Qualia and Chess
Posted: Sunday, July 24, 2011
by Tony Brussat
http://qualiadelic.com
Garry Kasparov has done a lot of thinking about computerized chess. He had the fortune (or misfortune, as he hints) to be the reigning chess champion when computers challenged and then surpassed their human chess-playing counterparts.
Kasparov concluded that “correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves – the number of moves “seen ahead” – that computers rely on.” (New York Review of Books)
But we are doers. We make decisions. Human consciousness works without knowing all the possible moves before hand.
Instead, we receive a certain amount of information, such as what we see with our eyes, and then we imagine out from there. We extend the patterns we know beyond our immediate senses, just as we extend the wallpaper in the room behind us even though we can't see it. This is what our consciousness evolved to do, and it does it very well. It works, we survive, and we are quite happy, right?
Well, maybe not...but, it is not our consciousness which is to blame, but the patterns that we have evolved to see – so many of them are flawed. Or they are good, but, no longer as good as they used to be. Kind of like an old tradition that resists change. Yet there is hope! The beautiful thing about life is that we see beyond the patterns. We are not stuck with the wallpaper or the traditions. If we are not happy, or not surviving, we can adapt – and with nothing more than a small, handful of moves.
Life, like a chess game, is full of patterns, and we, like computers, can only use the ones that we know. So, no matter how far ahead we can “think,” we won't get what we want if we can't come up with new ones. Therefore, we must discover new qualia.
Qualia, of course, is the stuff we pick up with our senses. However, it is not likely that our eyes are going to start seeing things they haven't seen before, nor will our ears or our sense of touch miraculously transform the world. However, the patterns which the mind discovers are also qualia.
Ideas, it turns out, are qualia, too. Some several score of millenia past, our brains began to take notice of qualia within ourselves – the qualia of self, of archetypes, and of patterns in nature. Science, civilization, and all the rest are the results of paying attention to the qualia within, but obviously these are deeply flawed. We have got to change some of our habits of perception; let's change the wallpaper. Fortunately, if you think there is nothing new under the Sun then you don't know qualia.
Ideas seem to flourish without our help, suddenly popping into our brains when we need them. Qualia may live, and reproduce, and evolve somewhere else in the universe (out therein the qualiasphere!), and perhaps they just come into our brains because we humans can't resist the impulse to take an idea and make it manifest in the world. If I was an idea, I'd like a human in my ecosystem.
So Be Qualiadelic. Be Conscious. Change the routine!
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Interesting. Good analogy. I appreciated it.
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