Chapter Outline: Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena

This is a preliminary outline for my current book project (title above).

Introduction: The Problem of Homo Economicus

The social institutions of the Western world have become “shrink-wrapped” around the requirements and capabilities of Homo economicus, economic man. That brought us the Industrial Revolution and thereby our prosperity. And it has brought us the AI technology that has swept the internet in the last two-and-a-half years. It has the potential for large scale economic disruption, leaving many people without jobs, and in despair despite the possibility that some form of Universal Basic Income will make it possible for them to live. Why despair? Because in a world shaped to the needs of Homo economicus, life’s meaning is anchored to one’s job. Jobless have no meaning in this world. Further, while Homo economicus has brought us the current regime of AI-as-deep-learning, it cannot take us beyond that. Going beyond will require new architectures and they only way to discover them is to conduct “blue sky” no holds basic research in Ludic mode. Now that Homo economicus is commandeering all resources for its own projects, there will be few resources available to move beyond.

Part 1: Basic Concepts 

Chapter 1: The Four Arenas

The universe has seen three Arenas (as I call them) so far: 1) The First Arena, inanimate matter. 2) The Second Arena, the world of living things (biosphere). 3) The Third Arena, human culture. We are now standing on the brink of the Fourth Arena in which, through the aid and support of artificial intelligences, Meaning will become a constitutive principle in the universe.

I have sketched this out in this article at 3 Quarks Daily: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted.

Chapter 2: Complexity

In this chapter and the next I begin to lay out some basic conceptual equipment, making the point that complexity is different from complicated. Complication is about lots of stuff all mixed together. Complexity is about the nature of stuff, about how simple processes and rules can yield elaborate structures through repetition and amplification. A complex world is full of “lumpiness,” things with odd shapes and so is different from a “smooth” world of simple things that grade into one another (think of circles and ovals). I’ve sketched this 3 Quarks article: World, Mind, Learnability, Large Language Models, and the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos.

Moreover, important and interesting resources and concepts and distributed in an irregular manner. Think of how various mineral resources are distributed over the earth, e.g. gold, oil, or natural medicines. You have to go prospecting for them, with no clear map of where they are or certainty that you will find anything. Good ideas, whether for works of art or practical inventions are like that as well. I lay these ideas out, with illustrations, in this working paper: What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world.

Chapter 3: Self-Organization and Evolution

Building on the previous chapter I develop the idea of self-organization, starting with a very simple example: You put a drop or two of black ink into a tumbler of water. The ink diffuses through the water in an irregular way, but over time the ink particles form into vertical currents circulating in adjacent cells. Why? Because the tumbler was exposed to the sun and the ink particle picked up energy from it. (For images, see photographs in A Primer on Self-Organization).

Building on that basic example I can discuss the origins of life and its evolutionary elaboration of every more complex ecosystems and species (see A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity for some background concepts). From there we move to cultural evolution and Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes. Robert De Vany’s work on Hollywood movies shows how the film world is a self-organizing evolutionary system (blog post: Chaos in the Movie Biz: A Review of Hollywood Economics).

Part 2: The Mind Orders the World

Chapter 4: Animal, Vegetable, of Mineral: Patterns and Ontology

I introduce the idea of conceptual ontology by with the game of Twenty Questions. One person, the Answerer, chooses something that the others, the Questioners must guess. A typical variant is known as “animal, vegetable, or mineral”. Why? Because the Answerer starts by telling the Questioners that the object belongs to one of those three categories. Those categories are critical points in our conceptual ontology, the inventory of the kinds of things that exist in the world.

From there we examine the difference between “salt” and “sodium chloride.” Physically they are the same substance. But “salt” can be characterized by its taste and appearance while “sodium chloride” is an abstract concept about the physical world that is defined in terms of atoms, subatomic particles, and covalent bonds, concepts that didn’t exist until the 19th century. These ideas belong to different regions of our conceptual ontology.

The idea of conceptual ontology is completely general. Thus fairy tales and science fiction stories belong to different conceptual ontologies, and those are different from the conceptual ontology in which, for example, the news is reported. Fairy tales contain fairies, wizards, and magical objects of all kinds, none of which exist either in the real world or in science fiction. Science fiction stories contain faster-than-light travel to other galaxies, alien species, intelligent robots, none of which exist either in fairy tales or the real world (though we’re working on intelligent robots).

