escaping teleological language
Even when we talk about things we consider mechanical, we often use intent to describe things. “I’m holding the ball in my hand, but it wants to drop to the ground because of gravity.” This is not an accident, and it cannot be weeded (but it can be replaced). It’s not an accident, because we need something to serve as the backbone that makes verbs “work”. We could try to describe things passively: “The ball falls due to gravity.” Describing things like this tends to not catch-on because we need an underlying metaphor to support our understanding, rather than just a list of facts. We need a language game.
The most common language game is that of agents and intent. I think it’s because our minds are biologically biased to think about everything as a person, because the most important thing to model is people. Hence the personification of everything in the myths of innumerable culture. I declare we should make the new language game focused on games. We can have players instead of agents and instead of being about intentions, let's make it about moves and patterns, about history. In many ways, this is similar to the difference between imperative and functional programming: instead of describing what things should do let’s describe what they are.
Hence our historical definition of a superorganism is observational, we see through to the moves we know must have been played in order to keep a body in stasis. And we can take this further—we can describe the world as a series of operations, operations that make us intuit models of rules and moves, rather than saying we are sure about what someone else is constrained by. So, when I see someone flirting a certain way, I think “Well, if I was going to impersonate them, these are the rules I would play by”.