Off the cuff. Christopher Alexander has written about the '20th century mechanistic viewpoint' in The Nature of Order and I think this 'rational instrumentality' is very similar. My perspective on the two are the same until I find evidence that shows I'm wrong to conflate them.

I'll rewrite the questions in more comfortable language.

1. Do goals and optimization make us behave according to the mechanistic viewpoint?
2. Does the mechanistic viewpoint make us live inauthentic lives?
3. Does the mechanistic viewpoint deprive us of communities, traditions, and norms?
4. Does the mechanistic viewpoint disenchant the world?

And answer them with my current thoughts . . .

1. I'm not sure about this one. Maybe? If I take out my thoughts that it is cause-and-effect (i.e. goals and optimization cause us to ADOPT this viewpoint) and think more that it is the other way around, that my recent disenchantment with goals and optimization comes from a lack of desire to pander to the desires of an attitude I no longer have, then . . . I can comfortably say that I suspect goals and optimization satisfy some need that arises within the mechanistic viewpoint, and perhaps encourage that need and that set of values as well.

2. Juul writes immediately afterwards that "this is not the only possible conception of authenticity" (201); he is presenting a spectrum of authenticities. In a way this statement is a non-statement, or rather the question is a non-question. It should be read in reverse. "Is, or to what degree is, inauthenticity defined by adherence to the 20th century mechanistic viewpoint, and the pursuit of goals and optimization that results?" I'm not that interested in defining authenticity.

3. Communities, traditions, and norms. My idea of rational instrumentality is that it asks, "Can I think of a reason why this is good? Can I explain in precise terms why this is good?" and if the answer is "No" or "Not really" rational instrumentality says "Then it is not good." It is capable of depriving us of any sort of thing belonging to any category. Communities, good communities, and complex and non-quantifiable. Demanding rational justification deprives us of this non-quantifiable good. Traditions and norms are pretty much the same thing as one another (right?) and . . . are almost defined by their lack of explanation? If the reason that we do something is because we have a good rational reason for it, even if we have been doing it for a long time, it is not a tradition or a norm. So yes, we are also deprived of these things by a mechanism of rejecting things which we cannot dissect.

4. Yes.

For mixing:
- Start: Mixer bowl full of merengue
- Push aside the merengue, expose bottom of mixer bowl
- Pour non-merengue ingredients into bottom of mixer bowl - not on top of merengue
- Mix by hand ~5 times, enough that it's badly incorporated
- Stand mix on 2 for 30 seconds
- Scrape the walls, clean the whisk
- Stand mix on 2 for 10 seconds
- Scrape the walls, clean the whisk
- Stand mix on 2 for 10 seconds
- Fold in from the walls, go by feel, hopefully macronage is complete at this point!

Is this the correct way?

Preheat 345 F
Put in one tray of macarons, top rack centered or slightly to right (SEE BELOW NOTES)
Set oven down to 320 F once macarons are in
At 13 min, remove tray

(Repeat for multiple trays, preheating back to 345 F) (Maybe?)

P. 201

. . . The dual worries [expressed by Tale of Tales, Bernie De Koven, Paolo Pedercini, Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity, and Charles Taylor] about goals and optimization in games are therefore (1) that they shift the player's focus away from the game world and (2) that they make us behave according to a rational instrumentality, the mode of thinking that makes us live inauthentic lives; deprives us of communities, traditions, norms; and disenchants the world.⁴⁷

47. Mercer, "Black Art and the Burden of Representation," 65.

//

How does this feel? I've got to try it on myself. Is this my worry? Is this what lead to playables? I too am worried about goals and optimization in games. I don't care about point 1, but what about point 2?

• Do goals and optimization in games "make us behave according to a rational instrumentality"?
• Is rational instrumentality a "mode of thinking that makes us live inauthentic lives"? (certainly not "the" mode)
• Is rational instrumentality a mode of thinking that "deprives us of communities, traditions, and norms"?
• Is rational instrumentality a mode of thinking that "disenchants the world"?