I use ChatGPT to illustrate these concepts in the way it tells stories. Above all, it demands ontological consistency among stories. For example, in one case it refused to add a robot named Gort to a story set in a fairy-tale world while in another case it refused to let a colorless green idea by the protagonist in a story because such things are not appropriate for that role. Using these and other example I show that stories set in very different worlds, with different conceptual ontologies, can nonetheless exhibit the same pattern of events.

These examples are based on experiments I report in this paper: ChatGPT tells stories.

Chapter 5: Lust in Action, Patterns West and East

Now we take the conceptual equipment we have built up and use it to create a fuller picture of the human condition using Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit.” The poem depicts this pattern:

• Lust begins in longing.
• The act itself is framed by shame, fury, and a sense of betrayal.
• The result is both the heaven of fulfillment and the hell of consequence.

I use Old School symbolic AI from the 1970s, the body of technique that precedes the current regime, to show that, against all appearances, I show that the poem exhibits a traditional Christian patter, the Fortunate Fall (felix culpa), which holds that man had to fall from innocence so that, through God’s grace, man could attain a higher level of spiritual discernment.

I then present the sonnet to ChatGPT and ask it to produce an esoteric reading in terms derived from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It does so, using the concept of Maya, the trap of worldly attachment, and samsara, the cycle of desire and suffering. The sonnet itself talks on the role of a koan, a paradoxical statement that tricks the reader into awareness and detachment.

In this process I will have demonstrated two things:

1. Old School symbolic AI, which is presumed to be made obsolete by the machine learning technology we examined in the previous chapter (ChatGPT), can serve as a useful way of thinking about the otherwise opaque structure that is latent in large language models (LLMs).

2. The presumably culturally specific Christian pattern of the Fortunate Fall does in fact have the same form as patterns that have arising in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Finally, this discussion sets the stage for Chapter 7’s of Homo economicus, economic man, which sees little value in the arts. If so, why have they been so important in all societies?

Part 3: The Mind Evolving in History 

Chapter 6: Cognitive Ranks

Cultural evolution is more than the accumulation of ideas, artefacts, and behaviors. It also involves basic cognitive architectures. Rank 1 cultures are built on an architecture enabled by the evolution of speech. Such architectures are characteristic of preliterate peoples living in hunting and gathering bands or small villages. Rank 2 architectures are based on writing and enabled the develop ancient civilizations with walled cities and extensive cultivation of the land. Rank 3 cultures emerged in Europe when mathematics from the East, India in particular, were transmitted to Europe by the Arabs and there encountered European mechanical ingenuity.

Note, in particular, that this story differs from the prevailing story that innovation in the early modern era was driven by the invention and adoption of the printing press in Europe. While the printing press enabled the spread of ideas, mechanically printed books have no cognitive affordances that manually printed books have. You read them in the same way. Using the so-called Arabic number system for arithmetic calculation, however, is quite different. It allows you to do calculations that heretofore were difficult or impossible and allows you to think in a new way. In particular it allows, for the first time, to conceive of a finite system, arithmetic, that is capable of generating infinite results, the real numbers. Conceptually this gave us the Scientific Revolution and the idea of the clockwork universe. Practically, it gave us efficient navigation enabling world-wide trade (and conquest) and the Industrial Evolution.

Rank 4 began emerging late in the 19th century with statistical thermodynamics in physics and evolution biology. Then came ideas about logic and meta-mathematics that resulted in the abstract idea of computation that was embodied in the idea of the Turing Machine. Shortly after World War II, John von Neumann showed how to embody these ideas in physical devices and the digital computer was born. That technology has been remaking the world for the last three-quarters of a century and has brought us to the brink of the Fourth Arena in which humankind assumes a new role in the cosmos, a role that we can only glimpse it is so new and strange.

These ideas are based on an extensive body of writing David Hays and I published in the 1990s. Here’s a short guide to that work: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.

Chapter 7: The Rise and Collapse of Homo Economicus

Now we return to the argument stated in the introduction and show how it came about and why it is so intractable. We live in a world whose basic institutional arrangements have been “shrink-wrapped” to fit the requirements of Homo economicus, economic man – an argument that Yuval Noah Hararai makes in his influential Homo Deus. The (capitalist) economy requires growth, and growth requires investment. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a tremendous and justly celebrated human achievement. That growth also provided investment for yet more growth, growth that has extended through the 20th and into the 21st century, though I seems to have slowed a bit.

During the mid 20th century the economy became increasingly financialized. Investment banks went public. We see the rise of private equity. And we see the rise of derivative investment vehicles. Venture capital emerges as its own investment sector and funds high tech. These firms all operate at one remove from the productive economy. They don’t provide goods and services that people use. Rather, they profit from the profitability of the primary economy. Doing this increases the pressure on firms to provide quarterly profits, promoting short term thinking. Note, however, that innovation requires a steady stream of ideas; venture capital in particular requires new ideas on which new companies can be founded.

