Re: game theory

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I think it's a mistake to see psychopathology as ever "functional."

"Success" can't be furthered by unrealistic thinking.  Even if we
interpret "success" as making money, psychopathological thinking will
be less successful than rational thinking.  In Keynes's analysis of
financial markets, for instance, the "wisest" investors are understood
to be those sufficiently free themselves from psychopathology to be
able to understand and predict the psychopathological thought and
behaviour of others.  However, to treat money-making or "goods" in the
utility function sense as the end of life is itself a mistake, a
mistake expressing the same psychopathology as the unrealistic means
adopted in their pursuit.

This last point explains why the idea of willing as psychopathological
is inconsistent with the idea of it as "evil."  Individuals doing bad
things are mistaken about what they ought to be doing, not evil.

I've several times elaborated what I take to be Marx's conception of
the "good" and of the means appropriate to its pursuit. According to
him and to the tradition in thought to which he belongs,  the "good" is
the activity of creating and appropriating beauty and truth within
relations of mutual recognition (an idea elaborated, for instance, in
the account of true human production at the end of the Comments on
James Mill
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
index.htm>).   It's radically inconsistent with a "utility function"
game theory approach.  It isn't just the way greed enters into the
conventional conception of the latter that creates the inconsistency.

Ted