Caring about the game

LISTEN. What a nice story they told yesterday on Sunday Morning, about an old bucket of balls that means so much more. It's a story about connecting across the generations, which to my mind is what the human game is ultimately all about.

The World Series is now set, with the Dodgers' Game 7 win last night following the Rays' the night before, and to my delight and slight surprise I actually care. Same for the Titans' win in OT after a stunning last-seconds score to tie the Texans. It's good to care about things you don't really care about, that's another way of thinking about Moral Holidays. Sundays are good for those. But I already don't really care about who won.

In our penultimate reading of Falter today in Environmental Ethics, Bill McKibben says that's not surprising. It's precisely because we expect the games to continue that any particular outcome, the thrill of any particular victory, the agony of any particular defeat -- exciting or excruciating though it may be in the moment -- quickly recedes into the annals of trivia.

Our games "divert a preposterous amount of our time and energy" but their meaning eludes us. "Once the final game of the season has receded a few days into the past, even the most die-hard fan doesn't really care that her team won," we quickly shift focus from World Series to Spring Training. "What we remember are the stories... 'It's how you play the game' is the truest of cliches."

And the cliche that Baseball (or tennis, or stock car racing, or whatever) is Life means just that, that we have stories to tell about how they or we played those games and somehow made ourselves think they mattered, made ourselves care. They do matter because we care, as Roger Angell so smartly said: “we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved…”

The point is to keep our games going, to keep the stories coming, to keep on caring. If we can still care about the little games, maybe we'll still have stories to tell about the bigger game, the human game. Then we all win, and it'll all seem to mean something. If we don't play well with others, though, we'll be all played out. We won't Live Strong, we won't take charge of our lives, won't conquer the Alps of our imagination or attest the power of the human will. We won't make it into the Hall, at least not without a meaning-sapping asterisk. 

McKibben's a baseball fan, who undertstands how stories keep old games alive from a mere spectators' point of view. But he's also a distance skier who understands that the meaning of finishing 48th depends on summoning powers of will not from a pill but from reserves built of training and resolve. "I'm not here to talk about the past," Mark McGwire stonewalled about his own shortcut to glory before he was quickly upstaged by Barry Bonds (another shortcutter). But the storied past, and the prospect of generating more stories today and tomorrow and tomorrow, is exactly what we're all here for.

Which brings us to Google's Ray Kurzweil, dreaming like his bosses Brin and Page of upgrading "our version-one biological bodies" and backing up our memories and stories in a "synthetic neocortex in the cloud." But would the backup be us, would the stories be ours? Can you suggest a Smart Reply, Ray?

Ray's vision sounds Marxist/utopian: "As we get smarter, we can create more profound intellectual expressions--music, literature. Beauty and artistic expressions of all kinds." McKibben: "Freed from the need to work, we'll paint paintings, play the saxophone, write books all day." If our smart machines let us.

How smart is it to equate the supposedly limitless exponential acceleration of computing power with evolved and evolving human-level intelligence? What can we possibly think it would mean for our machines to be billions of times smarter than us, as Ray predicts by the end of this century?

And in the meantime, will we be talking to our cars and trusting them with our lives? McKibben likes his IPAs, as do I, and is intrigued by the thought that he may one day be able indulge his taste for them at some Boulevard or other without having to worry about the drive home. But the smart car "won't be able to carry on an interesting discussion about whether this is the best course for your life." Well, why can't my car be accessorized with Alan Watts built in? What a smart feature that would be!

But seriously, to be "smart as a human across the board" raises questions. Smart as which humans? Doesn't the "board" include intangible dimensions of intelligence, emotional and self-comprehending, for which no computer has yet demonstrated any capacity?

That's a big yet. Maybe it's forever. The only way we'll know is to keep our game going. Either way, it'll be the greatest story ever told. Will humans tell it? Or post-human hybrids? Aren't we telling it now?

Maybe we'll use CRISPR to create better story-tellers, or to create an insuperable gap between Naturals and Genetically Enhanced Superhumans. Bill Joy, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Jaron Lanier and others have interesting ideas about whether the future will include us, but our present ideas about the future are presumably already shaping it. Those who say we should restrict our gaze to the now, it seems to me, are missing that point.

Or, perhaps mind is entirely epiphenomenal, in which case I suppose we should just relax, tell some stories, and watch the show. But in that case, I don't think I'd care about the result. And I do care. I also think our children will "supplant" us, theirs will them, and so on down the line.

If the game goes on.