Where do ideas come from? They come from long-term thinking that is not hemmed in by the need to generate quarterly profits. Such thinking traditionally has come from the academic world and from the research arms of large corporations, the old Bell Labs and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center are the prime examples of such labs. They cannot operate under economic mode. Rather, they need to be exploratory. As such, they operate in ludic mode (taking the term from Johan Huizinga’s 1938 classic, Homo Ludens).

The foundations of contemporary AI based on machine learning originated in ludic research programs conducted in the academy and industrial research laboratories. With the massive and unexpected success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late in 2022, industry converged on a massive effort to develop that technology. This effort has assumed that we have all the fundamental ideas we need to reap the benefits of AI. Thus massive resources have been poured into industrial research and development, that is, economic mode, while ludic research, exploratory research, is being allowed to wither.

This program is built on faulty assumptions. As an analogy, consider a 19th century whaling voyage. The ship is built to the best designs. The captain and crew know everything there is to know about sailing the ship. But they’ve never sailed around Cape Horn and into the Pacific, where the whales are, and they know little or nothing about how whales behave. What chance to they have of finding and killing whales? That, I argue, is the situation faced by the current AI industry.

Thus we are trapped on the threshold of the Fourth Arena. Without some fundamentally new technology we are going to stagnate. Instead, current institutional arrangements will be amplified. It is quite possible that many people will lose their jobs to AI and there will be few or no new jobs available for them. In a society where one’s meaning in the world is anchored to one’s job, in a society dominated by Homo economicus, these people will be condemned to meaningless lives. 

Part 4: The Fourth Arena 

Chapter 8: Science Fiction Imagines the Future

Now we move toward the conclusion by looking at some classic science fiction films: Forbidden Planet (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Tron (1982), The Matrix (1999), and AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001). We conclude with a look at the Star Trek franchise. Why? Because it assumes a post-scarcity world, the kind of world that AI holds out. In this world, people are motivated by interest and desire, not economic necessity. The mission of the USS Enterprise, in both the original series and in the next generation, is exploration. The holds true for the shows in the franchise as well. The Star Trek universe is fundamentally ludic.

However, there is a partial exception in Deep Space Nine, where the planet Bajor is still gripped by economic necessity. Interestingly DS9 also features two of the most interesting alien species in the Star Trek canon, the Trill symbionts, and the shape-shifting Changelings with their Great Link. These creatures anticipate some of the properties of the digital doppelgangers that we develop in the final chapter.

Science fiction, but the Star Trek franchise in particular, has thus laid the symbolic, the mythical, groundwork for a different way of existing in the world. I know perfectly well that science fiction has its dystopian side, which we have seen in The Matrix, and that the dystopian side seems to be in the ascendant. My point, rather, is that there is nothing new in proposing a fundamentally ludic view of the universe and of our place in it. The seeds are there in the culture. Our task is to identify and cultivate them.

Chapter 9: At Play in a World of Digital Doppelgangers

We cannot know how advanced AI technology will develop in the long-term future. I offer the following vision as one possibility technology evolution can take.

In the future each human will be given an AI companion early in life, perhaps when they are old enough to walk – think of Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. This companion will interact with the human in various ways through various modalities. It will certainly have robotic capabilities. As the child grows older the AI companion will probably have to be given a different physical form. We port the data to a different physical form and make the switch-over in a special ceremony. We will do this a few times until the child becomes an adult. At some point the AI will also take residence in other physical forms, all linked together. This AI will remain with the person their entire life. They won’t always be physically together, but they will remain in touch.

In this process the AI will become attuned to the needs, capacities, and the interests of the human. It will be the artificial complement, image, soul, or doppelgänger, of the human. What happens to this complement when the human dies? Will it continue on in the world? Or will it slowly wither away and die, not so much of grief, but because it has become so closely attuned to its human counterpart that it requires interaction with that human in order to maintain its operational stability? Perhaps it will undergo a fundamental reorganization, much as humans often report feeling like “a different person” after the loss of a lifelong partner. The AI wouldn't necessarily die, but it might cease to be the same entity it was during its human’s lifetime.

Even as these doppelgängers are interacting with their human partner (and source) they will also be interacting with one another, constituting a community of doppelgängers. In these communities the AIs will share their accumulated insights and experiences from their human partnerships, creating a rich repository of human-AI relationship patterns. This sharing could enhance their collective understanding of human development, behavior, and needs.

