The abstractions would be in the math, but the Dawkinsian language about selfish genes and competing strategies is a literary metaphor. I’m sure game theorists can leave aside all the literary flourishes and apply just the math of game theory. Then my question is how useful or original the pure math would be. Does it add to our understanding or is it just obfuscating certain platitudes or dressing up what we already know from Darwin?

Metaphors are algebra? Yeah, right. Tell it to the nonrational functions of most of the human brain. You’re only reconstructing how you think metaphors should work, or how they work for autistic individuals, not how they work in most human discourse.

You’re asking whether I reject all metaphors since I’m rejecting the game theorist’s ones. No, that’s not my point. It’s a question of being upfront about what you’re doing. What exactly is game theory? Is it math, science, or literary philosophy? Or is it a hybrid of all three that shifts the goalposts and burden of proof as needed to get by?

You see, I’m trying to decide whether I should be interested in your game theoretic criticisms of my writings or even whether they are criticisms in the first place as opposed to restatements of what I’ve been saying. In theory I’m openminded here because I already strive to make my philosophy naturalistic and science-friendly. Alas, I’ve been burned, as it were, by previous mainstream applications of game theory, in the Cold War and in neoliberalism. So I’m somewhat skeptical.

You want me to show how game theory’s metaphors fail to map onto reality. Nuh uh, that’s not how the burden of proof works. You’re the one bringing this stuff into my house on Medium. You’re the one speaking in that language. It’s up to you to convince others you’re not talking out of your hat. Why should I do your work for you? Do you think it’s self-evident that all analogies are equally strong?

Comparing genes to selfish people looks like quite the stretch because genes are, you know, not even alive so they have no selves or vices. Luckily for Dawkins and co., we readily anthropomorphise everything because of pareidolia and our facility for mind-reading. That’s what gave rise to rampant animism in our prehistory and in our individual childhoods. And that’s why metaphors are technically unfalsifiable and why art has a subjective aspect. But that doesn’t mean all metaphors are equally useful for cognitive (philosophical or scientific) purposes.

You point out that there’s misuse of metaphors in philosophy. But why on earth would I disagree with that? Do you think I’m philosophy’s representative? I’m doing philosophy, but that hardly means I need to defend everything that every philosopher ever said. I’m doing philosophy my way. Likewise, you wouldn’t need to defend the neoliberal’s or Randian’s abuses of game theory. But you would need to show there’s an honest and helpful use of that theory, just as I’d need to defend my philosophical worldview.

But you also say that my approach to philosophy is based on weak metaphors. You bring up God at that point, but I’m an atheist so I don’t rely on that metaphor. You think I’m doing metaphysics, but I get my metaphysics from science. That’s the naturalism part. Where I actually draw a more questionable analogy is in my aesthetic interpretation of pantheism, where I compare all natural outcomes to art. I compare nature’s mindless products to intentionally designed ones. If you like, you’re free to criticize that as a myth or delusion that rationalizes a strategic choice to compete in a cynical game. And then I’d say the existential stakes aren’t so game-like. So it would be a clash of metaphors, and the question would be which is more overextended, “pantheistic art” or “strategic game of life.”

You say that moral prescription “is a coordinating strategy in a plus-sum game.” So “Thou shalt not kill” is like a country’s social convention that tells drivers to drive on the same side of the road. But even if that’s how morality originated, as some such social comprise or as in an initial implicit social contract, what’s to stop morality from taking on exaptations or nonreducible new functions? This reminds me of one of my problems with Buddhism, when the Buddhist says that mental phenomena are all “illusions.” Then I ask what’s the difference between an illusion and an emergent property that calls for a higher-level analysis in a new vocabulary, as in a special science.

It’s just a pragmatic question: How much does the lower-level explanation add to our understanding of the higher-level phenomenon? If the math alone is trivial and too coarse-grained, and the dubious metaphors are needed to fill the gap, that’s a problem. The metaphors would be like the epicycles that fixed up Ptolemaic cosmology.

