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[silverspawn]

Game 2 (w/W)



My opponent made a mistake in the opening and I was determined to take advantage of it, which I didn't really manage. But the resulting position was very difficult for them despite being theoretically even, and they messed up. Much lower rated opponent though.

It's crazy how many positions in chess are such that if you just move the right pawn, suddenly you have a massive advantage. This would have been the case here, but I missed it so the white graph drops off. Always check pawn moves when the position is complicated!

Anyway I said only two at a time, so rest later.

[Awaclus]

Like, we have neuroscience; we know how the brain works!

That's exactly why I think it's obvious that the brain is not like a digital computer. I'm not a neuroscientist admittedly, but everything I know about neuroscience suggests that the brain is not like a digital computer.

[Awaclus]

And like, don't we actually largely not know how the brain works? We know individual facts about how it works, and we know to some extent how it doesn't work.

[silverspawn]

Like, we have neuroscience; we know how the brain works!

That's exactly why I think it's obvious that the brain is not like a digital computer. I'm not a neuroscientist admittedly, but everything I know about neuroscience suggests that the brain is not like a digital computer.

Yeah. I mean, that's why I posted about the walking cycles of insects some pages ago. It's one of the problems where we know how the body does it, and it's not with digital computation; it's with several physical oscillators and clever connections between them. I don't think there's any similarly sized problem where we know how the brain does it and it does it like a digital computer. I'm not sure if there's any problem period that we know the brain does like a digital computer.

But people nonetheless think it's obvious that it is one. There's this thing called the neuron doctrine which is basically this claim (though it's not phrased very well), and it's widely accepted.

And like, don't we actually largely not know how the brain works? We know individual facts about how it works, and we know to some extent how it doesn't work.

yes. But people don't know this, either.

[silverspawn]

ok games 3 and 4 gogo

[silverspawn]

Game 3 (b/W)



This game was just bizarre. First, my opponent felt pretty strong even if their rating wasn't super high. Second, the white bars in the beginning are meaningless; I get them all the time with this opening and no one ever sees the winning idea for white (though I should avoid them anyway). There was this hard to see tactic where my opponent won two pieces for a rook, which is good. But then their back rank was vulnerable to a mate for the entire game. Almost everyone just fixes this, which this person could have done easily. But they insisted on not fixing it, instead calculating every move again such that there was a tactic that made back rank mate not work. Eventually they messed up and back rank mated them.

[silverspawn]

Game 4 (b/L)



I won't say this was the most ridiculous game I've ever played because there's a lot of competition, but it's up there. Same opening, then the game devolved into my opponent giving fifteen successive checks while their own rook is hanging with check. They messed up because neither of us is anywhere near good enough to calculate this, I I'd claim I calculated more, then it was my turn, I got a big advantage, then I hung my queen because well time and nerves though I know I shouldn't do that. what I really shouldn't do is play this time format.

This might seem really disappointing but actually it's the universe's way to test my conviction, so it's actually really forthcoming.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

This is pretty amazing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-is-blatantly-aggressively-misaligned#7

[silverspawn]

Ok the universe has been testing me, but it can't go on forever. Let's see if we can get some non-ridiculous games.

[silverspawn]

Game 5 (w/W)



There was a complicated tactic and my opponent won a piece, perhaps unintentionally. I made the shameful decision to stay in the game because I didn't want to be down 2-3. I made better moves and successively won three pawns. My opponent traded another piece which I think is a huge mistake, leaving us with Bishop/Rook vs 3 pawns/Rook, which is actually even. Then I lost a pawn. I was completely losing but won on time. Terrible.

[silverspawn]

Game 6 (b/L)



My opponent thought they could push an advantage in the opening, which is very stupid because I play this opening all the time and almost no one else plays it, so I know it way way better than they do. They predictably got worse because of it, but unforseen tactics worked in their advantage and they equalized. They made a lot of very dumb moves without calculating, effectively tuning up the randomness dial, and repeatedly got lucky, then they won. This was about equally terrible as last game!

