Philosophers Can't Jump

How play creates community

The Baby League Mismatch

The ref said, “No dunking.” We couldn’t even touch the rim. Most of us had never played team sports. Our captain and point guard, Loki, was legally blind. It was baby league intramural basketball. We were a club of philosophy graduate students facing scholarship footballers who had no business in the baby league. They could dunk! The WTF looks on their faces when seeing us didn’t intimidate us. Our cognitive flexibility gave us swag. Loki scored, made a foul shot, but also missed a lot of shots. Shooting was easier for him than passing. He could always hit the backboard…the rim was another matter.

They blew us out, of course. We had fun, but almost lost the joy; the undergraduate on our team, Crash, kept barking at us. His competitive drive alienated him from us. Crash resisted the real world of the moment. Yes, we were getting clobbered by superior athletes—a fact he took to diminish his self-image—but that reality was only one reality.

Cosplay vs. Competition

In another, we—definitely not basketball players—could now see ourselves as basketball players. We were cosplaying, constructing reality, whereas Crash was constricted by his reality, shading our cosplay that day. The organics at play made what was to be playful, a playfulness we embraced, and instead reduced it into a purgatory between Loki’s game as he constructed it and Crash’s game as he intended it to be played. In fairness to Crash, that is the way the game is played. But that wasn’t possible with a legally blind point guard surrounded by guys who looked more like 19th-century tailors than athletes.

Crash ‘could not deal with this’ as opposed to ‘he would not deal with this.’ It was as if he had no choice, which was difficult to believe. He was persuaded weeks before that Loki would be our point guard. That was our condition when he approached us to make up a team. He understood that we’d only take part in the tournament if Loki was our point guard. Crash was okay with it. However, on game day, as just noted, he could not accept the phenomena in front of him. He wanted to play point guard. We were never destined to play competitively, but we could cosplay with Loki as NBA great, Magic Johnson.

Kant Dunks On Hume

Why did Crash resist? Was he out of his mind? No, quite the opposite. The problem was: His mind was minding him, not us, resisting, even dismissing very visible facts, like us, finding us unacceptable to the bias he brought to the game. Crash was selficating, that is, exhibiting cognitive inflexibility toward our play, experiencing us as sabotaging what he held dear. We had persuaded Crash of our plan. He remembered being persuaded, but that didn’t change his basketball bias on game day. We were neurologically unaligned, just like 18th-century philosophers David Hume, an empiricist, and Emmanuel Kant, philosophy’s favorite metaphysical ethicist.

Hume’s claim that ‘we are nothing but a bundle of perceptions’ (a foundational insight for what we today call social psychology) and all that follows from it freaked out Kant, who almost lost his mind over Hume’s work. There was no philosophical room for Kant in Hume’s philosophy, not even a cot to sleep on. Kant was unmoored, frightened in the way a vampire would frighten him, sucking the blood out of philosophy, metaphysics and Christianity. Kant’s corpus was and still is intended to be a metaphysical lifeboat on Hume’s philosophical Titanic. On game day, Crash was the Kant of the court; we were Humean beings.

Crash could not accept what he had earlier agreed to. Our cosplay ignored his reality. We played like a bundle of perceptions with joy and chaos, like toddlers playing tee-ball. Crash wanted to experience competition, not the ‘win or lose, we all play’ of tee-ball. He had played high school basketball. We were surprised by how good he was, exhibiting the reflexes of one wired to compete, not cosplay.

Neurology and Basketball Identity

The reps Crash experienced at high school practices made him into a reflexive player; practice reworked his neurology. He didn’t have to think on the court, just play. Our cosplay shaded his hard-earned basketball identity. It was a religion for him. Ritualized practice after practice and game after game wired Crash into a sort of fundamentalist with an inflexible understanding of how to be on the court. It’s like his body and his neurology wouldn’t allow him to accept the alternative construction, something he had accepted before gameday. Loki was our point guard. We were at neurological odds, like Hume and Kant.

Neurological discussions about cognitive flexibility vs. cognitive inflexibility may provide insight into this. Cognitive obstinacy resists additional facts; one’s orientation toward the facts of the world and the way they fit together cannot be comprehended. Novelty, new facts, or different understandings risk destabilizing tradition and threatening time-honored biases. Crash was out of sorts when he ran into our cosplay, crashing our fantasy that was as real as the bias he brought to the game.

Cognitive Flexibility in Zmigrod’s Study

Image: Leor Zmigrod, nytimes.com

One study of cognitive inflexibility vs. cognitive flexibility drives home this unresolvable dialectic. In neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod’s groundbreaking work, “The Ideological Brain,” she illustrates differences between inflexible and flexible cognition. Note that many of us are hybrids on a spectrum. Sometimes, we are cognitively inflexible and flexible at other times, some more than others.

Those who are found to be more malleable are less ideological than those who lean into inflexibility, which is tethered to a totalizing understanding, a picture, so to speak, conflating how things are with how things should be. Reality is confusing, dizzyingly chaotic, like a basketball team led by Loki. Ideology clears up such confusion and chaos, burying it with totalizing clarity. Crash was a basketball ideologue, a real basketball Jones.

Zmigrod asked a group of participants to organize a number of cards given to each of them. The cardholders were not informed how to organize their cards, only that they should organize them. Participants organized their cards by color, even though each card had an animal on it. They stacked all the red cards on a red card, and so on. After this exercise, they were asked to organize them anew, but not by color.

Some members were unable to organize them in a different way, while others organized them by animal categories. The parties struggling to organize them differently discarded the instructions and newly organized the cards by color. They rejected a different approach to coordinate the cards, not because they disagreed, but because their cognition was inflexible to doing it another way. Their inflexibility wasn’t a choice for them. It was who they were at that moment, just as Crash couldn’t adjust to additional facts on game day.

Loki’s Dream Realized

Loki, who loved basketball, who could recite the line-ups of every Final Four team going back decades and tell you the scores of the games, who lived for the game he could never play because of his physical limitations, now played on an actual team in an actual tournament, double elimination. Our cosplay required cognitive flexibility, which allowed him to dance his way in our two games, making what was once impossible more than possible, a reality. His play was now a fact of life. Loki played ball on a team he captained, never crashing, just living the dream of being a ball player.

With the cognitive flexibility required for cosplay, Loki’s dream was transformed momentarily into reality, a reality he adored, but which Crash, because of his inflexibility, could not embrace. He could but see the reality one way, and in that way we had been humiliated, not exhilarated. Yes, facts are facts. In a double-elimination tournament, we played a minimum of two games. But in those two games, we were basketball players, even if—as Crash would point out—we really weren’t basketball players. To our credit, though, and Crash would have to accept this, we did follow the rules and did not dunk in either game.