What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? (2014)

thebaffler.com

17 pointsthunderbong6 comments

The article argues that nonhuman animals play. This is probably true.

The article implies that the play is "for no other purpose than fun", specifically it's not an evolutionary adaption. This is probably false.

Mainly because even in humans, play has evolutionary reasons. Children play to calibrate their motor skills. As do puppies. Humans play to attract mates.

Just because something is play, doesn't mean it's not evolutionarily adaptive. And in my book that doesn't spoil the "purity" of play.

I don't think the article is implying "for no other purpose than fun". More like, for no other _apparent_ purpose than fun.

> If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found.

I think that this is one of the main point of the article - we can't simply explain away all of our behavior as some rational explanation. Not all play is merely for evolutionary adaption, and not all play has a purpose. Why does one puppy prefer to destroy a chew toy as play, and the other merely to squeak the squeaker?

Note that a rational explanation doesn't necessarily require that the behavior is rational for individual animals or their genes.

If I "let" you win the argument, will it bring the slightest of smiles to your face ? Must it necessarily make you more attractive to women (or whomever) ? Asking for a friend.

The essay is much deeper than this. Graeber is speaking directly to people like you (and me, until I read this article a few years ago) who believe all actions are rooted in evolutionary adaption. Graeber does get a bit woo-woo but I really like this essay for putting the idea that fun and play could just be emergent properties of the world we live in - which is pretty cool, no woo stuff needed (which Graeber does kind of wander into at one point).

Most important paragraph in the essay: "The tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science. Charles Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons. Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe."

> If one is already willing to embrace thirteen-dimensional objects or an endless number of alternative universes, or to casually suggest that 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and energy about whose properties we know nothing, it’s perhaps not too much of a leap to also contemplate the possibility that subatomic particles have “free will” or even experiences.

I had to chuckle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com