[silverspawn]

Game 7 (w/L)



I hung a queen nooo :-( Didn't think because I had this exact position so many times recently

[silverspawn]

I'm hereby revising my hypothesis as chess being all about mind state rather than effort

[silverspawn]

Just as one can notice that stroking oneself in certain ways can produce certain desirable side effects that are only partially and indirectly controllable — and one can then devote some time and ingenuity to developing and exploring the techniques for producing those side effects — so one can half-consciously explore techniques of cognitive autostimulation, developing a personal style with particular strengths and weaknesses.

wait what?

[silverspawn]

Man I love Charlie Kaufmann. He's so incredibly not generic.

[silverspawn]

It's interesting/depressing to note how lucky Kaufman has been. He barely even got his first job, only got his first big movie because an established Director just happened to have read his script, etc. (He said this himself, too.) Makes you think -- how many Kaufmans are out there who are also super great writers but were less lucky?

[Awaclus]

It's interesting/depressing to note how lucky Kaufman has been. He barely even got his first job, only got his first big movie because an established Director just happened to have read his script, etc. (He said this himself, too.) Makes you think -- how many Kaufmans are out there who are also super great writers but were less lucky?

There's got to be enough of them that every famous, but somewhat mediocre writer could be replaced with one.

[silverspawn]

Amen

He actually wrote a novel, too. Gonna give that one a shot.

[silverspawn]

So for some reason I was thinking about how we know that q^n for q in (0,1) converges to 0 as n goes to infinity. I can prove it using the logarithm but that's lame because it's circular; it just reduces the fact for q to e. This sounds super simple, it should be doable using elementary math.

Then I looked up the solution and felt really stupid. Man I'm so out of practice with clever proof techniques. You just do it by contradiction; it's a strictly decreasing series in a bounded interval, so it must converge to a fixed number. (This I'm very comfortable using, I've studied topology ground up.) So let L be the limit. Then we'd like to argue that L*q is next in the series, but L is the lowest point, so L <= L*q <= L (where the second inequality holds because q < 1), hence L = L*q hence L = 0.

You can't quite do this since the limit itself doesn't appear in the series. But we can get arbitrarily close, so we just choose a number C such that C <= L/q and go two steps from there, so L <= C*q^2 = L/q*q^2 = L*q <= L as above.

[silverspawn]

well to be extremely pedantic you have to differentiate cases L > 0 and L = 0, but L = 0 is what we want to show so it really doesn't matter

[silverspawn]

There is a lot wrong with Dennett's book, but the overarching problem is this. Dennett coins the term "Cartesian Theater" as the idea that all of experience comes together at a unified point for the benefit of some kind of listener. So this contains both the idea of unified experience, and the idea of an irreducible self at the core of the brain.

The unity of consciousness is one of the most important features, perhaps the most important one. Conversely, the idea of a self is so stupid that at no point in my sequence to do I mention it even in passing. It's not logically coherent, it's not physically possible, it's not required for anything, it doesn't help with anything; it's just not something that you need to spend any amount of time on even in a very comprehensive treatment of the problem. But Dennett fails to differentiate between them at any point in this 530 page book (unless it's coming near the end, still not done). The fact that his model fixes problems with the Cartesian Theater is absolutely central to the book; he talks about it over and over again. So the failure to differentiate between them is disastrous, it invalidates a huge chunk of his argument.

Like, the self thing is a strawman even for substance dualism (or what I call Model 1, the idea that C is a non-material thing with causal effect). Model 1 doesn't get a lot of time in my sequence, but even there I don't mention the self. The idea that it's all happening to the benefit of some listener just shifts the problem of explaining how stuff works one level. And if the self is not implemented at all, then this is a priori ruled out by the assumption that the universe follows any rules at all. (Which is actually one of the two assumptions I specifically make.)

[silverspawn]

And then, minutes after I write this, Dennett decides to write the most blatant instance yet on page 359. Thanks RNG god.

[silverspawn]

I also like the claim that the brain's representation of color is functionally equivalent to any other abstract representation. Let's try decorating this website red instead of blue and see how functionally equivalent that will be for the users.

[silverspawn]

But at least Dennett is finally talking about vision, and I'm actually getting some important ideas from this text. I was getting so annoyed when he spent all this time on speculating about language generation. Hey here's a book about consciousness, so let's spend 20 pages talking about the most obviously unconscious process that the brain does lol