The Ghost in the Machine

You may have seen photographs purporting to contain a ghost - as in visitors from the 'astral plane'. Maybe this photograph can claim to be the real thing. Certainly it is an expression of the actual thought processes, the "spirit of a thinking machine" as the website concerned describes it. You can 'see' its 'mind' in real time if you play a game of chess against it (just click on the photograph to try!).

So can 'pure thought' exist independently of its 'physical home' (whether corporeal body or man-made machine)? I would say that Descartes thought so - that mental activity carries on in parallel to physical action, but where their means of interaction are unknown or, at best, speculative. This is "mind-body dualism". Then came Gilbert Ryle who rejected Descartes’ theory of the relation between mind and body, on the grounds that it approaches the investigation of mental processes as if they could be isolated from physical processes. He says:

"The rationalist theory that the will is a faculty within the mind and that volitions are mental processes which the human body transforms into physical acts is therefore a misconception. This theory mistakenly assumes that mental acts are distinct from physical acts and that there is a mental world which is distinct from the physical world. This theory of the separability of mind and body is described by Ryle as "the dogma of the ghost in the machine." (Wiki).

Clearly this debate impinges on religious thought as part and parcel of the debate. Here is part of an interesting article where Adam Marczyk (his name according to the Tekton site) asks "Where is the Soul Hiding?"

"Central to many religions, both Eastern and Western, is the doctrine of dualism: that there is a non-material essence called the soul that inhabits and animates our bodies and is the cause and the source of consciousness, personality, free will, thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions, memories, the sense of self - in short, everything a person thinks of as "I". Theists typically believe that the soul survives the physical death of the body and goes on to whatever comes after death, be it an afterlife in Heaven or Hell or reincarnation in a new body.

I am an atheist because I have found no evidence that leads me to believe that the supernatural claims of any religion are true, and the notion of the soul is no exception. In fact, as this essay will demonstrate, there is strong evidence against the existence of a soul in humans, pointing instead to the alternative of materialism - that the mind is not separate from the brain, but that it arises from and is produced by neural activity within the brain. Simply stated, the mind is what the brain does.

As a practical matter, it should be easy to judge between dualism and materialism, because unlike most religious doctrines, the notion of the soul is an idea that would seem to have testable consequences. Specifically, if the human mind is the product of a "ghost in the machine" and not the result of electrochemical interactions among neurons, then the mind should not be dependent on the configuration of the brain that houses it. In short, there should be aspects of the mind that owe nothing to the physical functioning of the brain.

Until recently, this prediction was difficult to test, but modern scientific innovations have thrown light on the subject. Medical techniques such as CAT scans (short for computed axial tomography), PET (positron emission topography), and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) allow the structure and function of the living brain to be studied. Scientists can see which areas of the brain "light up" with activity when a healthy person performs a mental task, or they can examine patients who have suffered injury or disease to see which parts of the brain, when damaged, correspond to which deficits of neural function.

And already, a disappointing result for theists has emerged. Some mental functions are localized, while others are more diffuse, but there is no aspect of the mind that does not correspond to any area of the brain. In fact, we know precisely which brain regions control many fundamental aspects of human consciousness.".

Now let us return to the chess 'mind' in the photograph - after all, it symbolises the 'materialism' proposed by Adam in the above text even if it cannot seriously be entered into the debate as serious evidence one way or the other  :)

According to the website:

"Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.".

What do the images mean?
 
When it is your (White's) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves - often several turns in the future - considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.".

How strong is the program?

"The chess playing engine is designed to be at the same level as the average viewer. If you're a tournament chess player, you would clobber most casual players--and you'll clobber Thinking Machine 4 too. If you barely remember the rules of the game, the artwork may clobber you instead. The chess engine we built is simple and uses only basic algorithms from the 50s (alpha-beta pruning and quiescence search). The program's unconventional initial moves may raise eyebrows among experts: we did not give it an 'opening book' of standard lines since we wanted it to think through every position.". [Edward Tufte, September 9, 2005]

Would you like to play? Click here!

At least one chess player has an open mind about spiritual matters - I refer to Korchnoi. Here is an extract from an article at Sports Illustrated:

"His approach to chess continues to be highly spiritual. He's currently winning a game he has been playing for four years against the Hungarian grandmaster Goza Maroczy, who died 39 years ago. A Swiss mediator had asked Korchnoi, "If you could play anyone in the hereafter, who would it be?"

Korchnoi named Jose Raul Capablanca of Cuba (1888-1942), Paul Keres of Estonia (1916-75) and Maroczy. The mediator contacted a psychic who said he would see what he could do. A week later the mediator told Korchnoi the psychic "can't find Capablanca or Keres, but Maroczy is available."

Korchnoi and Maroczy play intermittently through the psychic, who doesn't even know chess. Korchnoi steered the game to a French defense, an opening with two main lines—one of which wasn't analyzed until after Maroczy's death in 1951.".

