Recognising life’s user interfaces
Ashok Neelakanta taught me chess. And what an amazing game it is!
Not that my plays are any good mind you. To this day I mostly lose to anyone that I play with, so it’s not the fact that it is a game that makes it amazing. It’s what chess does to you. Chess teaches you penetrative thought.
During college I joined a martial arts dojo to learn karate and during the initial few months of intense classes, I found myself diving deeper into the world of martial arts. Walking home from college, I would visualise passerby’s purposely maintaining a poker face, walking at me and at the last minute launching a preplanned attack, which I would deflect using a series of combinations, etc. Then something strange started to happen. I started seeing martial arts solutions to day to day problems. It’s not that I specifically think kick, punch, jab. Rather, the solution is directly based on the problem, but i’m always left with the feeling that the solution taste’s a bit martial artsy.
It seems that my mind is able to draw a parralel between martial arts combinations and common day to day issues, without mixing up the graphical language or terminology for each. After picking up chess I’ve started noticing that same thing. I need to stress that this is NOT volitional on my part. I don’t apply my learnings at chess on real world problems. I just find myself aware that the solution feels like a chess move. Somehow, I feel like there’s a bishop out there covering the queen and inevitably it turns out to be right.
Chess is turning out to be a graphical user interface to determine life’s decisions with.
I thought about it some more. I noticed that once the skill I am learning either becomes entirely a part of me, or ends up being forgotten these flashes of awarness stop or decrease substantially. Then it seems to be the case that these flashes occur the most when I am at the upward peak of the learning curve. Since they are not a volitive function, I can at best ride the wave and the only way to keep them in abundance is to ensure that my brain is constantly picking up something entirely new every once in a while.
As an after note…
Scientifically speaking there cannot really be an ‘I‘. I mean, sure from a religious point of view or from a sociological point of view a sense of identity does exist. I know I am George Supreeth. However, on careful scrutiny I am not able to place the source of this feeling. I just cannot localise it. Yet I am!Benjamin Libet’s experiments (1979) showed that the concious decision to act occured 0.2 seconds before the action. However the readiness potential to act occured o.55 seconds before the act. This has it’s echoes in modern day experiments in the postdiction effect recorded by David M. Eagleman. It follows that the awareness that is I is then really a user interface to life. It’s an inference based on itself. (awareness)
