Life In 19x19

Go has definitely changed the way I think. Since learning and playing the game requires heuristics, and since these are broadly defined, one can extrapolate them to most areas of life.

I've learned:
That you can let a bad move weigh your down all your life. But if you play properly afterwards, it ...

What do you do exceptionally well? Nothing.

Think deeper and broader. We all learn skills as we plod along through life, do we not?

You don't have to be world-class at your own abilities or to be able to use them competitively. It doesn't even need to be something you think we will want to use ...

[*]What's the average (or majority) of your badminton opponents' level ?

Hi, Ed.

With 2 years' experience playing, I was beating about half of the regular players in the college team. They had the advantage of experience (by at least a decade), technique and, by far, physical condition. In the ...

I want to learn as much as possible from those who do what they do well. I'm sure many of us here have this mindset of wanting to improve themselves, especially when it comes to hacking their performance instead of doing what they're already (unsuccessfully) doing, only harder.

What do you do ...

Mario Power Tennis for Gamecube.

I know someone has already mentioned a video game, but I have not only trounced a provincial champion every time we played, I do believe I can top any player in the world if I keep my skills sharp.

I could have been born with many talents, even for other video ...

This is related to the subject, if not the current turn of discussion.

The real purpose of education in North America (speaking as a Canadian) is to offer mass childcare at a reduced rate. There's really not much else to it. Scientific studies have hammered on and on for over a century about the ...

Another interesting area is the martial arts, where
ancient masters who had zero access to more recent advances in neural sciences
nonetheless had some very high-level understanding of the human mind-body.
In some ways, the ancient masters were "inadvertently" scientific:
their "experiments" were ...

I'm not surprised to see, once again, that one man's ideas about certain mental processes surpasses the current understandings of the involved sciences. Too often in academia the model becomes an idol, and we filter out whatever doesn't agree with it in the natural world.

The idea that language ...

I noted the fragmentation of my own consciousness when I was in my early 20s, simply through self observation. If consciousness is a seamless experience, how did I do that? (It wasn't the effect of drugs. )

You're going to have to explain that again, with more information, if you want a proper ...

'Consciousness' can mean many things, and there is no single consensus in any scientific field towards one single definition.

That being said, this is an interesting discovery. The implications however are not as deep and disturbing as you may think. Consciousness as defined by the ability to ...

Indeed. Neuroplasticity is the key to our survival, as the brain adapts to new circumstances and knowledge. I believe this is because it's all we have as far as evolutionary advantages go.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but I was struck by this assertion. Is this really true? It's possibly our greatest ...

Interesting.
But then - how can we be sure its not just humming along on idle?
Just like a muscle which we not use at the moment, but it still has blood pumping through, and whatnot.

Sorry I missed your reply by this much.

We can be fairly certain that something is going on. If not the whole ...

What's interesting is not that dowsing doesn't work, it's the explanations the dowsers come up with after being objectively proved wrong.

When people are emotionally attached to something, no rational or scientific argument will convince them.

I absolutely agree with this except for one small ...

I don't think that anyone has made the evolutionary argument. In short, if we only used 10% of our brains, our brains would have shrunk by natural selection to eliminate the 90% that we do not use. Brains are expensive organs.

I believe we've touched on that point very briefly. The idea that the ...

I have to disagree. This strikes very much of a scientific point of view, saying that if it is not measurable then it doesn't exist. I think the mind and brain are intertwined but only the brain activity can be measured. The mind cannot be measured and the unconscious brain/mind falls into this ...