You may be interested in a serious evaluation of the game as evidence for the "survival of an intelligent component of human existence after bodily death". It essentially asks the question:
'At what level did Maroczy play the chess game?'.

Members of our chess-playing community have their say at 'ChessGames' (including a nice comment by David Moody - who says, tongue in cheek, "I find this very troubling. Here I always thought The Afterlife was a realm of eternal rest and peace. And now you're telling me I'll have to spend it studying opening theory?) :)

And here is the complete game!


STOP PRESS: Whilst David Moody (see above) is talking about the Afterlife as "a realm of eternal rest and peace" we see that the New York Times is telling us about "Bobby Fischer’s Body Ordered to Be Exhumed"!

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Cemetary walks / Openings Indexes

Intro remark the first:
Obviously it should be 'Indices' as the plural of 'index' - but I suspect the term as used has a better 'reach'?!

Intro remark the second:
This post examines the way we itemize and classify our opening repetoire.

As I write these posts I am surrounded by my "matilha" - Portuguese for a pack of hounds. Let's concentrate on my 'pastor alemão', my German Shepherd dog, called Beauty (or "'Bew-chi" as they say around these-yere parts). She likes going on walks - so put on your walking shoes and "Let's go!"

People are friends (unless they try to mug me) but other dogs are enemies and we must be alert. She's a strong 'doggie-woggie' and needs to be firmly held if another dog appears on the horizon. Cats? Well, how often do you see them on a walk? Generally they behave secretively, though not always. I often wonder how they fare when they ensconce themselves under parked cars. Must be a shock when the car starts up. I hope they jump the right way - do cats know about things like which direction the car will set off in?

Beauty likes cats, there's a colony of them hanging out in the local cemetary. "Yo, Dude, let's go hang out at the cemetary - coool!". We wander around the serried ranks of tombs, the paths are paved, very little grass but quite a lot of trees. I let her choose the route (warning - chess analogy imminent!), helped by one of those ratcheted extension leads whereby she can stray up to about 15 feet away from me. If she sees one of the many cats I had better be ready! She doesn't bark, just makes a tentative leap - which the cats studiedly ignore of course.

I see a workman making a new tomb and ask "Is that for me?!".

So Beauty is looking for cats in a fairly random fashion and the discoveries she makes are fresh and uninfluenced by her conscious mind eg trying to find the bigger cats or whatever. The analogy with chess relates to how we choose our opening repertoire - I think that we should avoid allowing our prejudices about ourselves and the game to interfere in our choices. To eliminate the conscious choices, determined by a logic which is perhaps inappropriate (please also see my post 'Consciousness / Religion / Blitz chess'). For example, we may think that we are a complex person and that we should be looking for complex openings such as the Closed Ruy Lopez.

That's no use at all, I suggest! I have come to doubt that I will find a comfortable fit between my personality and choice of opening that way. Let's free things up a little and  ... experiment. More importantly - experiment without making continual judgements along the way. You need to try a lot of different openings before making any judgements. Why are we all so judgemental?

Instead, we should do what Beauty does. Creep along quietly, letting our instincts decide on the route we will take. Well you need a cemetary or its equivalent to walk around.  You need some way of enjoying this whole process (which can all too easily become a boring exercise if approached in the wrong way). And you also need to avoid forcing yourself to make a decision about which opening(s) you will put into your armoury. The decision will arrive by itself - and will be all the better for that (IMHO).

So let me provide same. I have three such offerings. One is pictorial, one is text-based and one is interactive. All are enjoyable 'maps' to get that all-important overwiew - which I don't think you get from a database (which too easily locks us into a particular line).

Interactive
The Arkansas State University has an amazingly comprehensive list of openings, the moves of which you can click through. It contains a myriad of variations for you to 'walk through'.

Images and Text
These are shown below.
CLICK ON TREE DIAGRAMS FOR FULL SIZED VERSION.
THE LAST TABLE IS REPRODUCED AS A JGP IMAGE - PLEASE CONTACT ME FOR ACTUAL TEXT.

These were copyrighted by Edwin L. Schoen, dated as 1998 t0 2000, to ELS Software. Originally they were located at:

http://home.xnet.com/~elschoen/chess/ - but I had to use the (extemely useful) Wayback Machine to access it. I've contacted him to check what is possible but no reply as yet. I would like to update them some day, but may wait until someone shows interest in my doing so - via the Comments to this post.

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Consciousness / Religion / Blitz chess

Chess can be thought of as an anology for the way in which our minds work in regard to decision making. I am not making a grandiose (or even useful) statement here. But it is interesting to look at some of the scientific results about consciousness. We have a rather simplistic mental image of ourselves - consciousness is our user illusion of ourselves.

