GBG PLAYERS
BY DEFINITION

From: h

k, Mark, Steve, Friends and Players:

k writes in part:

I feel that all this has some relevance to attempts to play a GBG, tho', and especially one that seeks to combine art and science.

I very much agree ... and games which seek to combine them are, as I pointed out in my own post, games of a sort which Hesse himself seems to have envisioned . . .

In physics it's the Noethers, Curies, Einsteins, Newtons, who's names get into the books, and only after their work has been very carefully scrutinised over a long period. This points out the crucial difference between hard and soft subjects.

It's the Victor Turners and Mary Douglasses whose names get into the soft science books, too -- and only after their work has been very carefully scrutinized: but the scrutiny is a bit different, since they are proposing hypotheses (liminality, ritual purity) rather than proofs, and the proof of the pudding is in the degree of illumination their hypotheses cast on their subject matter.

I'm taking anthropology as my example here because I have at least nominally professed it and have both some knowledge of and some respect for the field.

In poetry, which I also profess though in a less academic sense, it's the Yeatses whose names go in the books... and we should also remember the distinction between poetry as a cumulative discipline and physics as a discipline of progressive refinement (i.e., Homer is still valid as poetry after Dante and Yeats, while Newton is in a real sense corrected by Einstein).

Most results just get amalgamated into physics (in this example), so a GBG move incorporating some physics is just going to be a statement of some fact or other, and worse still, its connections with other facts need only be looked up! I doubt many of us would find such a game very appetizing.

No indeed.

To find new and original connections with bits of physics is, well, that's *physics*, and neither I nor any but a few professional physicists are entitled (by virtue of skill, knowledge and training) to perform that activity.

But that's finding

new and original connections *between* bits of physics, surely, not *with* them?

I can imagine a game played by two astrophysicists (the two Chandrasekhar taught in that astonishing two-man class in Chicago, for instance, where the entire class went on to win Nobel Prizes as their teacher had done before them) which would generate analogies between bits of physics that were themselves brilliant...

It's the hallmark of truly great scientists (and engineers) that they are able to reason *correctly* by analogy; but proof by analogy is fraud, and they must always go back and fill in the details later.

and the discussion of links in such a double astrophysicist game would be the place where, precisely, the going back and filling in the details would take place...

GBG players are not in a position to do this.

and such a game would by definition have players adequate to this task.

On the other hand,
I suspect that the sorts of multidisciplinary games that Hesse had in mind would be those in which links would be made, say, *between* an idea in physics and an idea in philosophy or anthropology or poetry or music ...

As I wrote to this list on Mon, 7 Apr 1997:

GBG: Three Dimensions

When two ideas can be linked by similarity of some kind, it's as though an arch is built between them.

When the two ideas are not too far apart

For example: isn't an arch rather like a bridge? the arch (or bridge) doesn't have to be very high to span them.

But when the two ideas are [seemingly] very far apart

For example: as far apart as subatomic physics and mahayana buddhism it takes a high arch to bring them together For example: matter and energy in physics may compare with form and emptiness in buddhism so that where the mahayana sutra (scriptures) reads form is emptiness, emptiness form, yet form is form, emptiness is emptiness, the physicist might say matter is energy, energy matter, yet matter is matter, energy is energy...

An examination of the way these two statements have validity in their appropriate realms -- in other words a detailed comparison not only between these paradoxes but also between the strategies deemed appropriate and inappropriate for explaining them in the mahayana and physics communities -- might well lead in fact to some illumination of one field by the other, though as a game move their juxtaposition might be aesthetically pleasing (read, beautiful) without casting such illumination...

Which is to say that a game move might be valid if it merely juxtaposed a scientific with a poetic utterance (as in Eddington's juxtaposition of a hydrodynamic equation for ocean waves and a poet's description of them), the link in such cases being one of common topic rather than analogy.

To my mind, this kind of link makes for a GBG style which is impressionistic by comparison with more strictly analogical links, and opens up a fascinating topic:

How many styles of GBG?

• classical?
• baroque?
• romantic?
• impressionist?

can we conceive, and do we in fact have examples of each that we can cite?

Hesse's own distinction between formal and psychological games should presumably stand at the opening of such a discussion:

In the formal Game the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game, out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical, and other elements, as dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity and harmony as possible. In the psychological Game, on the other hand, the object was to create unity and harmony, cosmic roundedness and perfection, not so much in the choice, arrangement, interweaving, association, and contrast of the contents as in the meditation which followed every stage of the Game. All the stress was placed on this meditation. Such a psychological - or to use Knecht's word, pedagogical - Game did not display perfection to the outward eye. Rather, it guided the player, by means of its succession of precisely prescribed meditations, toward experiencing perfection and divinity.

Back to k's post:

Personally, I get very annoyed, reduced to incoherent rage in fact, when I see analogic reasoning alone getting applied to terms like space, energy, dimension, especially when words like higher, through, over, beyond, extra get brought to the party. This simply is not valid (and I'm going to have to go have a little lie down now).

You have my sympathy, k. A mahayanist might invite you to use the discriminating sword of that rage to protect us all from games invoking scientific matters without sufficient scientific understanding .

In contrast, within the humanist fields it *is* enough, in a sense, to just have an idea; to combine ideas according to personal, analogic connections is enough by itself.

Not so: see my examples of Victor Turner and Mary Douglas above...

Not so elsewhere. In this way the GBG seems to go directly to the root of the divide between the two cultures.

A very interesting suggestion: yes, I think one of the virtues of games played by, say, a scientist with humanistic interests and a humanist with an appreciation of the sciences would, precisely, be the tendency of such games to lay bare the philosophical underpinnings of the divide.

But I should also note that the divide itself can be questioned, and that Elizabeth Sewell in The Orphic Voice (Yale, 1960) has made a profound argument for viewing poetry and biology as complementary aspects of a single (taxonomic) discipline (as some people, Hesse I think among them, view music and math as complementary)...

In the post k is responds:

we as players should welcome *both* the clarifications of fact offered by the sciences, and the clarifications of psyche offered by the poets...

and k commented:

Perhaps so, but we should also not ignore the deep qualitative differences betwen them.

Pecisely why I posted as I did ...

I, k, would like to see the Game played in a way which honors the root systems of both sides of an analogy. I recall hearing Murray Gell-Mann talking about the need for educating (at places like CalTech) a *bunch* of bridge-makers whose analogies would typically bridge between two specialist disciplines, the idea being that they would need to work as a team with specialists in each of the two disciplines, to verify the groundedness of their analogies in the territories at either end of a given bridge. I hear this suggestion as coming pretty close to advocating the comprehensivist education that Mark's Waldzell Game is all about ... though Mark hopes, I think, for comprehensivists who are sufficiently assured in *both* the bridged disciplines to constitute such a team in and of themselves...

Any hope, Steve, that as an astrophysicist with a keen appreciation for analogical thinking, you might like to join us in this thread? Mark?

playable variants on
Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game