Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Game Life: The Ultimate Goal


In the last post I started conceiving life in a totally different imaginary way. Life is a game. I called this game "Game Life". Game Life is the game we all play. Whether we liked it or not we have no choice but playing it. I promised you that the manual of this game will be delivered to you soon. So here it is; the manual of Game Life.

Goal of the game

The ultimate goal of this game is to achieve Eudaimonia. You don't know what Eudaimonia is? Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek term commonly translated as happiness, flourishing or wellbeing. Why is the goal of this game stated as Eudaimonia rather than happiness? It is because the term Eudaimonia emphasizes the most adequate account we can offer of happiness. It emphasizes that happiness is the supreme good of any of your actions. It also emphasizes that achieving happiness can only be conceived as the realization of a list of irreducible values. Those values are friendship, understanding, accomplishment, practical reasoning, and last but not least pleasure.

Game Life is a multiplayer game. As a matter of fact more than 6 billion other players share this game with you at the moment. Millions of other players have played it long ago and those past players have contributed significantly to building this game and to your current situation in it. It is expected that many more players, more than what you might be even able to imagine will play this game in the future. Similarly, they will continue to influence this game.

To achieve eudaimonia, you must interact with other players. Interaction with other players is crucial for your progress in this game.

PTE & PACT

In this game each player must start with two different theories interacting together. First you must have what is called in this game the primary theory of Eudaimonia or (PTE). In addition you must have a primary theory of action or (PACT). PTE is a primary theory you hold of what you should achieve in this game. It is your initial vision of the goal of this game. PACT on the other hand is your initial theory of how to achieve the goals determined by your PTE.

In this game you pass through a preparatory stage. It is a stage corresponding to the childhood and adolescence stages of human life. In this stage you get, through other players, whether playing the role of parents, friends, celebrities, authors, or media figures, to form your PTE. In this stage you are not evaluated. Once you reach the adulthood stage, the real game begins.

In the preparatory stage, other players guide your actions. You are programmed to develop habits. Those habits will form your PACT. Your PACT aided by your built in ability to conceptualize will allow you to build your PTE. PTE and PACT interact together. Fist PACT form PTE, then PTE might change PACT. Again changes in PACT enforced upon you by surrounding circumstances or by the development of new habits might change the PTE which might again change PACT and so on. This continuous process of interaction between PACT and PTE is what is called learning. This process starts in the preparatory stage and goes on through all but the stage of the game. However, you will not be evaluated in this game until you pass the preparatory stage. It's PACT and PTE held by you then that counts the most.

Ancient players of this game had a PTE that was focused on mere survival and bonding to as much other players they can communicate with as possible. Through several generations of players, PTE has evolved into the form defined above. Current PTE held by most players conceives Eudaimonia as the realization of the above mentioned values. Unfortunately, lots of current players while holding this most recent form of PTE don't recognize that they do. In today's state of Game Life, lots of current players while in the preparatory stage get to develop a PACT that focuses mainly on the value of pleasure. This affected their PTE which similarly takes pleasure to be more important than other values. Such inappropriate PACTs and PTEs might have been facilitated by the relative easier possibility of gaining pleasure compared to other values in today's state of Game Life. Your very first task in Game Life might be to recognize the PTE that you really hold and develop a suitable PACT accordingly. More about this task will be explained later in the manual when tasks are explained.

There is an additional precaution which you must hold on your mind while playing this game. As it has been mentioned before, interaction with other players in this game is the most crucial part of the game. You have no choice but accepting the PTE and PACT formed in you by others in the preparatory stage. You can only develop the PTE and PACT you hold upon reaching adulthood. You can never discard them and start from scratch. If you do so, you have lost this game and game will be over for you. Developing the PACT and PTE you hold by the end of the preparatory stage is the main way through which the ultimate goal of the game can be realized. Again as mentioned before and as will be explained downward, developing PACT and PTE can only be achieved through interaction with other players.

Ok, guys, I think that's enough for now. I hope you like this imaginary line of thought I follow to consider how one should live his life. I will go on imagining in next posts. Till then, good luck…

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