You say the conception of an overextended metaphor is itself a metaphor. That wouldn’t be surprising since natural language is rife with metaphors, as Nietzsche pointed out. That’s okay, though, since I don’t pretend to be doing math or science. I’m using natural language to give a philosophical account of life, the universe, and everything.

But my point there was that when a metaphor is overstretched, we can be justly suspicious of its use. The user would seem overly attached to that analogy for some reason. This would be consistent with a propagandistic use, which is to say the speaker would be relying on the connotations to obfuscate and to mislead the listener. If you think there’s no such thing as manipulative, over-extended metaphors, try theism on for size. So no, the concept of an overextended metaphor is hardly “unmappable literary hooey.” Our overreliance on bad metaphors is all too real.

Or are game theorists committed to saying that whatever myths emerge to rationalize some social compromises are fine, because game theorists are like economists or psychiatrists in merely describing reality without any hint of evaluating the outcomes (so game theorists can seem scientific)?

For example, what exactly would your beef be with theists? You’ve called religion a myth and a delusion, if I recall correctly, but that’s like Marx calling all of culture an ideological construct. Your use of game theory implies that liberalism and free market theory and humanism, too, are just myths and delusions in so far as they’re prescribed as outcomes of social coordination. All of culture is a set of competing social conventions for you, and we decide which is best by looking at their social benefits. Theistic religion has kept populations together for thousands of years. What gripe, then, could a game theorist have with religious prescriptions in that case? Obviously if you still reject theism, you’d be doing so outside of a game theoretic explanation.

The fact that you doubled down on your declaration that natural selection is a tautology indicates to me that you really are somewhat desperate to hold onto the alleged originality of game theory. But that’s none of my business. I’d just reiterate that the concepts of adaptation, fitness, and so on are middle terms that needn’t be defined in terms of survival.

Natural selection already tells us how species persist: the hosts adapt to their environment long enough to reproduce and to pass on the genes that build comparable body types. The fittest aren’t just the ones that survive. They’re the ones that find a niche in which to flourish, thanks to their traits that enable them to adapt to circumstances. If anything, this is an explication of what “survival” means in nature. Rather than presupposing a concept of survival, natural selection would be telling us what it means to survive in a species.

In any case, what game theory adds to that is a dubious literary flourish to rub it in theists’ faces, as though evolution were intelligently guided after all despite God’s nonexistence. This sounds like those physics books written by atheists like Stephen Hawking that nevertheless feature “God” in the title, like “God Created the Integers.”

But in the big picture the disagreement here is likely trivial. We both want to give naturalistic explanations of these things. The details matter to specialists. I’m a big picture guy, as you can tell from the variety of subjects I try to cover in my writings.

You keep attributing this dreaded “metaphysics” to me. I’m a methodological naturalist, so epistemology is deeper for me than metaphysics. Indeed, I’ve written numerous hypermodern articles about why we shouldn’t take our grand narratives so seriously. I’ve called them fictions, rather like how you call them mythic rationalizations of social coordination. The difference seems to be that I take aesthetic evaluation seriously as an emergent, existential matter. By contrast, you say that once something’s been identified as a mere story, it doesn’t matter on its own level.

I guess you’ve never been swept up by any art. What happens, though, when you read a good book or watch a stirring movie? Do you think it’s all just lies to hide the underlying social posturing? That’s the cynical postmodern or otherwise reductionistic view. It seems to me that nature complexifies, so new patterns call for novel discourses.

Your interesting point about the Texas Sharpshooter problem seems to dovetail with my point about the unfalsifiability and triviality of overextended abstractions and metaphors.

