05
Games, Rules, Laws

2026-02-05 · 1780 words

Yesterday I wrote ~2,500 words, so today will be a little shorter. A couple weeks ago I started working on a now ~5k word essay that has unfortunately become three essays in one. Out of laziness, I’ve pulled one thread out of that essay, and abridged it here. I hope you enjoy.

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In Seduction, Jean Baudrillard talks about the difference between Laws and Rules. Laws are those fundamental immutable facts about this thin slice of computational reality we happen to inhabit: The law of gravity, the fundamental forces of nature; the laws of electromagnetism; the sun rising each day, the earth progressing through its days and seasons in an elliptic progression around the sun. Laws govern us, constrain us, and it is impossible to act outside of their bounds. This is what it means to exist in a material world and experience mortality.

Rules, however, are laws that we make for ourselves, that we choose to follow. Baudrillard would say that when we choose to follow a given set of rules, we play a game. I choose to exercise table manners, and we play the game of dinner. Unlike laws, which cannot be broken, rules can. When we break a rule, we don’t lose; the game stops. I flip the table, and the game of dinner stops. When the game stops, we step back a layer, to a more fundamental game, and must choose how to resume play. The ultimate game for those who choose to play by no rules are the laws that govern the material universe. Is it worth playing by any rules, then?

Let’s talk about agency for a second. The old definition my parents taught me, not the new “ignore all rules” definition that people now first learn. Agency is not defined by what you are capable of doing, but rather by the structure and intention you impart on the choices you have available to you. Agency requires two things; the first is to have many opportunities or options open to you. An opportunity only counts as an option if it is distinct: if two doors lead to the same room, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. The second is to have a good understanding which options lead to which outcomes. Being in a room with 100 doors is pointless if you have no clue as to where each door leads. When you have the triple threat of options, understanding, and a desired end, you have agency. The laws of physics define all doors available to us; the rules of the games we choose to play let us narrow the number of paths we need to consider to get where we want to go. If there’s some highway that cuts across this maze of rooms and leads to where you want to go, why not ignore the other doors and take it?

I believe in God, and I choose to follow many rules. I am often asked, “Well, then is it true that you’re not allowed to _____?” to which I’ll reply, “Well yes, but not exactly. I am allowed to do anything; I choose not to.” People think of these rules as constraining, restrictive. However, precommitting to follow certain principles is anything but constraining or restrictive! I’m free to go to parties and have lots of fun knowing I won’t drink and compromise my ability to make rational decisions, for instance. Isn’t that invigorating!? “You must be fun at parties.”

I’d like to focus on two stances from rational philosophy: the physical stance and the intentional stance. There are other stances, like the design stance and the engineering stance, but these two will be useful here.

The physical stance is predicated on the literal material understanding of a system. Imagine a brain surgeon performing brain surgery on a cancer patient. The surgeon has the physical understanding that brain tissue is made from neurons, which is different from the tissue that makes up tumors, which allows her to perform her job. With this physical understanding and experience, she is able to identify and remove the tumor.

After the surgery, the surgeon wishes to interact with her patient and communicate how it went. She would not think, “I, as a mind simulated by a collection of neurons, have electrical signals moving in specific patterns in my brain representing information about the surgery. I must now, understanding that I am communicating with another simulated mind, determine how best to encode these patterns as vibrations of waves in the air so that they may sense these vibrations and construct different patterns in their own minds that lead to similar simulated understanding of this information I have, so that we may both approximate each other’s understanding and determine how to update our physical and mental states with respect to our differing long and short term goals and desires.”

Ouch. It’s cool that we can look at material reality through this lens, but this lens is a horrible model to use if the surgeon wishes to be fully present and acutely in tune to how her patient is feeling, so that she may establish a good and trustworthy doctor-patient relationship with them.

All of this is to say, different models are useful for different things. And as much as it is important to understand atoms if you are doing chemistry, it is important to understand the mind and the spirit if you are building a relationship with someone else.

Now, the intentional stance. There are two ways we could think of how an old-fashioned thermostat works. The first is the physical stance: a thermostat contains a metal strip that contracts and expands with heat. This strip can act as a switch or a resistor in a circuit that, when the metal expands enough to close the circuit, allows electrons to flow so the air conditioner can cool the air (and vice versa for heating).

The intentional stance frames the system in terms of a question: “given that every system is governed by laws, how would a system act were it a rational actor with beliefs pursuing a desired end?” The intentional stance states that any system has three primary facets: a way to sense information about the world and form beliefs, a desired state to be in, and the capacity to act. Adopting the intentional stance requires playing the role of the system. For example, as an old-fashioned thermostat, you have a desired temperature. You sense the temperature through your metal strip. You can act to cool the environment by using your air conditioner. Intentionally, a thermostat acts to keep a room at a set temperature. The intentional stance makes it easy to figure out why systems are not behaving as expected. If the room is too hot, it could be because the thermostat believed it to already be very cold, or you and the thermostat share misaligned desires, or the thermostat was unable to act on its beliefs to accomplish its desires.

A rational system is a system that takes the most direct actions to accomplish its desires. If you observe the actions of a thermostat, you can learn its desires. Likewise, if you know the full desire of a thermostat, you fully can predict its actions. “Full desire” might have a few more terms than just “keep an exact temperature”; from a thermostat’s behavior, you might realize that the observed desire is influenced by the properties of thermal expansion in the metal strip, etc. A broken system also has desires, they’re just often desires that don’t align with human ends. (I desire to do nothing!)

To return to the analogy of the surgeon, it is clear that under the intentional stance, the doctor would be thinking about what the patient is experiencing and feeling, how the patient wishes to feel and what the patient wishes to know, along with what the patient is capable of doing to take care of themselves and request help as needed. This is a reasonable, emotionally intelligent way to approach the relationship, and will lead to better interactions in the long run.

“The most important things about beliefs are whether they are true. The most important thing about motives is whether they are good. But motives don’t tell us whether beliefs are true.” — J. Budziszewski

The universe is governed by laws. Believing that people have spirits is unfalsifiable, in the material sense. However, if that belief changes the precision with which you understand and interact with people for the better, why not hold that belief? I love math and physics and discovering laws, but I also love people and I love discovering rules to live by. Belief is another joint along which to carve the fields which make up reality, not any different from the joints we choose to carve along for an atom or for a car.

According to Hume, reason is a slave to the passions. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature For a rational actor under the intentional stance, passions are desires, the end, the meaning. If belief is a tool for reasoning, and holding a belief makes you better at accomplishing your ends, then that belief must track truth in some way. The map is not the territory. The map earns its keep by getting you home.

A belief that consistently works is a belief that must, in some way, track the shape of reality; it is a belief worth holding. Similarly, a game whose rules trace a corridor towards your desires or raison d’être is a game worth playing. The laws of the universe are cold, harsh, and unyielding; why not build forgiving games worth playing together?

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I hope you enjoyed this thread! The original essay covers two other topics; the first part covers materialism, the final part is about asymptotics, internal structure, and institutional design.

While waiting for me to finish these pieces, you might enjoy this one: