Game Gene Theory: How the Mind Actually Works and Why We All Survive

This is not a book about game theory and John Nash or about the selfish gene and Dawkins but it undercuts both.

There is no survival instinct, as Freud and Darwin believed, because we cannot see what choices will guarantee self-preservation. Survival will not compute. Secondly, there are thousands of alternate ways to survive and a module in the brain will not be able to choose among them because each choice is new, unknown, and cannot be prioritized. Thirdly, with such a need, how can you be compelled to move forward and survive in the future if you are already surviving now? You have already arrived. There must be another way to get around the unpredictability of life and an instinctive game playing compulsion is just such a way.

If you observe what elements are normally said to make up a game, there are six required elements: goals, rules, and play, as well as a need for progress, challenge and endings. Because these game factors are so widespread and universal they are the trace evidence of a game based psychology. They also become the template for further scientific investigations. The six parts that make up games have the following purposes: A compulsion to make arbitrary goals is there to move us forward. A compulsion to select arbitrary rules is there to help us reduce distractions and confusions. A compulsion to play makes us get around the unpredictability of events. With games our emotions react and make values. Our intellect evaluates and ranks based on the strength of those emotional reactions, positive or negative, in order to help us choose further goals, rules, and plays. In the same way that the sexual emotion is a trick that helps reproduction, so the game instinct is a trick that helps us all survive The book expands this logic as scientifically as possible.

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Introduction:
A problem exists today within science among various fields, especially in psychology and evolutionary psychology, one that I hope to rectify somewhat with the theory outlined below. The problem lies with a standard theory, one that says there is a survival instinct within all life forms.
I believe there is too much excluded factual information and research to make this idea satisfactory. The solution, as I see it, is to superimpose the new concept of a game gene, by which life is genetically tricked to survive, by a number of genes, through a desire to play games. For simplicity it is called game gene theory.
I will begin by briefly examining the standard theory in question followed by a rationale for rejecting it. Some background will follow which will show how game gene theory came about and the main section will be concerned with fleshing out this framework in order to confirm its viability. The last sections will outline some final problems concerning past survival instinct speculations and there will also be replies to two potential objections regarding the game gene alternative.

Standard Theory

Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Freud, William H.R. Rivers, Violet Firth, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker, among many theorists, have claimed repeatedly that there is a survival instinct, either for individual or group self-preservation, or for both. They did not look for exceptions that disproved their theories, or if they found them they tortured their ideas to fit, as in the concept that a gene itself has a will to survive. Pinker updates his school s account in 1997 in the assumptive and unsupported way of his predecessors, ...self-preservation, that universal biological imperative.... ...has to be programmed in . Many scientists today take such a notion as self-evident: life survives so a survival instinct must be the main genetic compulsion. Despite the idea s currency, suicidal and non-reproductive exceptions are endless