Hi Reader,

Last week I wrote about games. At some point this week I had what I recall was a brilliant expansion on that idea, but I don't remember what it was and didn't write it down. This is a common experience for me as a father of young kids. I'm getting better at living with the frustration.

So this week you may in some way be getting my B-game, but it's still going to be about games, appropriately.

Let's continue to run with this idea that life is games for now. Here's an idea I edited out of last week's newsletter: truth is, at best, highly localized.

What does THAT mean?

In writing last week's newsletter, I noticed that, strangely enough, I wound up talking about true stories. I wouldn't have consciously made a connection between games and stories or games and truth, but I think my unconscious recognized something here that I want to shine a light on.

When I say truth is highly localized what I mean is that whatever I'm telling you is a story because it's made of words, and that while the story might be true, it's at best only true right here, right now. It's not true for yesterday or tomorrow, and certainly not 100 years from now.

An example story: there's a coffee cup on my desk. True story—it's right there. I'm touching it right... now, well, just then I mean. That's partly me being silly because I had to get my hand back to the keyboard to type the words and I couldn't be touching the mug at the same time. But it's also partly a nod to the fact that the story isn't true anymore. I'm not touching the mug right now.

And the sense in which the story is untrue is larger, even, than that. I've been imagining this story about a mug for a long time and haven't figured out how to tell it, but let's give it a shot.

So I say there's a mug on my desk. But what is that mug, really? "Mug" is just a shorthand way of saying a lump of clay someone shaped in a certain way, painted, and cooked in an oven until it got hard. And "clay" is just a shorthand way to refer to a composite material made of hydrous aluminum phyllosilicates formed over long periods of erosion of rocks like feldspar.

A few years ago someone grabbed some clay and made this mug. Before that time, it didn't exist. At some point in the future, it'll break, and then it will no longer exist. So when I say "this mug," I'm referring to a very temporary object in the scope of the billions of years the universe has been around and the billions of years it has left. On that scale, this mug is like nothing so much as a quantum blip. If we were to try to look at it over the scope of the universe, it wouldn't look like a mug, but rather like a random scattering of atoms that coalesced for a time in a certain form and then morphed some and crystallized and then sat in my house for a while and then broke apart and weathered away to sand before being blown outward by the sun going supernova. And after that, who knows? (Literally.)

Now THAT'S a mug!

Of course you see this is a game I'm playing with words. And it's an example of the larger thing I'm pointing to, which is that all "truth" is games we must play with words, and it is only relevant to right here, right now.

For me, at least, this is a big departure from what I was raised to believe (and which I think a lot of people still believe) which is that Truth is a universal, fixed thing. More and more, that seems like a mistake to me. At the same time, it strikes me as very ironically appropriate that I'm trying to contextualize the True perspective from which no truths are true. Maybe we never escape our childhood inculcations.

To weave in a thread of philosophy here—or at least my very limited understanding of it—there's an old idea called Platonic Ideals that says, for instance, the way I can know the three trees outside my window are all trees (even though they look objectively quite different) is because there's this "ideal tree form" that exists somewhere out there (in the World of Forms, which I suppose I must somehow be tapping into) as a point of comparison for these three crude simulacra, as well as all the other trees I've ever seen and will ever see.

That makes a kind of sense, at least. And I think it's what the idea of Universal Truth is like: an infinitely-distant projection of the symbolic reference of an immediately-present thing.

But symbolic language also seems very capable of explaining our ability to think in the abstract.

One more piece of context and then let's wrap this up for today.

I just spent way too much time looking for this reference and failed to find it, so here's my recollection: a teacher was explaining to her students two different descriptions of gravity. First, there's Newton's formula:

...contrasted with an ancient, poetic, perhaps spiritual description: gravity is matter longing to return to itself.

Newton's formula is held up as an example of analytic, symbolic, language-based thinking. It is precise, unyielding, predictive, empirical.

The poetic description is held up as an example of things-in-themselves, and is more holistic, insightful, piercing, and, in a way, truer.

But it's not truer. Or, at least, we don't/can't know if it is.

If I have a point, it's this: I'm playing a game that I say is about truth. I say that even while telling you I'm lying, because I'm only lying in that I have to use words and words aren't true. That story I shared about the mug is something precious and beautiful to me. I want to say that I don't know why, but on some level I must because I feel it's true. We're all spinning through this existence, coalesced from stardust, apparently separate yet necessarily and infinitely connected.

I am moved by that. And that's the truth. Even if I don't know the score of the game.