Category Archives: human mind

My subconscious and I

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In the anime Hikaru no Go, the boy Hikaru can actually see the great Go player that resides in his subconscious. No one else can see him though. I can’t even see mine. It’s OK, he is probably not as good as Sai – just better than me, and that doesn’t say much.

I sometimes say to my subconscious: “There is a reason why you are the sub.” But this is not one of those occasions. Sometimes it just shows off. This was one of those times. Make that TWO of those times.

On my bus commute, I took the opportunity to watch a Go match on my Android tablet. It was a 7-dan player against a 6-dan. For me, that is comparable to a first-grader watching two English majors debating Shakespeare. While I find it vaguely interesting, I don’t really aspire to understanding a game on that high a level. My subconscious may disagree: At a certain point, it basically said “Black is going to play there”, pointing to a spot on the (virtual) board. Plop! Black put down a stone right on the spot.

I looked closer at that particular move, and actually it was pretty clear that bad things would have happened had black not secured that spot right away. But the thing is, I had not seen that by thinking logically and reading ahead. Rather, some corner of my pattern matching brain must have picked up enough Go to expect the next move based on what it had already seen of successful (and, in my own case, utterly failed) games. Now, as high-level games go, this particular move was one of the more obvious. But the fact remains that I did not see it with my rational conscious mind, but instead a “voice in my head” (not literally, but more like an independent thought) spotted it straight away.

Later in the day, I took a look at the opposite: A lowbie game, still on the Pandanet-IGS (Internet Go Server). A 17-kyu – the lowest rank on IGS, but still way above me – was playing someone in the Beginner Class. As it happens, the beginner was in the process of winning when I arrived. Looking over the board, I quickly spotted a large group of white stones that were dead as a doornail. (We say that a group is dead when it can be caught by the opponent and there is nothing to do about it.) In this case, black could kill it in three moves, and there was nowhere else on the board where such a big opportunity existed. (Or if it was, neither I nor they found it!) I watched intently, but neither of them seemed to pay the slightest attention to the huge group, 15-20 stones by my counting. In the end, they both passed, which ends the game. They counted the territory, and still no one of them made a move to remove the dead group.

It was glaringly obvious to me as an observer, so I thought by myself: “If a 17-kyu player does not see something as obvious as that, and I see it, I must have made quite a bit of progress.” So I fired up the Go-playing robot program in my tablet. It crushed me again, just as badly as it usually does. I had made no progress at all.

And this, dear congregation, is the story of my life. I can see things that are above my play grade, with the help of the imaginary voices in my head. But when it comes to myself, I seem to make no progress at all.

Watching, doing, learning

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By closely watching a master, following instructions before fully understanding them, and copying masterpieces you could not have thought of yourself, you gradually absorb the skills of the master – they live on inside you. This is the ancient tradition of apprenticeship or discipleship.

The blog of secular wisdom, Farnam Street, has another short masterpiece recently: “What’s the best way to begin to learn a new skill?” Somewhat surprisingly, the answer seems to be: 1) Watch someone else do it, but watch very closely, as if imagining that it was you doing it. 2) Repeat what experts have done, even if you could not have done it on your own, because it builds a mental blueprint within you which you can draw on later.

Well, surprisingly if you have not watched the motivational anime Hikaru no Go, about a sixth-grader who encounters the ghost of a long dead master of Go (igo), the ancient Asian strategy game. The ghost attaches itself to the young boy and badgers him to play go. Hikaru finds the game tolerable once he has won a couple times by simply following the instructions of the ghost, but he understands very little beyond the basic rules. (Kind of like me, regarding Go at least!) But then as summer vacation starts, he begins to spend his days at an Internet cafe, playing Go over the Internet. The ghost tells him what moves to make, but it is the boy who has to actually use the mouse and keyboard. They do this every day for most of the summer. When fall comes, Hikaru has actually become a decent Go players – by high school standards, at least – simply by focused observation of hundreds of hours of well-played Go.

Later in the same anime, we learn that young Go students aiming to become professional, often spend time replaying great games from the past, trying to understand why each move was made, slipping inside the mind of the masters. This is an actual practice, and I see from the quote in Farnam Street that chess players do the exact same thing. By repeating the decisions of others, while paying constant attention, they absorb the skills subconsciously even if they could not have figured them out for themselves, or at least not for a long time yet. The subconscious absorbs skills in a different way from how we talk and think logically.