I feel as though I should read this book referenced only by note 47 -- Black Art and the Burden of Representation, Kobena Mercer -- but also that I need to think through each of these points individually.

I'm really not a fan of this reference being completely unquoted in the text. Like, give me some hint about what the book is saying or its relevance! Why is this a footnote, while the others are all quoted outright in the main body? Annoying.

~ linked from Dilation

Originally 'Ideas' was a top-level board, until reading Deep Feeling. It became almost immediately obvious to me that the value of game ideas was not as descriptions of form but as descriptions of feeling. Vessels for feeling. That is, almost nothing about the game idea's form is sacred: not mechanics, not technology, nothing.

I have always been interested in hearing game ideas, and interested in having them. Icebergvanias, Reverse Metroidvanias, all kinds of wonderful high-concept... er, concepts. Slowly over years I came to feel more and more negatively about them because of how easy it is to describe impossible design fictions.

Today I was thinking I'd like to work on something, something, something. Make something new. Start on something, start thinking about something. So I looked at the Ideas forum for inspiration, and I realized I needed a new forum of a larger shape: the now created, but empty, Vessels & Memories & Deep Feelings board. Ideas then belong inside, as a subcategory.

Ideas are vessels for some deeper feeling.

Games are also vessels for some deeper feeling.

They are all vessels.

~ The Nature of Order, Book Two: Chapter Fourteen: Deep Feeling, linked above

That was a good chapter. I think that's quite enough.

On page 373 there is a box containing seven "different ways that feeling and living process are connected" which I will summarize even more briefly.

1. We grasp wholeness (best) by feeling it
2. We can feel the next latent wholeness - where it should go next, how it should unfold
3. A thing, given life, must induce deep feeling in people
4. We can carry feeling to some dim extent without the thing-which-is-to-induce-it
5. Feeling comes from the wholeness of the thing, not from us
6. A thing, given life, may be said to have feeling, not merely induce it
7. Every wholeness has a latent wholeness, which we experience through feeling

Many of these are said much more eloquently but here I am simplifying it unbeautifully. Boiled down like this, reduced, it is apparent to me that there is a core idea simply surrounded by a basic graph of nodes, often explicitly connected both ways as if those are separate points.

1. A thing has a wholeness, and every wholeness furthermore has, or includes, a latent wholeness: future states which may arise from structure-preserving transformations.

2. We can feel all of this: the wholeness, the latent future wholeness, and so on. Everyone can, and automatically does, feel all of this. Sometimes we use the feeling to see how to develop a thing further. Sometimes the feeling is simply felt, making us feel good or bad or something else.

3. Feeling does not belong to either the one who feels or the felt artifact; semantically, we may say that we have the feeling, or that the object has the feeling, but the reality is that the feeling exists --- only --- in our intersection, in the wholeness of experiencer and experienced. More generously we may be forgiven for saying, as it is easier, that "I feel" and also that "The thing has feeling" are both equally correct (in that they are both strictly incorrect).

 . . . but that's a little long. Can I simplify that?

1. We can feel the wholeness of any part of the world, a wholeness which includes every part of it, as well as latent wholenesses, future states, things that it might become, or could become, in a way that preserves structure. These latent wholenesses, or this latent structure, is not quite defined yet, but we can feel it.

2. Feeling belongs to both us and to the thing which provokes the feeling. It is equally correct to say that it is our feeling and that we feel it, or to say that it is the world's feeling and that it induces the feeling in us --- which is to say that both are equally incorrect. The feeling belongs to the overlap between experiencer and experienced. Without either one, there is no feeling. However, it is easier to simply allow that both individual ownerships are valid enough, and that they are equally valid.

3. We can remember feeling, dimly. Although the feeling is not ours to have alone, we can remember a feeling once it has been felt. We can hold onto feeling, we can also play with feeling, imagine feeling. We can carry this dim memory with us for long enough, for a very long time, and this ability allows us to pursue it.

Alexander writes of examples in which focusing on life (and deep feeling) is more important than the details.

