Minds on Monday: Games, Art, and Evolution II

We had a vigorous discussion last week about the merits of Bernard Suits’s definition of game. Of course, we did not reach agreement. But Tom Hurka and I argued that there is a difference between defining concepts and defining words. Our position was that Suits’s definition focuses on a valuable concept that fits most games, even if it is not precisely coextensive with the vernacular use of the word ‘game’.

Today, I want to work with a Suits-like game-concept, setting aside worries both about correspondence with the vernacular and about precise details. The idea I want to explore is that games have a reflexive structure shared by art. I also want to suggest that they might share something significant at the base level of the reflexive structure.

Let’s start with this. Why do games have value? According to Suits, it is because the rules make the attainment of some “prelusory goal” difficult. For example, the rules of golf make it difficult to get a ball in a hole; the rules of chess make it difficult to achieve a position in which the opposing king has no legal move. This may well be right, but I think it misses something. At least a part of the value of games is that they are fun. Or to put it in a slightly pompous way: games are a form of play. The rule-induced difficulty of games is what makes them so. (To forestall an objection: I am not saying that games are always play. Tiger Woods doesn’t have any fun on the golf course. As an owlish youth, I had no fun when forced to play games in school.)

The origin of play is, plausibly, the development of skill. By batting things around, or chasing things, kittens develop skills that they would need if they were wild animals. These skills are in a certain sense innate, but like language skills in humans, they do not emerge unless exercised. An important (though not the only) way for these skills to emerge is through play.  The value of kittens batting balls lies not in any effect on the balls, but in the effect that this has on the kittens. Evolution reinforces this by making it “fun”. This kind of fun is play.

Humans have invented games as forms of play. Games have the nested structure noted earlier; rule-induced difficulty makes them good developers of skill. True, they are not simply play. But they are fun because evolution encourages play. And they are valuable because they are fun. (Note that explanation of value bypasses evolutionary explanation. Evolutionarily, play is fun because it develops skill. But fun makes play valuable in itself.)

I should say more, but let me move on to art. Art evokes aesthetic appreciation. But this is not all. One may appreciate a mountain or a lake, or an exquisitely well-dressed person. But mountains are not works of art; nor are well-dressed people. There are three things we need to understand here. First: What does art have beyond being the occasion of appreciation? Second: Why is (positive) aesthetic response valuable? Third: Does the value of art derive from its power to evoke aesthetic appreciation?

The first question has a Suits-style answer. Art goes beyond aesthetic appreciation because it is intended to evoke appreciation in part by means of the audience understanding how its appreciation is evoked. For example, art has genres, and genres are codes. The artist exploits these codes (sometimes by violating them in meaningful ways), with the intention that the audience should appreciate her product in part by understanding how it exploits these codes. (I said more about this in the discussion linked above.)

The second question is more difficult, but here is a shot at answering it.  (Fortunately, the details are not terribly important, as long as some such story is available.) In natural scenes, order is significant because it betokens an object of perception. Symmetry and continuity are indicators of object boundaries, for example. Certain kinds of sounds are heard as significant because they indicate a specific kind of event. My suggestion is that our perceptual skills develop by focussing on orderly patterns in stimulus arrays. Evolution makes this focus enjoyable because it is good for the development of perceptual skills. In other words, a certain simple kind of aesthetic appreciation has value because it’s the concomitant of a kind of play.

At this point, it should be clear, I think, that a simple answer such as I have essayed to the second question is not going to account for the value of art. Though it’s somewhat plausible to think that the value of games is inherited from the value of play, it makes little sense to think that the value of art is inherited from that of aesthetic response to significant perceptual patterns.  For when I appreciate, for instance, how a particular melodic line deliberately violates a certain rule of resolution, I am not responding just to a perceptual phenomenon. Rather, I am intellectually appreciating something about the creation of something perceptual. This intellectual appreciation has nothing to do with the development of perceptual skills.

There is something unique about art. On the one hand, its universality across cultures and societies makes it likely that it is somehow evolved. Moreover, it has a structure that parallels games, which are not too hard to understand in evolutionary terms.  However, in the case of art, the higher level of the nested structure is fundamentally different in kind from the lower level. Thus, the value of the higher level cannot be subsumed to that of the lower.

This makes the evolutionary story much more complicated.