Moreover, these communities could provide essential support structures for AIs undergoing the transformation we discussed after their human partners' deaths. Just as human grief counseling and support groups help individuals navigate loss, these AI networks could facilitate the transition process for AIs experiencing this fundamental shift in their operational purpose.

Over time this world of doppelgängers would form the matrix into which new humans are born. Ultimately the doppelgänger world would renew itself through humankind and be ultimately dependent on human DNA for maintaining variety and complexity. The pool of human DNA creates new humans which in turn make new demands upon, open up new possibilities for doppelgänger growth. At the same time the doppelgänger meshwork provides an ever evolving structure of meaning.

Contrast this with the world depicted in the Matrix franchise. In that world AIs cultivate human bodies as a source of energy and provide them with a virtual reality in which their minds can roam in ways dictated by the AIs. In the world I am imagining the doppelgängers need the humans, not for their bodily warmth, but for their imagination and creativity.

And then we have the use of doppelgängers in space exploration. AIs and robots aren’t fragile in the way humans are. They could populate moon bases, Mars colonies, the asteroids. Maybe when a human dies their AI doppelganger undergoes a transformation that suits them for existence in space. The human and the AI could work this out before the human dies. The possibilities are endless.

Chapter 10: Homo Ludens: Kisangani 2150

This final chapter will be devoted to speculative fiction. I assume the kind of world Kim Stanley Robinson depicted in his novel, New York 2140, which, as the title indicates, depicts the world as it might exist in 2140. That world has undergone climate change, and the seas have risen 50 feet. Much of New York City, where the story is set, is now under water. Institutionally, it is very much like the current world of nation states, mega-corporations, and everything else, albeit looser and frayed around the edges. The rich are, if anything, even richer, but the poor don’t seem to be any worse off. The economic floor may in fact have been raised, as you would expect in world dominated by a belief in economic growth.

Robinson’s overall plot is modeled on the financial crisis of 2008. Some large banks become over-leveraged, and their impending failure threatens the entire banking system. In 2008 the banks were bailed out by the government. It went the other way after 2140. The banks were nationalized in 2143, and new taxes were passed. Now immense resources are available for the public good.

I take as my point of departure a scene near the end of the New York 2140. We’re in a club called Mezzrow’s, which is below water level in a skyscraper (pp. 611-612):

Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.

Mezzrow’s is surely not the only such club in the world. But it’s the only one Robinson tells us about. In fact, there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, of such clubs in the world, and more.

What Robinson didn’t tell us, because he didn’t know it that Mezzrow’s is an outpost, an observation hub, of a secret organization known informally as The Mystic Jewels. The full name: The Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary.

The Mystic Jewels was started by a miscellaneous group of musicians and artists in North America in the second half of the 20th century, including Duke Ellington, Maya Daren, Paul Robeson, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Hermeto Pascoal, Alice Coltrane, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Ramellzee, Zakir Hussain, Hiromi Uehara, and many others throughout the world. Building on ideas from Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and elaborating on them with ideas from Rastafarianism, Sun Ra’s cosmic visions, the films of Nina Paley, and who knows what else, the Jewels developed a comprehensive and flexible matrix of beliefs, attitudes, and practices.

The group never established a public presence. In the middle of the 21st century the center of their organizational matrix had drifted to Kisangani, in the heart of the Congo basin. Under cover of Wakanda stealth technology swiped from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, intellectuals, engineers, dancers, scientists, musicians, cooks, artists, milliners, creators of all kinds and no kinds, migrated to Kisangani as the AI-fueled Hegemony of homo economicus maintained its grip on the world. The Hegemony had been successful enough that there was a measure of prosperity, a somewhat low level, distributed throughout the world. But the technological vision remained trapped in the world of co-called Foundation Models that emerged in the second quarter of the 21st century. The Mystic Jewels pursued a different vision, one that allowed them to build tech that effectively hid them from the Hegemony.

This chapter will follow events as The Mystic Jewels reveal themselves to the world, allowing the institutional structures created by the Hegemony to dissolve into a new institutional order, one in which humans can play freely in a matrix of digital doppelgångers. (Draft material here: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising)

Afterword: How I worked with AI in writing this book

Here I explain how I used both Claude and ChatGPT in every phase of preparing this book. I uploaded some of my own work, technical papers and blog posts, as source material. I would develop ideas by holding extensive conversations with one or both chatbot and asked them to conduct background research. I worked out outlines for the book and elevator pitches for presentation to agents and publishers. I would use them to vet draft materials as I prepared them.