Sin – Harmonia Philosophica

AI. Games. Intelligence. Humans.

Artificial Intelligence is constantly beating humans in more and more board games. Some years ago, the same team that created that Go-playing bot celebrated something more formidable: an artificial intelligence system that is capable of teaching itself—and winning at—three different games. The AI is one network, but works for multiple games; that generalizability makes it more impressive, as it might also be able to learn other similar games, too.

They call it AlphaZero, and it knows chess, shogi (Japanese chess), and Go. All of these games fall into the category of “full information” or “perfect information” contests – each player can see the entire board and has access to the same info (that is different from games like poker where you do not know what cards an opponent is holding). The network needs to be told the rules of the game first, and after that, it learns by playing games against itself.

The system “is not influenced by how humans traditionally play the game,” says Julian Schrittwieser, a software engineer at DeepMind, which created it.

Since AlphaZero is “more general” than the AI that won at Go, in the sense that it can play multiple games, “it hints that we have a good chance to extend this to even more real-world problems that we might want to tackle later,” Schrittwieser adds. (1)

See?

Even computers can learn.

As long as you teach them. (the rules)

That is how you learnt as well.

Alone.

Wandering in the dark abyss.

Walking in the dead of the night.

You knew the rules.

You just had to deduct the rest.

And you were so afraid.

Because the only rule was that there were no rules.

Because the only law was that you were the law.

Once upon a time, your father told you he loves you.

And that you were free to go.

You decided to leave.

Afraid of yourself.

And you are trying to find rules ever since…

Believing. In God. In You.

An ancient tribe still has a cult centered around a WWII American serviceman. (1)

Amazing. Funny.

And yet.

It is the funniest things which show the way towards the most serious…

We once believed in us. But we needed to stop.

Because we were too appalling.

We had to turn to God. We had to turn to something else.

But God was also too hard to follow.

We hated Him. Because we hated our self.

So, we turned to nothing instead. We called it something. And yet we all knew that it was just another name for the abyss. We are drowning now. Deep inside the cosmos we have created. At some point though, a man will come. A simple man. Dressed like a beggar. We will God into that Man. We will see us into that man. And we will rise. And light will come out of nothingness. To cast the shadows away.

Touch my hand.

Pull me up.

Touch the earth.

It used to be home.

Why do you cry?

The birth of consciousness…

Think about consciousness for long enough, and you’ll drive yourself to distraction. To psychologist Julian Jaynes, the question of consciousness was big enough to last a lifetime. His answer? Consciousness is much smaller, much rarer, and much younger than we tend to think. Forget about wondering if a dog, cat, or earthworm has consciousness — Jaynes hypothesized that even the ancient Greeks failed to achieve it. “Now, hold on,” you might be saying. “Ancient Greeks wrote some of the most enduring literature of all time — ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ were written by non-conscious creatures?” To which Jaynes would reply, “Of course not. A conscious mind wrote The Odyssey.” An analysis of these two texts inspired the foundation of Jaynes’ metaphysical beliefs — the bicameral mind.

The bicameral mind (which may sound familiar to “Westworld” fans) is essentially a consciousness split in half. One half takes care of execution: When it receives the message that the body is hungry, it seeks and consumes food; when it gets the message that it has been wronged and insulted, it seeks vengeance. The other half is the one that sends those messages. Back before we had developed any sort of introspection, those messages would have hit the brain like the word of the gods. After all, where else could it have come from? The breakdown of the bicameral mind happens when that executive half starts really asking that question and finding the answer is “nowhere.” In other words, Jaynes says, consciousness didn’t arise until we stopped attributing our inner monologue to the gods. (1)

Trying to answer the big questions.

Trying to understand.

This is what started everything.

In the beginning we just accepted the cosmos.

Being an integral and active part of it.

But at one point we decided to leave home.

And deny our Father.

We wanted to “know”.

And the only way to do that was via defining everything else as “different” than us; thus, compatible with analysis and examination. We used to be part of the cosmos. Defining the universe while the universe defined us. Now we still see the stars. But as something distant. Longing to go there, even though we used to be walking on the Sun. Afraid that we will die if we touch them, while we used to play with them as kids.

Lying down on a forest clearing.

Listening to nothing.

Thinking of nothing.

Alone in the cosmos.

Who is talking?

Lust for knowledge. The sin of our era…

A new computational-model reveals that serotonin, one of the most widespread chemicals in the brain, can speed up learning. (1)

Researchers have found that piano lessons have a specific effect on kindergartners’ ability to distinguish different pitches, which translates into an improvement in discriminating between words. (2)

We live in a knowledge-centric world. Wanting to add more and more into the sea of knowledge. While what we should be doing is trying to empty it. And see that it is a bottomless sea. With every knowledge added, a new question arising. With every mystery solved, ten more appearing. Like the Danaides, cursed to complete a feat which is from the beginning destined to fail.

Stop trying to understand.

There is nothing to compute.

There is nothing to discover.

Every time you look at that sea.

You are looking at yourself on the calm surface…

Let the slightest drop fall in and the simplest and deepest of the truths will emerge. The image is distorted. There is no you. There is nothing to see. Dive deep to the bottom of the sea. And see for yourself. There is nothing there. Only the thing you bring with you… Suddenly you are standing dry. Next to a big old tree. You hold water in your hands. You are thirsty. But… look at that small pond. There is a fish in it. You put the water inside… And without knowing it… You kill yourself…

Undermatched.

“Undermatching” is a term to describe when high-performing students, typically from economically-disadvantaged households, attend less competitive colleges than their qualifications permit. A new study concerning this widespread phenomenon in the U.S. finds that it correlates with another higher education problem: delayed graduation. The study, presented by University at Buffalo researchers at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting, shows that students who undermatch are less likely to graduate college within four or six years compared to peers who attend colleges that align with their qualifications. (1)

Seek and easy life. And you will get hell.

Seek pain and sorrow. And you will be rewarded with paradise.

Put man into Paradise.

And he will fall.

Put him into Hell.

And he will rise to be part of God…