That sounds quite useful, because beginning is often hard. Even I, who used to be pretty smart, constantly fail to learn to play Go well. Perhaps I should give it another Go…?

The beauty of our weapons

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This dagger is radiant with beauty – at least when seen by the one wielding it!

I was playing Daggerfall as a Linguist, probably the most underpowered character class possible to make without hacking the game files. A life on the brink of extinction, running away a lot, progressing slowly.  And then I got my hand on one of the most overpowered items in the whole game, the Dagger of Life Stealing. (Mages Guild, Grayidge, Tulune.)

The surge of elation and confidence was on behalf of my imaginary character, but I still felt it in my physical body. I also noticed just how pretty the thing looked, which was why I took the screenshot. But as the “voice in my heart” pointed out: It probably doesn’t look that good from the other side, that is, for the person it is pointed at. Isn’t that the truth for all weapons?

***

There are also abstract weapons. For instance, here in Norway we talk about the “strike weapon”, when workers go on strike against employers or against some perceived injustice in society. I am sure my friends on the political left see the beauty in this weapon, but it is clear that most people who get stuck at an airport or find their supermarket without milk or their doctor appointment canceled, don’t see the beauty of the weapon so clearly.

Conversely, the members of “Occupy Wall Street” and similar organizations probably fail to see the beauty of a well-ordered troop of policemen coming their way with shields, batons and pepper spray – a beauty that is plain to see for my conservative friends.

So that is the lesson I was told by the Voice in my heart. It would probably have been better if I spent more time with that teacher than with my old flame Daggerfall, but what can I say. This is what happened. Sometimes we forget the obvious: That the beauty of a weapon depends on whether you are behind it or in front of it. Even words can have the power to wound, and I remember the satisfaction of giving a particularly sharp-edged reply. There is a lesson in this for almost everyone, I think.

Pearls before swine, lots of pearls

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“The poison of jealousy turns even an angel into a devil.” When we go too high above our pray grade, we unleash a universal Constraining Force, which has the power to enrage the swine around us, or even the swine within. This is a fearful thing to unleash.

Recently I have immersed myself in winter and spring of 2010, rereading my first months in Riverview. I sure wrote a lot of worthwhile spiritual and generally good and useful stuff. I received a lot of revelations, and of course I had some from before, so I just kept writing it down. I am not really sure it has been of help to anyone, but perhaps one day it will be. Who knows?

I read a bit in Mouravieff’s Gnosis again. He mentions that those who are trying to break out of the general law – the inertia of the world – should keep silent about spiritual things. It is natural, he says, to want to talk to everyone about the wonderful things you have found. But it will cause the constraining elements of the world to become aware of you and react in various ways, externally and internally. (Resistance from other people, and temptations.) So while you may not need to literally go through your days silent, you should be silent about the spiritual sights you have just seen. He refers then to Christ’s words about not casting pearls before swine or giving to the dogs what is holy. They will just attack you.

That may be so, but if no one ever mentioned the spiritual things, then it would die with them, is that not so?

Well, that is so, but by and large it should be left to those who have achieved lift-off, I guess. Those who have so little to lose, the constraining forces can do little about them except revile them and kill them, which is not enough at that stage. Christ said at the end of his life that the prince of this world was coming “and he has nothing in me”. That is not the case for us newbies. Whether we think so or not, there is actually a lot in us that can be activated by the constraining force of the ordinary world.

But I keep having this notion that if I throw enough pearls before the swine, sooner or later they will lose their footing and fall flat. Since there seems to be an endless supply of pearls – for when you have been given an internal companion from Heaven, no matter how undeserved, there is no end to what could be said – it seemed reasonable to me that I must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

On the internet, nobody can see if you are a dog. Or a swine. I like to think that there are a few out there who are neither. But if I were to think of myself, and what is best for me, then I should probably keep a lower profile. The more we speak up, the more the constraining force will focus upon us, what the ancients called demons and Satan, which attacks both within through temptations and wild emotions, and without through slander and hostility. In one story written down in the gospel, Jesus Christ drove out unclean spirits from a man, and at once they went into a flock of swine. This is unfortunately so even spiritually speaking, that the swine are always receptive to the negative spiritual influences. The more pearls you throw at them, the angrier they get, unaware that what they are being pelted with is supposed to be valuable. We are not talking cuddly piglets here, a crowd of enraged swine is a fearsome thing indeed.