Regarding your game theoretic analysis of the Taliban’s patriarchy, I don’t see what that analysis adds to good old instrumental (means-end) reasoning. They have a goal they want to achieve and there are various options for achieving it, so they pick what seems like the most efficient means possible. Why must every means-end relationship be compared to a game that features a competition between strategies? My hypothesis is that that extended metaphor is a gratuitous intrusion that’s normalizes the paranoia, cynicism, and selfishness of power elites (as in the Cold War and in neoliberal justifications of the plutocratic outcome of free markets).

You say duty-based morality is consistent with game theory, as in the Trumpians who fail to do their duty and get vaccinated. But in so far as “game theoretic” abstractions account for moral duties, that would be because those abstractions piggyback on ubiquitous instrumental reasoning and are thus unfalsifiable and trivial.

In any case, by providing that vaccination example you’re assuming the duty is to generate a plus-sum outcome. I was talking about a duty to go against the herd. The Trumpians themselves say they have a higher duty to obey Trump and to tear down the corrupt establishment. These duties go beyond mere instrumental calculations or prudent cooperation. We break up into conflicting tribes because we have visionary faith in our duties and are therefore largely irrational, contrary to neoclassical and game theoretic idealizations. A faith-based commitment isn’t the same as an instrumental calculation of utility. You want to reduce all human behaviour to rational choices, but cognitive science says our everyday reasoning is rife with fallacies and biases.

You ask, “Can you show where morality is not explainable as coordination to a plus-sum end?” Counterexamples would be antisocial duties, as in pessimistic philosophy and ascetic religious traditions. My kind of existentialism builds on those. Our higher duty as enlightened creatures is to tolerate mass society as a farce that provides comedic relief, but our individual quest is to sublimate a philosophical perspective by producing honourable, anti-natural art, the kind that testifies to the anomaly of our existential position. Rather than focussing on any social cooperation, I assume the inevitable divide between the intellectual elites and the masses. The former will be marginalized, so there’s no attempt here to sell-out or to cooperate to please everyone.

But in so far as you can provide a game theoretic gloss on this kind of morality, you’d likely just be talking about instrumental reasoning, or about choosing between means of fulfilling a purpose. Everything that distinguishes game theory from instrumentalism would be superfluous. Sure, you can reconstruct each choice in terms of instrumental reasoning. Even an insane person might have “reasoned” that to be Napoleon, he had to craft a suitably large hat, so he “strategized” that a large hat would be more suitable than a small one. With this kind of analysis, we can predict that all animals try to get what they want. It’s Dennett’s “intentional stance.” I don’t need to disagree with any of that.

You’ll say this cynical elitism is just social coordination that avoids total chaos. But that’s not enough to distinguish game theory from instrumentalism. Yes, we all would like to avoid chaos, including ascetics who renounce mainstream society and retreat to caves or monasteries. So we act in ways that are most likely to get us what we want while staying true to our beliefs. That’s just instrumental animal behaviour. There’s no need to compare it to a game or to say we’re always consciously strategizing, since much of this behaviour may be hardwired or based on early training.

When you say that game theory doesn’t predict outcomes, that kind of clinches it for me. You’re saying game theory’s not a separate science and that it’s equivalent to positing the crudest, most widespread instrumental, means-end reasoning. Liberal societies will go one way, theocratic ones will go another, and “game theory” explains it all by positing a competition between means of achieving our different goals.

Yet you do go a step further when you dismiss the stories we tell to justify those instrumental decisions as mythic social conventions. Are game theorists necessarily cynical about all non-game theoretic explanations of human behaviour? Who says all reality-based beliefs are purely instrumental and socially strategic? What about antisocial individuals? Don’t they get a say in rejecting society in toto? Isn’t that what reformers like Jesus and the Buddha did? Where they just cynically strategizing in trying to reform the human endeavour? Or were they caught up their prophetic vision because brains aren’t so rational?

In conclusion, we might want to start winding this down to avoid repeating ourselves. I think I have a better idea of where you’re coming from. Either way, I’m sure we’ll go our separate ways based on our slightly different conceptions of the upshot of philosophical naturalism.