I would like to game the way in which the idea that constitutes "martyrdom" (shahada) in an al-Qaida mind enters a mind that’s primed with the ideas of Tablighi Jamaat, for instance, and once it’s "in," conforms the idea of "obligation" (fard) that’s already present in TJ’s non-violent and apolitical version into the al-Q sense of the word — that "to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it"… I’m thinking of something along the lines of the kind of research that allows someone to write, describing the John Cunningham virus (JCV):
the JC virus enters the central nervous system by fastening itself to the 5HT2AR receptor for serotonin, which is found on the surface of glial cells. When this receptor for serotonin is triggered, it opens the pathway that allows the virus to enter the cell.
The thing is, we can manage a very brief verbal sketch of how an idea enters a mind and becomes part of a person’s "thinking" — and we can model in some detail the way that an idea spreads through a population — but we’re not very good at modeling, or gaming, thought processes. And from my POV, that’s the most fascinating challenge of all.
My question is: what kind of game should this be, how do we set up the board, what markers shall we have for ideas or parts of ideas and for views or congregations of ideas, what rules do we need to use in combining them, etc — how do we get as close to a mental conversation as humanly possible?
I happen to think that meditators will have quite a bit to teach us here, that the Tibetans may have a better vantage point than we as a culture do… because they’ve been watching the mind, and in particular watching its various coiled springs uncoil, and putting the process into words, for longer than we have. But it will take a whole new series of aha!s to really figure this out.
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The result wouldn’t look like the image at the top of this post — it might look more like a PERT chart, but with sequences of ideas rather than actions. And it would be based on narratives, not theories. Above all, it would be multi-voiced, polyphonic, fluid — like that diagram from Edward Tufte about the Ocean of Stories:
That’s it — what say you all?
The Bjork Virus video can be found here, the Virus app-game-song can apparently be downloaded here.
July 9th, 2013 at 6:47 pm
This is the first time I have seen the diagram from Edward Tufte, and it is pretty impressive.
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I think the problem (maybe one problem) with the game you seek is that it has at least 3 domains, and, according to Howard Bloom, most humans are only able to comprehen 2, at the most.
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First you have the physics of the game, which is really just structure. This is what you have said that you excel at, and is the most important part of all observations.
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Structure tells the gamers if the sum of all the forces acting against the structure is zero (there is no movement) or not (movement). If there is movement, then game can begin.
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Then you have the second domain called culture that takes the advantages (in a process that Bloom calls logic) in which gamers they “see” and create a substance )mass) that fits inside the structure observed.
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The viruses in the video seem very equipt to handle the logic of the game. What viruses “see” is each other, and when there is enough of them in the same environment the “game” can begin.
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Then you have the domain called ethics. This is simply that which you “get” out of the game. It’s a very important domain, because, if you don’t get anything out of the game, without ethics, there really isn’t any point in playing.
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Perhaps ethics is more important for the young than the old, because the young want to know why waste my time playing this game, if I don’t get nothing out of it, and the old simply are glad to be still playing 🙂
July 10th, 2013 at 2:44 am
Hi Larry:
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Thanks. My own way into this is via Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, originally conceived by Hesse as an imagined conversation between great thinkers of different centuries, and later translated by him into a game of intersecting and overlapping ideas. My own translation of that fictitious game into HipBone, Games and their development into the games family called Sembl by Cath Sryles, suggest to me the kinds of linkage that my own personal mapping of such things would look for, and my links are qualitative and anecdotal rather than quantitative, and the balance of forces that I see accordingly is aesthetic rather than numerical. I imagine there are many other possible approaches, and I’ll be interested to see them — but that would be mine,
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I hope to follow this post up with one drawing on Peter Neumann’s article The trouble with radicalization, currently behind a paywall. I thi nk it will provide grounding and grist for me to dig into what I’m thinking of in much greater depth and detail.
July 10th, 2013 at 5:42 pm
I guess you could call me a qualitative, only in reverse.
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There was no “game” I could bring to the web, so I in a way, I tried to make my self un-welcomed as possible. When I started blogging, which is really just a game, I thought if I could become an expert at just any little thing on the web, I could attract followers.
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This soon turned into a disaster as I crossed paths with Mark at Zenpundit.
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We got into a debate about implicit and explicit rule-sets, and, after taking a good look at myself, I knew there was just too much out there to become an expert at anything. While I believe I “won”, with, to paraphrase: implicit rules never change, but explicit (written) do. It was a small win, knowing so little about it as I do, and what I have learned about it since then.
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So I set about trying to attract as few, but important, links as possible.
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As we have ended in the same position in the environment we are observing at this moment, I guess my strategy worked about as good as your’s did, if you are talking about gaming, and I am really as isolated as I think I am 🙂
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Does the title of this post mean what I think it means? I think it means you want to game the input (“an idea entering the mind”) instead of output (that which has formed domains in the mind). The input is really just moving through the process (OODA loop), and doesn’t have anything to do with domains. As it gets input, the brain processes it into domains, which later ideas can shoot it out as an Action.
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So normally you want to change the Act that comes out, through a environment with/without fear. Corporations have been doing it for years in Observation.
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As a qual, you probably want to do it in Orientation. As you are Oriented on the Right, I suppose you need someone on the Left to play your game?
July 10th, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Ha!
I am? I’m actually oriented to the Light as far as I can arrange things, which doesn’t seem to map Left or Right — but somehow has friends in both camps.
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I’ll probably give you & all a better fix on my thinking in an upcoming post…