For a beginner such as I – and this is tragic in itself, to be a beginner after all these years and with all this insight – for a beginner, the constraining force may well completely extinguish the spiritual life if I go too high. This is a fact deeply enshrined in all serious spiritual traditions, and also mentioned in Christianity of course: “and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.” The Devil is the personification of the constraining force, according to Mouravieff. I don’t think it matters here whether you think of the Devil as a person as such, regardless the point stands that it is not something we should mess with just for the hell of it. If we go too far above our pray grade, we become “inflated” as some translations put it, and the constraining force will cause us to fall into damnable actions.

This is not unlike what I experience when I play Go, actually.  See, at the start of a match, it is customary to place stones at strategic spots on the board, with the unspoken intention of declaring the surrounding are one’s own, or to occupy it if you will. But if I start out reaching far into the other side of the board early on, the opponent will react by invading my home territory and cut it apart, and I end up with nothing. Since I am a beginner and don’t have the skill to follow up on bold moves, the best I can do at my present level is to secure a smaller part of the board and wall it off from enemy incursion.

While I believe that my Invisible Friend could easily reveal to me innumerable books of Heavenly wisdom, it is unlikely that I would fail to make a fuss about it, and subsequently be cut to pieces by the constraining force, “an anti-dromedary” as I call it. (Enantiodromia.) When someone who has made a sustained and earnest beginning in spiritual work is gutted like that, the result is usually terrifying. An utter ruin, a destruction on a far more massive scale than the setbacks that anyone can experience in life. I have lived a charmed life so far. Long may it last – but that means not playing Buddha on the Internet.

Butt, meet ice

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“Since I was small I have played hours of Go everyday, no matter how painful, I played Go.” Why would anyone play painful games? Why do people get butthurt several times a day, year out and year in?

Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, has calculated that before you become an Olympic figure-skater, you will have fallen on your butt on the cold hard ice at least 20 000 times, probably much more. No matter how talented you are, there are things the human body can only gradually be shaped into doing, through relentless effort day after day, month after month, for years. I hope those skaters have some kind of pillow on their butt the first 10 000 times at least, because there sure isn’t much protection when they actually perform.

No, I have not suddenly taken an interest in figure skating. I have suddenly taken an interest in the ancient board game of Go, and could not help but compare my situation. I have been reading several tutorials, watched numerous live games at different levels, read up on strategies and solved problems. And when I play against my Galaxy Tab at the easiest level, it cuts me to pieces. I once managed to secure about a third of the board by defending tightly, but it took the rest. If I try for more, it slices me to pieces. That hurts.

I used to always be the smartest guy in my class. Once I moved away from my second cousins, I used to be the smartest student in my class. From high school onward, I used to at least sometimes be the smartest person in my class, teacher included. I was somewhere between the smartest of a hundred and the smartest of a thousand, back in the days. I have not got Alzheimer’s yet, and not slipped on a banana peel and hit my head. The younger generation has crept up on me, that is true; they are smarter than mine was. But I am still not stupid, I like to think. And then this happens. Over and over again. I just can’t learn Go, it seems. Even if I read it from different angles and think I understand it, the moment white invades my territory, I have no idea what to do next. Or if I have, it does not work. My butt meets the cold, hard ice of reality and it hurts.

As I implied in my recent entry about GURPS and real life, I am used to following this principle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else; there are lots of things you’ll succeed at right away.” That’s how I’ve lived my life, for the most part. I am used to picking up things easily. It worked before. But this time, I try again – and I still don’t get it. I hope this is not how my life is going to be from now on out. I feel like an ordinary human. It is not a good feeling. Ordinary humans have my sympathy. An abstract and remote sympathy, for the most part. Until now, at least.

Now I wonder: If I try, try, try again – if I do my best and still lose 20 000 times – will I really become a master? Or is talent underrated, and you either got it or not? Am I simply too old? One thing is pretty sure: By the time I have lost 20 000 times, the processing power of the average Android tablet will have risen tenfold. So there is a pretty good chance I’ll still be limping off the scene rubbing my hurting butt, ten years from now.

