Von Neumann and the Temple of Depense

Three of the crucial concepts in Kantian metaphysics are space, time, and causality. Ulmer's lecture last week holds that the Kantian aesthetic exists somewhere between common sense and decision-making regimes of reason. Or, more appropriately, the aesthetic bridges them. If I recall previous reading on Kant's aesthetic theory, he holds that it also exists alongside and through space,time,causality.

It's causality that I think game theory most applies to. One of the most vital tenets of game theory (or one of its contingencies) is that experience changes one's behavior. For example, if you're in a game of chicken, and you know that your opponent Rosko the Shark has a tendency to drive straight, drink grain alcohol, and tear off his wheel as he speeds toward you, you'll likely swerve. Sure, you didn't prove anything to Rosko, but at least you're not dead.

Your making this decision relies on the givens of our sense of space and time but also on the causality that informs our creation of causality in our striving to understand the givens of the world.

What game theory attempts to do is to rationalize through practical reason how best to alter the state of things to instill a desired causality. So, for example, if one played chess mathematically, one could effect a causality that would dictate the moves (if she moves her knight here, I'll take it with my rook, setting up this move by her, and this move by me, ad nauseum).

The subject of game theory exists to scoop it all up, to maximize personal gain.
This is the figure of a limited economy, not a game economy.

We're trying to find the causality of the gift economy (the sacred) and, I suppose, attempting to figure out how to bring that sacred to the experience of entertainment, the defining function of electracy. We could then use that sacred to promote policy formation. How to strategize this kind of symbolic exchange?

Game theory's based on scientific rationality, a product of literacy (logically, I will do...). Electracy's based on the flesh, on feeling, on affect, pain and pleasure. What will a game theory with these tools look like?

Game theory predicts a subject's behavior or attempts to account for it, but as we noted, it's mostly used to point out what's right in front of us. It demystifies.

Part of Baudrillard's mission is to reinstate mystery, seduction, and the secret. So, I guess our game theory is to figure how digital rhetoric has seduced the subject, figuring out an already existing model, and, understanding those tenets, attempt to use its precepts to effect some kind of shift.

Game theory's inapplicability to human behavior comes from its failure to properly contextualize the subject. As we noted before, the human subject isn't the purely rational figure of game theory.

So, a subtenet of our wanderings may be to properly consider our subject. Is pain, pleasure, etc. still applicable. Do we still function according to affect?

I'm fairly certain we do, but reflection may complicate.

Perhaps.