"...that he’s not necessarily certain play is at the heart of it, but that it’s just as likely, and probably more likely, than our culturally engrained values/beliefs of competition."

Yeah I sort of read that as a playful dig at Dawkins' claim that "it's all just a metaphor i didn't really mean any of the words i used", so I wasn't really sure how serious he was about his play theory. which i think is why i don't like the supposition actually, and i think it's interesting that you wrote "recoil" in your OP, cos I sort of do have that response.

for me, in my experience, life is serious not playful, although it can be. I'm reluctant to ignore my senses & memories & intuitions and they generally inform me that existence is pretty serious business. ofc I can be decieved/wrong but...

"I think the basic argument was that, at rest, when not hungry, horny, cold, whatever; when we are at our most free of need, we play. So there’s an argument to be made that that’s the default… drive? of things!"

so to this I'd say, we also play when we need things too. We can defer basic needs, and children for example often will (at least past a certain age, in some contexts) rather play outside and have to be called in to eat. And also, we often involve play in the meeting of our basic needs (tho not always). And, when people are fighting infection, or depressed, or otherwise distressed, the desire to play i think goes fast. if it were a default, i think it wouldn't be so conditional and contextual. and sometimes we stop playing and just lay about in the sun.

personally, while i do think there is a drive to play, I concieve of it as a strategy that life adopts in order to learn stuff. Its like running a simulation - a game is a set of rules you (and others) impose on an activity. you can cheat, you can change the rules etc - this happens organically. the point is to come up with a set of rules, because the external world (and you) abides by sets of rules (that can vary, or be contextual, or change, just like rules in games). and a way of learning how to best adapt to and utilise those real rules for real material reward, is to experiment with artificial rules that you generate.

for example, with play fighting - it lets animals learn to fight within rules designed essentially for learning a dangerous (serious) real world activity safely.

i guess I'm trying to say i think play is a tool/strategy for learning, and learning is maybe a more "default" thing than play because it's how we adapt to our environment.

"And a potential ethical fall-out of this could be… maximize time for play! Orient the focus of our lives away from things that feel like work, toward things that feel like play."

so then I get to the ethics, and I think that there's a reason why we have this orthodox division of concepts between games and reality.

i think we're taught pretty severely via our senses, and our affective (i mean "felt") responses to our senses & memories, that life is serious business. Since we use games to learn, and learning relies heavily on our "felt responses" to things (in play or otherwise), it can be tempting to mix the two and conclude that play is as meaningful as "real life".

life requires work often. in the example of the cat toying with it's prey, the cat is learning through play (i may be wrong here but they play with their prey when they know it can't get away, not when they're hunting it down) and the mouse is working to survive, by applying stuff it's learnt - some of which will have been learnt via play activities.

if you take an ethical approach that play should be maximised, I worry (given my conception of what play consists of) that there is nothing to cause you to live as if life is a serious thing. And I think that life would continue to teach you, even if you attempted to play all the time, that there are serious consequences for your actions, because unless you don't feel things you will hurt people and be upset (or attacked possibly), or hurt yourself & instinctively stop playing with the hot fire, for example.

like where is the reason not to be whimsical and cruel like the cat, if you have the power to do so? And if you arrange your life in the pursuit of play such that there are no "serious" consequences for yourself, i believe you would stop learning much because you would not be applying what you learn through playing to the world in order to survive. I think the reason people start viewing life as a game, or aspects of it (such as politics, for liberals), is because they have stopped needing to take it so seriously. And this I think can be seen in the difference between anybody who has experienced a real event compared to a simulated one, when you have to take life seriously sometimes (work), you end up better adapted for when life gets serious, and when life is serious you learn better in some ways than through play as the felt response to an experience will be much more.

So I guess this is why i "recoil" from the supposition, i don't view play as anything more than a strategy for learning, and i don't think it's the only or necessarily even always the best way to learn things. And I don't think you can stop somebody from playfully cutting up your grandma & stitching her face onto your dog if we suppose that all we should do is engage our impulse to play/experiment/have fun/exercise our powers.

sorry the above may not be particularly coherant, I'm not sure about my position anyway I may be completely wrong about play, or misconceiving what he means by it.

"I just harvested some last week and i’m excited to see where they take me)"

Enjoy! I love them so much, they really show you how your mind works I think. like finding out, oh my brain does have some fundamental sensory concept of time and space i know this now because i've seen what life looks like when I fuck with it. and shows you how resilient your concepts are, like of self or things, given that using shrooms to completely shatter them apart is temporary & you wake up the next day with your brain going "oh well that period of intense confusion & signal disruption/distortion is over, back to doing what i did before that all happened".