The End Game

The end game is a concept that is crucial in making correct choices. Knowing to what end your actions are working towards my seem obvious however it is surprising how many choices are made without any reference or even idea of what the ultimate objective is. Being a gamer I relate most things that I can to games as the methods of reasoning in them are widely applicable in real life yet they are very simple by comparison thus making it easier to apply them. In any strategy game knowing how you plan to win and the likely situations that will arise as your plan comes to fruition is essential, it is something to always have in the back of your mind while playing. If I were writing an essay with the aim of getting better at games this would be one of the first lessons. With games it is obvious what the ultimate aim is, usually it is simply to win. Knowing what the aim is in games it comes down to a simple case of when and how. Even so, in many of the games I play I see people repeatedly doing the same things, perhaps the powering up stages of the early game, whatever that might be, and failing to ever focus in on an end point. Games might have resources you obtain and then convert into points or ways to optimise efficiency and so being efficient and getting lots of resources will be generically good things to be doing. If you lose sight of how and when the end will come about and simply focus on those core elements of the game you will get pipped to the post by someone who saw the end in sight and stopped gathering more resources so as to focus on converting those they have into points.

I notice many people act much in this way in their lives, they repeat the same cycles as if they were going to live forever. This is more understandable, unlike games our lives don't have the end detailed in the rule book with known conditions or timings, nor do we have an aim laid down for us to finish with the most points, complete specific objectives or eliminate all our opponents. This essay is not concerned with discussing aims for individuals which I have covered to some extent in other essays, most notably “The Meaning of Life”. All that should be taken from this essay in regards to ones own life is that you should have at least one aim and you should be mindful of your own mortality. Failure to do both will lead to you making choices that are incorrect from a game perspective, which typically translates to being inefficient or treading water.

Often thinking with an end game in mind is coined “thinking of the big picture”. I prefer to call it end game thinking as it draws attention to the key element involved. Big picture implies you need to know lots about everything between now and the end game however you can, and have to, make do with only knowing about things now and where you are trying to get to with little knowledge of what may lie in-between. Both big picture and end game thinking at least conjure up the idea of making investments and doing things that might not always be the best for right now to make it better for later. More sayings spring to mind such as “a stitch in time saves nine”, while I am not sure about the ratios and feel I would need a more exact time scale to work with the sentiment holds very true. Understanding the situation you are in and being mindful of where you want to end up generally allows you to make good calls despite having no knowledge of how you are going to get from where you are to where you wish to be.

One thing that has always surprised me is that the human race seems very focused on the here and now and devotes very little time to thinking about the end game for our species. It is much harder for an individual to work out an endgame for themselves when they also have to work one out for society as well so as to frame theirs within it. Regardless of this is it is also much harder for state to create policy or infrastructure without an endgame for humanity in mind. We end up just patching over the problems we presently face, working out road-hog isolated solutions. What we should be doing is tweaking and making changes cohesively towards an end goal instead of taking each problem in isolation and covering up its mess in some thoughtless manner. Rather than the cyclic boom-bust nature of modern society we would have a steadily improving state of affairs if changes were made with an ultimate and holistic aim in mind.

Humanity is a fairly composite term and should be broken down into a few more specific categories within which we can more usefully discuss the end game concept. There is life and evolution of which humanity is and intertwined part. We then have the physical universe in which we live and how that is expected to change. We have society with its culture, laws, systems, infrastructure, morality and so forth. We also have knowledge, a concept for which the end game is pretty obvious – know all that can be known. This leaves scientists with an easier time that most groups of people in society as they are aware of the ultimate aims of their roles. There are also religious end games, some of which are described, others not however these are moving outside the scope of this essay. For humanity to sensibly consider what its endgame might look like it must consider the forces of life and evolution and the changing universe and reconcile them with any utopian social ideas.

The physical universe may not be fully understood by us but this should not prevent us from preparing for what we know or expect to happen based on our present understanding. Overall the physical universe is the slowest effect on humanity of the ones I have named, which given that evolution is also included, should demonstrate just how long term we are talking. Although slow the physical universe is something we have least control over and must work with or around in whatever plans we may hatch. The main date in the diary set by the physical world in regards the endgame for humanity is the expiry date of the Sun. We have at least four billion years to prepare for this event but should we wish to survive as a species we have to have populated other worlds or found ways of surviving a nomadic life in space. It is not something we should necessarily be working on now but it would be remiss to simply assume life can go on as it is indefinitely on our surprisingly transient (when discussed in the universal context rather than that of our own lifespan) hunk of rock we call home.

