Making space for play

learning from our immediacy and traveling between worlds

This is a guest post from Julian Kiverstein to accompany Episode #65 on play.

In play humans and other animals will engage in activities that, seem to the outside observer, pointless. When animals play, they expend energy in pursuit of goals that seem to have no connection to survival and reproduction. If we think of all animal behaviour as the outcome of some elaborate cost-benefit calculations, that animals expend energy on seemingly pointless activities would seem to make no sense.

In response to the question of why animal’s play the late anthropologist David Graeber once responded, “well, why shouldn’t they”? The idea that animals shouldn’t spend their time doing anything as frivolous as playing, assumes that animals will only do what there is a clear cost-benefit, economic rationale for doing.

However, Graeber’s point, and I would agree, is that not everything that animals do is the outcome of an elaborate rational or economic calculation. Animals play just for the sheer fun of doing so. The drive to play may well be a fundamental drive and a motivation shared by many animals with otherwise very different ways of life.

What does it mean to play?

Play is notoriously difficult to define. De Kowen (2017) despaired of ever being able to conceptually pin down something as spontaneously free, “idiosyncratic, personal and profound” as play. In my conversation with Andrea, I relied on an understanding of play we have developed a few years ago based on the predictive processing theory (Andersen et al. 2022). Before I outline our proposal, first a few words explaining the predictive processing theory of the mind.

The key idea is that the organism does not passively wait for sensory information to come in from the world but actively generates sensory states and in doing so makes it maximally likely that its body will tend to remain in or close to homeostatic balance with the environment.

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Key Ideas of Predictive Processing, a technical interlude:

Predictive processing models the human mind using three key computational components: predictions that are generated out of a hierarchically structured probabilistic model the organism is hypothesised to embody; prediction errors that are the outcome of comparing active predictions with sensory information originating in the body and world; and context-sensitive precision estimates that weigh the reliability of predictions relative to prediction errors. The organism-environment system self-organizes around an imperative to minimize prediction error, which can be achieved in two ways: either through the update of predictions or by the dynamically recalibration of behavior, thereby ensuring that the agent remains in a viable and adaptive relationship with its environment.

Here’s the definition of play we proposed in our Psychological Review paper using key ideas from predictive processing:

“Play is a behaviour in which the agent, in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate toward sweet spots of relative complexity with the goal of resolving surprise. We further propose that play is experientially associated with a feel-good quality because the agent is reducing significant levels of prediction error (i.e., surprise) faster than expected.”

Play activities involve a kind of niche construction

The idea I want to pick out from this quote and briefly elaborate on is that play activities involve a kind of niche construction.

In evolutionary biology, niche construction refers to the process of organisms modifying their environment, in ways that positively influence their own and others’ evolutionary fitness (Laland et al., 2015).

In predictive processing, niche construction has been modelled as a form of active inference, whereby the organism offloads some of the work of prediction error minimisation, that would otherwise need to be done by the brain, onto stable structures in the environment, a kind of extended predictive processing (see, e.g. Constant et al. 2022).

We argue that in play, animals actively seek and create situations that they expect to be surprising. When the environment offers no uncertainty, animals will actively create it. This may seem like a very surprising thing for animals to do from the perspective of predictive processing, which claims that the brain self-organizes around a single imperative to minimise uncertainty. Is there not something self-defeating about actively creating uncertainty for a creature whose main business is hypothesized to be keeping uncertainty to a minimum?

To understand why creatures that act to keep surprise at bay would be motivated to actively create surprise, we need to understand why play is intrinsically rewarding. I need to unpack the idea of just right surprise, the sweet spot between predictability in which there is nothing new for the animal to learn, and unpredictability.

Development takes place at the edge of our current abilities because it is at this edge that new insights are to be found. The just right surprises that we create in play are surprises that we can resolve given our current level of ability and thereby learn from.

Crucially when we resolve surprises that are right on the edge of our current abilities this feels good to us because we have done better than we expected to do. Feelings of pleasure can be modelled in predictive processing as better than expected rate of error reduction (see Van de Cruys 2017; Kiverstein et al 2019).

Predictive processing therefore has a potential answer to the question of why play is intrinsically rewarding – why play activities are valuable for their own sake, and not only as a means to achieving other independently valuable goals. Predictive processing can explain in other words why animals play just for the sheer fun of doing so.

Adalberta Kiessewetter | Vienna: City Park (Wien: Stadtpark)

If play is so fun, why don’t we adults spend more of our time engaging in it?