Or I could do something more meaningful, I guess. If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself whether it is really worth it…

Chunks of memory

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Your personality doesn’t matter. This is a skill you can learn.

Extreme feats of memory are possible when we remember large quantities of information as one unit, because we have spent so much time with it. We all do this.

I know I have written about this before, already back in the original Chaos Node, where I read about it in an issue of Scientific American. Recently I read about the same thing in the book Talent is overrated. For instance, chess grandmasters could glance at a chess board and later reconstruct it exactly, something no normal person could do. From another ancient board game, Go (or Igo), I know that high-level players not only remember every move of a match, but can often guess how a match has progressed even if they arrive late into it, possibly even at the end. For someone unfamiliar with the game, this seems like magic. And yet we all do the same thing.

Neurotypical humans store incredible amounts of information about the people around them. Not only can they recognize a friend at a glance after several years, they can also keep track of the relationships between everyone in a village: Who are second cousins with who, who are friends, who are enemies, who are in love with who and who were in love with their current enemies years ago. Nobody finds this remarkable in the least, but it is really amazing.

Likewise we are very good at categorizing things. Or dogegorizing, I guees: Even children can usually tell cats and dogs apart, although small children have trouble with really small dogs which may be labeled cats. Even though there are so many different dogs and breeds of dogs, people have this internal concept “dog” which kind sums up the essential elements of doghood and which they remember as a unit, even after many years.

In the same way, if you grew up with your mother, when you think “my mother” you actually remember thousands of things, from how she looked at various ages to details of her behavior and relationships. You don’t consciously think of all these details every time you see her name, but if someone were to say something untrue about her, you would recognize it immediately.

In other words, all of us have the ability to remember very complex things as 1 unit.

Our short term memory is very limited, usually we are able to remember around 7 units of information at the same time. The actual number may vary from 5 to 9 and can be increased with rigorous training. It is the number of digits you can remember while walking from one room to another without repeating them in your mind. But if those digits are familiar, the number suddenly increases dramatically. For instance, to me the 6 digits 271258 count as 1 unit of information: It is my date of birth in the format used in this part of the world, ddmmyy. So I would be able to remember 6 more digits while leaving the room. Yes, strange as this may seem, I have an average short-term memory. I have tested this.

***

The computer language Forth caught my attention toward the end of high school. It was little more than a rumor back then, some new-fangled invention from the States. Personal computers were something hobbyists built themselves, and pitifully weak. A corporate mainframe at that time was perhaps a match for a smartphone today. OK, perhaps a little more. Let’s say a smartphone next year. But only a few years later, I had my own personal computer, weak though it was, and was programming in Forth.

This particular computer language had a peculiar structure. The basic language was very simple, consisting of a stack for data and a set of basic “words” that were coded in machine language, either directly or with an assembler. These were very simple commands which would be defined differently from computer to computer because of the hardware, but which (ideally) had the same names and function on all computers. But this was not what fascinated me. Rather, you could define new words by combining the old ones. The new words could be used in the same way to combine into more words. By keeping the definitions short and simple, the risk of errors was greatly diminished, and it was easy to test the new words right away. Yet there was no obvious limit to what you could do. There was very little overhead in having many levels of definitions.

The reason this appealed to me is that I am a verbal person. I think in a very similar way to this computer language, building new concept from existing concept. As long as I keep it simple, I can trust the knowledge I build from basic, and I can test it.

***

When you spend a lot of time doing something, whether it is programming or chess or surgery, you acquire what is called “domain knowledge” within that area. And when this knowledge becomes a part of you, something as natural to you as cats and dogs and family and friends, you begin to be able to think of it in chunks. The chess player can remember every piece on the board because not only the pieces are familiar to him, but the possible configurations too. He has seen them many times: When this particular group of pieces appear on this part of the board, it means certain risks and opportunities that are very real to him. He has no need to memorize this particular picture: He has seen it before, repeatedly, and it has meaning to him.

When I learned to read, I had to learn the alphabet like people did for generations before me. I hear that this is no longer considered very important, people start looking at words as pictures right away. But words still consists of letters, and sentences consist of words, paragraphs of sentences and so on. When you remember a poem or a particularly moving passage from a book, you don’t try to recall each individual letter in turn. Like the programming language, the “primitives” – the basic components – soon become buried in higher-level structures. Reading and writing are themselves everyday examples of structured knowledge. And as with the programming language, there is no obvious upper limit. Scholars will hold entire books conceptually in their mind – not word by word probably, but still in a very real sense whole books – and compare them to arrive at a higher meaning from the way the books agree or disagree. If we were wiser and lived longer lives, who knows what we could achieve?