This (not the bit about chess) is explored in the book "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders. This post focuses on the notion that our "consciousness presents its possessor with a picture of the world and a picture of himself as an active player in this world. But both pictures are heavily edited". Experiments (chiefly by Benjamin Libet) clearly show that there is a half second delay before consciousness is even aware of a particular sensation. Our unconscious mind has already reacted to someone sticking a pin in us BEFORE we know about the event in our conscious mind. So you don't actually go through a decision making process of saying "Ah, pin sticking in me, better do something" - no, your unconscious mind gets there first.

What then happens is that the conscious mind relocates the event temporarily so that we somehow think (in our conscious mind) that we experienced the pinprick immediately. This sounds surreal, but can be shown experimentally. I refer you to the book itself, rather than saying more about it here And undoubtedly failing to convince you! However you may be interested to know that this research goes right back to the sixties and seventies - but has not been systematically followed up (why this is so is another interesting question, dealt with in the text).

Basically the unconscious mind receives so much data that we would be overwhelmed if our minds were confronted with it all at once (think how much data you are currently ignoring as provided by your peripheral vision for example). So the brain needs time to sift through the data and reduce it to manageable proportions.

"The important thing is that consciousness occurs when we have discarded all the information we do not need". (Page 242).

"But what about 'free will'? Never mind our getting up from the thumb tack without a lot of discussion; do Benjamin Libet's findings mean we do not possess 'free will'? For what but the consciousness can exercise free will? If the brain is already in action when we think we decide to reach for the relish, there is not much free will in us".

OK, don't panic - there is an answer - and it may also illuminate the way that we make chess moves as I will eventually talk about. Critically we can exercise a veto. In the case of reaching for the relish, our conscious mind can decide to stop our hand before we actually pick it up from the table. "Consciousness cannot initiate an action, but it can decide that it should not be carried out".

"Veto principles have always been common in human morality. Many ethical strictures, such as most of the Ten Commandments, are injunctions not to act in certain ways," Libet wrote in 1985. So here we arrive at what suddenly seems to be a religious debate. Should people be castigated for having 'bad thoughts' over which it would seem they have no conscious control? Does this abdicate them from responsibility, thus:

"Christianity says that we must do the right thing and not even feel like doing anything wrong. Judaism says you may not do what is wrong. ... if our consciousness has no possibility of controlling the urge to act (because it is not even informed when the urge arises), it is difficult to see how we can be responsible for our urges and dreams".

It sounds as if the author has taken sides and 'prefers' Judaism to Christianity, in which only our actions count - how can we be held responsible for any 'bad thoughts' over which we have no control? This contrasts with the idea that Christianity says that our thoughts count too - so 'bad thoughts' are sinful, whether acted upon or not. However, as a consequence of the 'half second lag', "it is hard to control how many of our thoughts do become actions". The book is also saying that "we actually know more about what other people think and feel than our consciousness does" - so what we think and feel about each other does matter".

Well, these are controversial waters (you'll have to read the book for yourself!) - and perhaps not in the remit of a chess blog! Best to return to chess itself, specifically Blitz play. For is it not here that we confront the half second delay between collecting huge masses of data and presenting an edited version to the conscious mind for appraisal and decision making?

So I look at a chess position and assimilate the data and decide my move. My suggestion to you, Dear Reader, is that if I make a move immediately, I am only likely to come up with one of the random possibilities. I will not have even given myself the crucial half second needed to sift the data and to "start thinking". In view of the "temporal time delay" mentioned in the book, this may be an erroneous view - but it seems to me to have some justification. Anyway, my conclusion is that, unless I give myself at least half a second before making my move - I will not be able to apply the veto (refered to above). How many times have we made a move at Blitz, only to see almost immediately  that it was a catastrophic blunder? Lots of, in my case!

So I am going to try to restrain the instinct of reacting instantaneously any more. That's the point of my posting this. Of course I may have previously decided on a combination of moves, in which case there is no problem in playing the 5th move (or whichever) of the sequence right away. That is specifically excluded from my injunction. No, it's the 'spur of the moment', instantaneous moves that can cause the problems. We need to curb the instinct to CHOP the opponent down as soon as he/she makes a move. Sometimes we think that we are thereby sending a message that "I am in such a strong position against you that I have the answer to your move ready to go immediately, I don't even need to think about it".

So we try to intimidate them  ... and then comes THE BLUNDER!

:)

Afterthought (August 2010)

I was reminded of this post (slightly edited) when I saw the following related comment in an ICC forum, thus:

"(Of course we all make blunders) and have thought about what was going on ... my feeling is that this sort of experience is the simply product of a lack of discipline in the way I sometimes think about moves (not to mention other things in life!) ... that is, for some reason at times one actually blocks out some of what you're actually seeing on the board ... I think that's just a reflection of the human inclination to simplify complex situations by focusing on patterns, etc ... once you make the move, you relax this decision-making mindset and suddenly you notice that you were blocking out important information ... in any case I think this is within one's own power to combat, rather than something to be addressed through a technical fix (such as, in online chess, a 'confirm move' window.".

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