A Philosophy of Playfulness

People are most characterized by their problems. When we think of personhood, we usually think in terms of where they come from, what tribes they belong to–their religion, their family, their work and so on–and the environment that they grew up in. This misses the mark. People are universal explainers. 

The evolution of a person is a problem space with a trajectory that is sometimes chaotic, or if one is fortunate, one can grow peacefully throughout life. A person can solve their problems by discovering one of an infinite number of solutions, but there are no guarantees. Therefore, whether we progress, stagnate, or regress is due to what we do in the face of our problems.

This universal capacity to solve any problem is the fundamental aspect that makes us more significant than every other animal on Earth. We reshape our world because we understand the hidden structure of nature and exploit its laws to our benefit. And yet, sitting on our elated perch on the shoulders of giants, we have demeaned this status as tiresome to embody.

We are biological beings, but we are not defined by our biological evolution. We are not just monkeys toiling away with our tools. Our ongoing cultural evolution entails a deep playfulness that aids our creation of a better world. The role of play in progress is deeply unvalued in life. We take that play benefits the artist for granted, but we fail to see how it can help the scientist, engineer, or mechanic.

My earliest memories are of assembling Legos. I refused to follow the instructions and instead created spaceships from a set initially designed for a car. I am a product of Western values. Some of my heroes were Bart Simpson and the band Rage Against the Machine. I wouldn’t explicitly connect the values of individualism and disobedience baked into pop culture to their Enlightenment roots until much later, but the seeds had been planted by playfulness.

Explanatory universality is the lifeblood of people. We are inevitably faced with choices of how to live, and these constitute our problem situation. The explanations we create through guesswork and criticism have no limits(outside laws of physics) because we are a product of nature, and nature has no fundamental bounds on how much we can understand in principle. 

The alternative and pessimistic view is that we are stuck in a parochial bubble of understanding that can never be popped. This is tantamount to believing in the supernatural, essentially that a phenomenon in reality exists that we can not grasp with our tools of reason. In The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch explained, “Denying that some regularity in nature has an explanation is effectively the same as believing in the supernatural – saying, ‘That’s not conjuring, it’s actual magic.’”. The gap is ignorance, and we leap not with faith, but by building bridges composed of explanations.

Nor are there limits to the tools we can create to augment our intelligence. Ever since we invented writing with smudges of pigment on caves, we have supplanted our ability to extend our biological memory of processing the world. Today, we have extended our toolkit to supercomputers and smartphones, furthering our ability to process information. 

When we think of science and philosophy, we too easily forget how crucial the element of play is. We are not just social animals—we are playful creators. We are artists and scientists from birth. We take myths and stories, and then we put together theoretical structures out of the pieces. 

A person’s ever-evolving problem situation is a painting on one’s canvas of life. The evolution of a person has zero limitations outside the laws of physics. As David Deutsch has argued: 

“...if the ancient Athenians had known antibiotics or just about hygiene, they could have prevented the plague that contributed to the fall of their society, of their nascent optimist society. If they had, then as Carl Sagan speculated, we might now be at the stars and technology would be regulating trivialities like the planetary climate as automatically as it's now regulating the temperature in this room. We know that's possible because of a momentous dichotomy that follows directly from the rejection of the supernatural, namely, every transformation of physical systems that is not forbidden by laws of physics is achievable given the right knowledge, and hence the rational attitude to the future is what I call optimism — the principle of optimism, namely that: all evils are caused by lack of knowledge.”

We can scale down the same argument to an individual level and reject the stance that you should slow down and accept your fate. I flirted with a formal meditation practice for over a year, attempting to resist the chaos of life. I was wrong. I lacked an attitude of responsibility toward the problems I had on my plate. I now have the attitude to seek out creative solutions to my problems. I embrace that life is chaotic but that solutions are out there, and that incorporating them is an act of creative play. The world is not against me—it is a playground full of elegant wonders and abundance. 

There is more to life than thinking you are hardstuck at an unbeatable level in some part of the simulation. This is pessimistic religious thinking built on sand. We have the power to choose the direction of our life. Playfulness and freedom of choice emerge from our creative ability to solve problems. Understanding this liberating idea makes life like a game where you are the hero and the world-builder.

Unsurprisingly, some of the best inventors of our age like Elon Musk grew up playing video games and then learned how to design and program them. It’s one thing to master a set of rules in a game; it’s another to realize that you can become the game-maker. 

The leading rival explanation for making progress involves forcing yourself through something that you don’t enjoy to get you to some imagined end state. We consider a disciplined person to be hard-working, committed, and showing self-control, and we deem this as desirable, but this is wrong. We can spend a lifetime working towards an end state, and only realize once we are there that the path was wrong and the end state was a fantasy. The most maintainable attitude is removing force, especially inner coercion like discipline from our worldview. Peacefully aligning oneself to reasoned values requires no coercion; it only requires an understanding of optimism.

When one understands they are the ultimate creator, life becomes infinitely more malleable. Bits and atoms become our Lego blocks, and the rules and dynamics we play by become more open-ended than the most expansive video game.

This form of optimism is distinct from psychological woo and from blind optimism, which asserts that solutions will automatically emerge. Knowledge is not guaranteed—it requires focus, a rejection of evasion, and an attitude of facing problems head-on with a playful attitude.

The principle of optimism, play, and our explanatory universality together cements the idea that we are an entirely different entity than every other living being. On these grounds alone, we can throw away evolutionary psychology. We have evolved by natural selection, but we underwent a phase change, a jump to universality. As Jacob Bronowski has masterfully articulated in his Ascent of Man series, we have elevated from mere features of the landscape to shapers of the landscape. From atoms and ideas, we are now free to imagine and build extraordinary lives.

Thanks to Logan for the help on this.