5/30/2023 0 Comments The player of games![]() ![]() The Culture is committed to a Whorfian thesis about language, and its language has been designed to facilitate the flourishing of the Culture. ![]() Perhaps the humans are thought the useful redundancy of the Culture. In this volume of the series, we never learn what keeps the machines from killing the humans they outsmart. Its ruling ideology (it's called a 'philosophy' by themselves) is 'Strength in depth redundancy over-design." (239) This is an ideology of precautionary principles. Jointly these two societies inhabit the Culture, which is extremely powerful in the galaxy. This intergalactic human society is surrounded by an, in part, hidden machine-culture in which super smart machines and networks reveal consciousness and intelligence that outstrip anything we are capable of. The action starts in an imperial, utopian somewhat anarchic (there are few laws) society with little scarcity (nor money) and not much death full of semi-clever drones that serve and keep humans alive. The Player of Games is a clever science fiction novel, but here I want to treat it as a contribution to Socratic Political Theory ( recall here and here). Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society's games revealed so much about its ethos, it's philosophy, its very soul.-Iain M. ![]()
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