Notes For Posts I Never Made

Sacred things

No faith in God or man

In a game of chess a player may become infuriated, humiliated, angry, surprised, jealous, admiring of oponents moves. Emotons pepper the rational. A computer has none of this. Just cold, dead, 2d logic.

On May 11 1997 Deep Blue, with human intervention between games, won the 2nd 6 game match against world chess champion Gary Kasparov. He accused IBM of cheating and demanded a rematch. Kasparov had beaten an earlier version of Deep Blue in the previous year. Close to the end of the first game, or near the beginning of the second, depending on whos memory you look at, Deep Blue made a sacrificial move that Kasparov found highly skilled, beautiful even. This through him off course and upset his cool head. In later years one of the programmers claimed the computer, at this crucial point, weighed up the options and could find no move preferable to any other. Due to this it chose a random choice.

People often say that looks don't matter. I dispute this. My dog is a handsome fellow and because of this people often approach him to tell him how good he is. A lifetime of this has made him expect most approaches to be freindly. A nasty looking dog is often approached with fear, revulsion. Consequently they are prone to fulfill the prophecy. It is presumably much the same for humans.

If you place two stacks of cards that are shuffled to appear random yet build a higher value average score in to one than the other, in front of test subjects. Now get them to choose a series of cards from both stacks. Attach sweat sensors to the subjects. The subjects may never notice which stack gives the best results. It is evident from such studies that intuition developes before knowledge. Our unconscious mind does far more than we think it does. The person we think does the thinking doesn't.

'The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, 'To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?' the question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseperable.'

But what of self directed neuroplasticity, learning, the mechanics of thought, escaping from the muddy, rutted thought field, forcing fresh neural pathways. 

Irrational beliefs have a purpose. We all have sacred objects. Steve McQueens leather jacket he wore in The Great Escape just sold for thousands of dollars. What s that other than sacred. Richard Dawkins, the scourge of the super natural, collects pens and other objects, once owned and used by Charles Darwin. We need sacred stuff, stuff beyond question or reason.

The mind needs a mechanism to make connections in order to understand invisible systems. It can go wrong as with schizophrenics. Some schizophrenics can tickle themselves.

The mind can not exist seperately from the body. To think otherwise is to believe in the supernatural.

The body continually replenishes itself. f you are reading this and you are middle aged, it is more than likely that no part of you is more than ten years old.