Patri Friedman

The human condition is tension—tension between what one will do and what one ought to do, tension between the animal and the machine, tension between society and self, tension between man and woman, tension between heart and head

Why do we feel these tensions, and why are they at the core of our humanity? One could imagine a man who never feels conflicted in the slightest, who from the depth of animal instinct eats and ruts and shits with no care for alternatives

One could similarly imagine a man who never feels conflicted in the slightest, who always performs his duty like a machine, with never a longing in his heart. But on 2nd thought, in these cases, has one imagined a man?

Consider game theory: the search for a mathematical model that describes and predicts the behaviors of agents in competition. It describes human behavior because it is abstracted from human behavior.

we can conceive of perfected game theory, a fully correct and rarified model. Call it game theory prime, GTP. GTP is a mathematical model but from within humanity we experience it as emotional dramas, FIERY passion, like the radiance of the sun, the calculus of defect-cooperate.

Ontology is a shell game, and you're the mark; even so one can say that GTP "precedes" humanity. When water is liquid, what is ice? it's a phase shift, but the phase of ice "exists" in some sense, and it would not be so unreasonable to think of humanity as a phase shift of GTP