Infinite Game

Agüera y Arcas's gloss on what evolved organisms are "optimizing": nothing. In the toy chemotaxis simulation, conservative and reckless strategies both survive because no score is being maximized — "the only prize is that you get to keep playing." Life is an infinite game (the term is Carse's, unattributed in the talk) whose sole criterion is continued participation, which is why dynamic stability, not fitness-as-number, is the right frame, and why the speaker later rejects utilitarian optimization as a model of value. It also underwrites the "personalities" point: selection leaves the interior of viable behavior underdetermined.