(March 31st, 2014, 18:18)suttree Wrote:But... but... what if an observer's predilection to explain behaviour by referencing either the player or the situation is itself attributable to either the observer himself (his temperament) or the obsever's situation (the fact of the matter)??? It seems, in Civ4, before one gets down to dealing with what really matters, namely, the actual playing of the game in pursuit of a victory condition, it would first be necessary to reach prior agreement about decison making, namely, about whether it is to be viewed either as the product of a temperament with which the player himself takes possession of the state of the game, or as the means by which he catches an immediate glimpse of the situation and translates it in to action. There is a certain unease about this which seems in part justified because there are various kinds of decision making, and it could well be that one of them, rather than another, would be better suited to winning a game of Civ4 and that a wrong choice among them is thereby possible – in part this unease is justified because decision making is a faculty of a determinate kind and extent, and without a more precise determination of its nature and limits, we might end up grasping vaporous clouds of error instead of entering into the heaven of a victory condition. This unease is even bound to be transformed into the conviction both that the entire project of explaining behaviour by way of a reference to decision making is, in its very concept, absurd, and that there is a sharp line separating decision making from human behaviour. This is so because if we suppose behaviour to be solely the product of a certain temperament or instrument by means of which the player takes hold of the situation, then it is obvious that if we apply an instrument to something, the application does not in fact leave it be as it is on its own; rather, it sets out to reshape it and change it. Or, if decision making is not the application of a certain temperament but is to some extent a passive medium through which the situation is cognized in the light of the truth and translated in to action, then here too we do not explain the behaviour as it is in itself but only as it comes to us through this medium and in the medium. In both cases, we employ a means which immediately engenders the very opposite of its intended purpose, that is, the very absurdity of the enterprise lies in our making use of any means at all. To be sure, it seems that this evil stands to be remedied by means of a cognition of the way the matter of "temperament" works, for such a cognition would make it possible to peel away in the behaviour the part of the decision which we receive by virtue of the temperament from that part which belongs to the situation, and thus we would receive the behaviour in its purity. However, this improvement would in fact merely bring us back to where we were before. If we once again subtract from the reshaped thing what the temperament has added to it, then the thing – here, the behaviour – is once again for us exactly as it was prior to this fully superfluous effort. However much we were just supposed to bring the behaviour a bit closer to us by means of the temperament and not have the temperament change anything in it at all, perhaps similar to the way we would ensnare a bird on a twig covered in birdlime, the behaviour itself would nonetheless almost surely cast scorn on this ruse if it were not both in and for itself already there with us and wanted to be there. In that case, decision making itself would merely be a ruse, since all its efforts would only amount to its putting on airs about doing something which is quite different from engendering a merely immediate and thereby trouble-free relation. Or if in the examination and testing of decision making, which we represent as a medium, we learn about the law of its refraction, then it is also equally useless to subtract this refraction from the result, for it is not the refraction of the ray but rather the ray itself by way of which the situation comes into contact with us, and if this is subtracted, then all it would point to would be either a pure direction or empty location.
I think there is an app for that.