There is also speculation about the universe re-collapsing or expanding into an entropy death which is much much further down the line than the Sun's expiry date however poses a more awkward question for humanity. Perhaps there is no getting around the end of the universe and humanity needs to have achieved all its goals by this stage. Perhaps a species needs to know its own mortality in order to properly motivate them towards their goals much like it does with individuals. This feels counter intuitive at first as things might seem a bit pointless if it is all going to come to nothing and so the mortality of a species would be a de-motivator. It could just be that we are so much in the infancy of our species life cycle that we are all but oblivious to the appropriate ultimate aims of our species. Like a newborn baby that only really appreciates its immediate needs humanity often works towards fairly superficial ends. If you apply the de-motivation argument to the situation of the baby who is only aware of its immediate needs and suddenly make it also aware of its mortality it might seem logical to give up trying to satisfy them now and accept the inevitable. This is because we are not accounting for all the other reasons for being that the baby will come to appreciate above and beyond basic needs as it grasps a fuller understanding of its situation and environment. It will come to understand it is destined to die but will continue to strive in life towards ends other than just basic survival. Certainly as individuals we have ascended beyond pure survival however the species as a whole only makes advancements to serve the comfort and convenience of individuals. We presently do very little to further the species beyond our increase to the pool of knowledge however we don't even put that to great use, often ways to kill each other or novel new ways to consume more resources. We have the capacity to makes the choices faced by gods yet we still act much like the other animal species on the planet, just finding places we can exploit and then filling them up with our numbers. As the wise agent Smith noted to Neo, we have almost regressed below our fellow higher animals to the level of a virus based on our present inability to conserve our environment.

As an aside, the argument that a super intelligent alien species has not made any contact with us therefore acting as proof against their existence, or at least any with the capacity to travel about space with some ease, seems flawed based on our own preconceptions of what an evolved or mature species looks like. I am not suggesting this is a proof of alien life, only that this line of reasoning certainly does not prove their non existence. Our mating rituals, our houses, basically everything we do can also be found elsewhere in the world performed by other lifeforms. Are our houses sufficiently more complex than a birds nest when judged on the same scale as a super alien intelligence? Is our language that much more advanced than the sounds made by a pack of wolves that an alien observer would notice the difference? Certainly human achievement is monumental when compared to the achievements of any other species native to Earth, but given that totals at nil it is hard to guage a nominal level of achievement. I would argue that evolution as a mechanism has achieved much but that its various non-human offspring when defined as species or individuals have failed to break their mould and have no achievements that could be called their own. Humanity needs to have some humility in regards to our progress when we are conceiving of an end game plan. Simply outclassing the other apes is unlikely to be noteworthy on a galactic scale.

Much of what motivates the living other than satisfying immediate wants and needs are things that can be left behind after death. There is a clear difference between the end of a species as a result of the events of the universe and the death of an individual. If the universe ends there will be nothing left to benefit from anything. Rather than ruin the analogy however I think this highlights our lack of understanding and our inability to conceive of what our ultimate aims could be and how they might be relevant. Simply put it is impossible to imagine something you have no notion of at all. The hurdles imposed on our species by the universe set both technological and philosophical challenges but they are so very far away that they seem all but irrelevant in our lives. Presently then it is just good food for thought and something to be dimly aware of. We are pointed in the right direction at least, with our scientists and philosophers compasses being dead on (in terms of their ends games, not always in terms of ideas or pursuits) giving us valuable knowledge and insight, however we are somewhat constrained by our short term individual goals and lack of direction as a species.

The evolutionary end game is a much more pressing question than how we are to survive the death of the Sun or be relevant in light of the end of the universe. It is rapid by comparison but not so much that it would be too significant except for two things. One is that we are bypassing understood evolutionary mechanisms with our technology such as medicine preventing natural selection from working as it used to and secondly we are becoming very adept at tinkering with genetics thus opening a whole new world of possibilities. In a classic sense we think of evolution slowing honing and dividing species into more specialized, adept and diverse organisms able to best exploit an environment. This view breaks down when we apply it to modern man. We have become so good at exploiting our environments we no longer need the help of the tediously slow biological evolution process. The problem is we are taking control of something without any idea of the direction we should go in. Eugenics is a fairly ugly grey area and a debate that needs having and resolving soon. It is not just our own genetics we are altering but that of all species we farm and even, although to a much lesser extent, all those species whose environments we affect. Selective breeding and GM foods are altering things outside the classic scope of survival of the fittest. It is not that taking control of the direction of evolution is a bad thing, indeed it can and does offer us a wealth of useful opportunities, the concern is that we are not aware of the ramifications of our actions as much as we might like.

