Yes. And you find that problematic because "game" implies that it isn't serious?
What makes something serious? Pain or threat of loss makes something serious. You can also choose how serious you're going be when playing a game...etc.
Hurm, my friend, when we try to talk about anything we have to use language, and language is essentially metaphorical. So when I use a phrase like "somewhere along the line", I'm not automatically implying that time is a real thing: I'm just using a colloquialism. I feel quite a lot of your comments (no offence intended) are semantic nitpicking; I suppose if I'd made my longish post twice or three times longer in an attempt to accurately express my thoughts, I might have been a tad more faithful to them -- If not to the actual truth, which of course I can't say I know for sure. In general, I try to convey my uncertainty by fairly liberal use of words and phrases like
perhaps,
would,
could,
might,
seems,
in my opinion, and so on.
You yourself use an engaging phrase (maybe a neologism; at any rate, I've never heard it before) like
baby God, which on one level seems humorously mocking, but on another does convey fairly accurately the idea that M@L isn't the finished product, but is constantly evolving.
Notice how right there I have implied time. Indeed, the present participle, a verbal root ending in "-ing", as in "evolving", is the product of language, which is saturated in the experience we all have of mass, distance and duration. As (my reading of) Don Hoffman implies, the various elements of language aren't in an of themselves literal representations of what actually
is. They're more
iconic representations of something that we experience in a certain way. Note how
something is itself a metaphorical expression: but how else could I refer to
anything (there I go again) without using words predicated on how we perceive the world? We perceive it as concrete, comprising all sorts of
things and
events (there I go yet again, implying time) that seem to be exactly as they appear.
But I doubt they
are exactly as they appear - which I think is one of the predicates of Bernardo's idealism. We're constantly trying to express the ineffable using concrete terminology. I'd have to do that even if I
could perceive
dinge an sich (things in themselves, as Kant put it, not even trying to avoid the concretisation of
things) as they actually might be. Language is all I have, for better or worse.
I can have some approximate inner sense of what mass, distance and duration might mean, but can I express that in an accurate and meaningful way? Probably not, especially with a picky reading of my semantics, but what the heck, I'll take a stab at it.
Suppose that matter, time and space don't exist in the way that naive realists assert they do. Then what might these words actually represent?
Matter could be just a word used to describe apparent objects that we can perceive with the senses.
Time and space may be just words we use to denote degrees of familiarity with such apparent objects. Tables and chairs are very familiar; mountains are less familar unless we live next to, or are climbing, one; the planet Mars, the sun and so on even less so.
That which is more familiar than something else seems easier to get to, either sensorily or pyschologically (or maybe some combination of both). Hence perceived distance might in a way be related to the degree of difficulty of getting up "close and personal" so to speak. In psychological terms, don't we often figuratively use distance as a metaphor? I've just done it with the word "close", and the word "distant" is frequently used to describe those who, for whatever reason, tend to keep themselves to themselves.
Then again, don't we often say things like: "he wants to be a doctor, but he's still got a long way to go"? Here we're describing something in terms of distance when time might be just as appropriate. In fact we often use the concepts of time and distance interchangeably: but when we want to distinguish the two explicitly (as in science), we are careful to make distinctions. But still, the two concepts do seem intimately associated. Distance makes little sense without time, and vice-versa. The light-year or -second implicitly combines the two: how
far light travels in a
year or
second.
Our models of the world are, really, built on metaphors that rely on how we perceive it. The fact that we can quantify such perceptions seems to reinforce their concrete reality; that's often very
useful, of course, but
usefulness may not actually be the standard in play -- it puts an anthropomorphic spin on things.
Psychology and perception are also intimately associated. Don't we often say things like: "Newton
perceived the mathematical relationship between mass and gravity"? Actually, Newton didn't actually perceive any such thing: he
hypothesised it, and that turned out to be a useful: but is F=G(M1.M2)/D^2 a literally accurate description of what might be going on? Or , for that matter, is Einstein's curved time-space cause for gravity? This, of course, despite the fact that Newton's idea is good enough to get a man to the moon, and Einstein's to be able to predict what happens to starlight during a solar eclipse.
What the heck
is gravity? As far as I'm aware, no one knows, and still less knows
why it seems to exist ("curved space-time" isn't a reason: it's a model). People go about giving names to concepts and thereby seem to make them concretely exist. People (me included) blithely accept the terms and bandy them about as if we knew what we were talking about. We paint the world using verbal colours based on what we perceive, but this is quite probably not what's actually there. It could well all be an illusion, not in the sense of entirely fictitious pink elephants, but more akin to a stick in a certain light that looks like, and is interpreted as, a snake.
Good and evil are, likewise, anthropomorphic concepts. We feel so sure that they actually exist and are in opposition. But maybe, as Idries Shah said, good and evil intertwine. What seems to be for the good might actually turn out to be for the bad, and vice-versa. People can suffer, regardless of whether or not evil is intended. And even if evil is intended, in the bigger scheme of things, it might be for overall good depite the evil intentions of a proximate actor.
Was the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a good or evil act? Lots of people suffered horribly, of course, but in the overall context of WW2, were more lives in the long run saved because of it? What about WW2 itself? Was it worth fighting to combat Nazism? Then again, what about war in general? Is it ever valid and moral to fight a war? One can and does have opinions about such matters, but opinions are often neither here nor there in relation to actuality.
If by reading what I wrote earlier, or here, you get at least some idea of where I'm coming from, that'll have to be good enough for me, but please, do try to remember that language is always only approximate, and to a greater or lesser extent straitjackets us all.