- One cannot create a fishpond only by knowledge of fish, ecology, etc. It is important to have a vision of "the slow movement of the fish, the edge, the light on the water, the kinds of things that may  be present at the edge . . . the kind of soft and subtle feeling of life which such a fishpond requires."

- A colleague or student working on a house for a client, thinking 'There are too many stairs, for the old people to climb' and 'It is bad that you have to go through the rain to get to the bedroom'...

- Similarly on the Eishin campus, teachers arguing, "How can you make a school where you can't go from one classroom to another without getting wet?" // It seems that the discussion actually was brought down to this level for a little while, alexander responding "Rain is part of life", but ultimately it was this appeal to process, and the mechanics followed:

"We argued and argued. Finally I reminded them that it had been their own choice to make classrooms separate [which] brought with it a second reality --- that the classroom buildings really would be separate . . . and that one would then have to go out into the rain . . ." (394-395)

"A year after the buildings were finished, I asked them if they minded getting wet between classes. They laughed. "We like it," they said. "We have umbrellas. Or we run. We feel more alive."" (395)

Looking at this I think any inconvenience can be forgiven, can even be fully embraced, if it really strengthens the whole. It is necessary and we see that it is necessary.

Quote from: 3:51And . . . because this surface is sort of wavy, sometimes, something very sweet*, something so lovely, will sort of express itself, something very sweet because it's purer than the thoughts one normally picks up because it's a little bit subtler than that. You know, because the wave drops down, and you can taste this real sweet thing, and you'd like to have your hands on it.

*It's cute, this moment. Potts smiles happily when he says "something very sweet, something so lovely", and looks delicately overwhelmed with joy. The way he looks in this moment makes me so happy.

~ back linked from kill gameplay

Don Potts speaks quite a lot about consciousness and conscious and unconscious thought in these first minutes. He says that an artist 'would love' to perceive the source of thoughts, the deep unconscious, directly. I like the thought that this is some commonality between artists --- that all artists are so interested in thought, that artists are defined by this interest in perceiving the self, the deep self.

". . . as the geometry develops, the feeling is keep intact, but becomes more and more solid — provided we do not depart from the feeling that existed in us at the beginning." (372)

". . . it can be described as a mathematical structure, [but] it is too complex to take in by purely analytical means. In order to get the whole, to grasp it, one must feel it. Its wholeness can be felt. Using our own feeling as a way of grasping the whole, we can put ourselves in a receptive mode in which we grasp, and respond to, the existing wholeness . . . This is not an emotional move away from precision. It is, rather, a move towards precision." (372 - 373)

Ah, here I have a nitpick. I would say that it is more importantly a move towards accuracy; feeling is more vague, like saying 12 x 10^5 instead of 1,200,000... the latter has more precision, but it is WRONG precision, given too early. Feeling is more vague but correctly vague, and allows us to wait until the appropriate time to increase our accuracy. It is the concrete form that is more precise. But the feeling is more accurate, or rather, less inaccurate, than non-concrete analysis.

Watched this long ago, thinking about it now because of The Nature of Order Book Two, in particular the chapter "DEEP FEELING". Will write up some quotes soon I think.

~See The Nature of Order: Book 2, chapter fourteen, DEEP FEELING

"We come now, to the most important and most profound aspect of living process. I believe it is the deepest issue in this book." (370)

"During the early part of the 20th century there was a school of thought where a great deal was said about artists expressing their feelings, as if . . . the feeling goes from the artist into the work while the work is being made. . . . What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the painting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us." (371-372)

Diagrams, displayed side by side (372)


". . . as we move forward, before we take an action, we can [from time to time] grasp the latent structure as an emotional substance, we may feel it as a vision — a dimly held feeling which describes where we are going, but is not yet concrete, in physical and geometrical terms. . . . we can sense, ahead of time, the quality of the completed whole . . . The final target, then, has the feeling which we anticipated much earlier, but often has an unexpected, unfamiliar geometry." (372)

~See Don Potts Sculpture Lecture
~Linked from Handmade Pixels, outro post
SYNAPSE~ Process for intensifying the feeling that is generated.