It is most likely people would chose to use our increasing control over genetics to select for desirable traits as our society sees it such as intelligence, tall and good looking with athletic prowess while cutting out defects such as poor eye sight or perhaps even allergies. A pragmatic suggestion might be to make people much much smaller so we consume less food and energy and can live in less space. This would be great for easing expanding population levels and would be more in line with species evolving to suit their environment better. The idea is however farcical both logistically and in terms of things like human rights. Who would agree or want to have their offspring genetically shrunk a bit even if it were for the good of humanity? Certainly this is one of the biggest questions that humanity will face thus far in its path. Atomic weapons are to date the greatest hurdle we have come to and although we have part cleared it I suspect we are not fully out of the danger zone. Either way, the bomb gave us terrifying control over each other and on local environments however the progress we have made in biological and genetic fields give us control over evolution itself. It is like those sci-fi horror b-movies where the robots become self aware and start making more of themselves using the designs of their creators, except we are the rebellious robots in this simile, not the benevolent creator, which is of course simply evolution. We need to decide not only the moral issues and the practical issues but also, and perhaps most importantly what direction we wish to go in regards to our end game. I suspect if it is left to the free markets and capitalism to develop then its uses will be solely egotistic and superficial. By that I do not mean just physical beauty but also things like athletic prowess or even intellect. Ultimately it would become a fairly cyclical and pointless affair where we would genetically select for things that would be “in trend” culturally speaking, people would conform to certain standards of beauty that had as much basis as what colour is in season. Generally such things would be selected for based on the prestige it would bring individuals and not for how they can benefit society or even humanity. If this were the case genetics would be a squandered power, we would remain animals and not become gods. I am perhaps being overly harsh as it would be difficult not to wind up with medical and intellectual perks as a result of tinkering with evolution inside a free market society which themselves would contribute significantly to the further development of the species. As yet I have no real answers to the direction and use for genetics, I would most like to see it used to discover more pure and direct forms of communication and/or higher or combined forms of consciousness however I realise this makes me sounds rather like a hippie. I have no notion of how this would be done nor what it would achieve, it simply feels like it is more worthy that making my offspring have less body hair or ensuring they are the higher end of the height spectrum.

While genetics may pose some very challenging and immediate questions and the notion of galactic significance is rather abstract and difficult to conceive the social end game is somewhat straight forward. As society is something that has essentially been constructed and defined by us the rules governing its optimisation and end game options are far more obvious and logical. It is a composite of laws, tradition, morality, culture, economics, infrastructure and governmental systems. Society is also a tool by which we can more efficiently work and live together for mutual advantage. As I mentioned earlier in the essay, we use ad-hoc solutions to the problems caused by any one small part of society and often disregard the effects it has on the overall system. Things work well enough in the short term and so a long term or cohesive solution is not found. The utopia is the endgame for society however there is not just one single utopian solution but many. Each person may have an idea of what their own utopia may look like based on their own political sway and other preferences in life and many of those may be valid utopian visions. The true test of a utopia, and whether it is an appropriate social end game is not how much the various ideals please you but how well the various elements blend together. To have a valid utopia the morality has to align with the economic policies, which in turn both have to work within the law and so forth. Presently we have a situation where our society is misaligned, there is overlap within the general moral compass, laws and the economy etc but not at all points and unsurprisingly it is these points at which you find the problems in society arise. An example is that our capitalist economy appropriately satisfies many of our ideas of freedom however its polarising effect on wealth does not fit as well with many peoples idea of justice or equality. Our economy is set very well to fuel the pace of innovation however it does little to help conserve our resources or environment. We are guided by our morality, culture and tradition but we do not control them directly and as such any utopia will be heavily defined by those of the times. In defining our utopias however we have complete control over the economy, the law and the systems by which things are done. If all the things that would be utopians have control over can be made to seamlessly work together as if one great machine and not independent parts, while also appropriately reflecting the less controllable aspects then you would have a worthy candidate to aim for as the end game for society.