> The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.
(The player of Games, banks)
(The player of Games, banks)
More specifically (and this is IMO critical), what pins such concepts down and makes them real, is not belief in the concept - but everyone's belief that everyone else believes in those concepts. E.g. it's not my belief in value of money that makes money valuable for me - it's my belief that the bank and the shopkeeper and the taxman all believe the money is worth something, which they do because they believe everyone else agrees too. This recursion allows us to expect certain things, such as me expecting to get food from store in exchange for money, and as long as enough people believe everyone else believes, the concept is as good as real.
Point being: this is not some gotcha or trickery, but the very stuff our lived reality is made off.
While I understood the idea of shared beliefs for particular cases (god, money), being presented with the full concept was very interesting (that was for me when reading hararis 'Sapiens').
The gotcha really is, that our massive use of LLMs creates new weird shared beliefs en passent