Part of the answer to this question surely lies in the culture we grow up in that treats play as frivolous and unproductive. My co-author Marc Andersen has suggested that adults become narrow-minded and inflexible with age. We amass knowledge over the course of our adult lives and become increasingly certain and fixed in our thinking about how the world works.

In terms of the space of possible ideas we can explore, we tend to stay close to home, restricting our exploration of different ideas to what we already know.

This contrasts with children who are more disposed to explore a wide range of different ideas and ways of thinking about the world. The conservativeness of adult thinking runs the risk of trapping us in suboptimal ways of thinking and doing things. Think here of the Einstellung effect in which prior experience and habits hinder the person’s ability to find a better or more efficient solution to a problem.

Adults can become overconfident in their beliefs leading to what Nguyen (2022) has called “epistemic traps” such as echo chambers in which believers automatically discredit and distrust information that challenges their beliefs.

Creating high quality learning environments is a key responsibility of the university. Why don’t we create more spaces for play in the classroom? We find such spaces in the arts and humanities, disciplines that are around the world are being cut back, denigrated and are widely viewed as trivial. Students following the arts and humanities have fallen precipitately.

Teaching and research, in what is left of the arts and humanities, are organized around performance measures. Curriculums and their contents are built around pre-determined standards of success that students then try to live up to. There is little or no reward given to initiative, creativity and independent thinking. Researchers aim to produce fast knowledge – unambiguous results that can be published in high-ranking journals as fast as possible.

There is less room for “slow science”, for spaces designed to sustain paradox, support critical reflection on difficult questions, and engages a diversity of perspectives. The goal of producing shiny results fast leads researchers to forget to ask questions, to raise doubts, to maintain an attitude of not-knowing, of uncertainty.

What would it mean to create space for play in the university? What it does not mean is the so-called “gamification” of education in which elements from game design such as progress bars and leaderboards are used in educational settings to make them more fun for students.

Gamification plays along with a system in which success in learning can be measured and quantified. What is lost in the process is the intrinsic joy of learning. Play in the classroom means trying out ideas because of the sheer fun of doing so just like in animal play. Trying out new ideas will require one to shift perspectives from styles of thinking and doing that have become normal, familiar, routine and mundane.

The playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller described play as an openness to transcending the rules that ordinarily govern us. More recently, Maria Lugones (photo below) has characterised playfulness as allowing us to be travellers between different worlds, which she describes as a “loving way of being and living”.

For Lugones, playfulness is the loving attitude a person has when travelling between different worlds (understood as culturally constructed realities). Playfulness is what allows us to perform a shift from being one person to being a different person, a shift that was required for her to enter a loving relationship with her mother, to see her mother as she was constructed by the patriarchal society she inhabited.

What would it mean to bring Lugones’ attitude of playfulness into the university? It would require setting aside of rules and conventional expectations and an entering into teaching and learning with an openness to and indeed an active creation of surprises. It will mean not binding ourselves to any construction of reality but opening ourselves to travelling between worlds with a spirit of love for what we might find.

It will mean sometimes allowing ourselves to play the fool and not concerning ourselves with how others see us because we travel between worlds with lightness and humility. To teach and learn playfully is to undertake these activities because they bring joy and wonder. Playful teaching and learning allow us to free our minds, to set aside conventional rule based, expected ways of thinking and being. In freeing our minds we open ourselves to encountering the beautiful.

Photo by Anton Volnuhin on Unsplash

References:

Andersen, Marc Malmdorf ; Kiverstein, Julian ; Miller, Mark & Roepstorff, Andreas (2023). Play in predictive minds: A cognitive theory of play. Psychological Review 130 (2):462-479.

Constant, Axel, Clark, Andy, Kirchhoff, Michael & Friston, Karl J. (2022). Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skulls. Mind and Language 37 (3):373-394.

Graeber, David. 2014. What is the point if we can’t have fun? The Baffler 24.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun

Kiverstein, J., Miller, M. & Rietveld, E. The feeling of grip: novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain. Synthese 196, 2847–2869

Lugones, Maria. 1987. Playfulness, “world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia 2.2, 3-19.

Nguyen, C. Thi (2022). Playfulness versus epistemic traps. In Mark Alfano, Jeroen De Ridder & Colin Klein (Ed’s) Social Virtue Epistemology. London: Routledge

Schiller, Friedrich (1967). On the aesthetic education of man: in a series of letters. New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby.

Van de Cruys, S. (2017). Affective Value in the Predictive Mind. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.). Philosophy and Predictive Processing: 24. Frankfurt am

Read Graeber’s esssay here