Humans, it seems to me, are not proportionate to the savanna or the shores from which the “naked ape” emerged, but rather proportionate to the infinite. As better men than I have noticed, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe may be that it is so comprehensible. At least now we know a little bit more about ourselves as well.

Deliberately reading a book

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Of this, I approve. One should show respect for the gate that leads to the hidden truths! If high school kids had to perform a reverent invocation to be allowed through the school gates, they might learn more. Well, better late than never!

Still reading Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin. It is not hard to read, at least for me. Obviously this varies, and I want to talk about this first.

Mortimer Adler writes in his (no longer so famous) book How to Read a Book that you won’t learn much from a book that is easy to read. That means you already know most of what the author knows, and already think the same way the author does. But if the book is hard to read, there may be two reasons for this: Either the author writes badly, or he is so far above you in knowledge or understanding that you have to struggle to get up to his level.

This, ironically, equates with what Colvin writes about one aspect of “deliberate practice”: It must be in the “learning zone” between the comfort zone and the panic zone. If you stay down in the comfort zone where you already know how to do things, you may have a good time, but you don’t grow. If you go too far above your current skill level, you enter the panic zone where you don’t even know where to begin. You must stay between these to make progress.

Back to Mortimer Adler, who I hope will become more relevant now that Kindle and its competitors have caused a great renaissance of the book. If an author writes badly and you are already on his level, you should be able to see through the bad writing and judge his skill, at which point you may just as well give up on the book (unless you are tasked to review it, I suppose).

But if you are below the author’s level (in that particular field), you have to read the book systematically to extract not only the factual information but the way of thinking which separates the teacher from the student – the book is the teacher, in this case. Most of Adler’s book consists of detailed descriptions of how to go about this. It is systematic, it is a lot of work, and it is not particularly fun. Yes, that means it is a “deliberate practice” as defined by Colvin and (more importantly) the scientists he popularizes, notably Anders Ericsson. In this case, a deliberate practice of thinking.

If you are above the author’s level, you should be able to understand it handily even if the writing is less than perfect. Of course, horrible writing can make even the simplest thought obscure, as Esaias Tegner famously remarks: “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” (“Det dunkelt sagda är det dunktelt tänkta”). However, as mentioned above, the converse is also true: Something may sound obscure to you because your thinking is obscure. So if you are an expert, people need to be really obscure for you not to understand them.

Since I am not an expert in the science of skill development, I think we can safely say that Geoff Colvin writes quite clearly. Since I don’t have a problem following the text when written clearly, he writes at a level close to my current understanding. (He probably has to “dumb down” to do so, of course.) So if you can read me, you should easily be able to read Colvin.

Adler is another matter entirely. He’s so high, high above me. Despite the clarity of his writing, I need to work deliberately to absorb his book. Perhaps I should give it another go, now that I have seen the same thing from a different angle.

GURPS skills and real life

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“Right now, he is he only thing on my mind.” No, he is (probably) not gay, he is talking about his rival in the ancient board game of Go. But some of us find it impossible to only have one thing on our mind… we are a natural born flutterby.

Still winding my way through the friendly, readable and inspirational book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Another thought that struck me was comparing it to GURPS – Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal Role Playing System, originally developed for pen & paper roleplaying games.

In GURPS, a high intelligence will give you a flying start on all mental skills. Then again, it costs a lot of character creation points to get that genius IQ in the first place. You still have to put half a point into any skill you want to learn. This corresponds to learning the rules of chess, for instance. Basically you need a passing familiarity with something, and from there on you can wing it, if you are smart. You won’t be really good at it, but you have a decent chance of success as long as the odds are not stacked against you.

This approach naturally lends itself to a “jack of all trades, master of none”. If you have a character point to invest, you could use it to get somewhat better at a skill you are already winging. Or you could pick up two new. It is hard to stop such a person from winging like a butterfly (or flutterby, as I like to call them) from one skill to the next.

In contrast, someone of average intelligence (or barely even that) will face a completely different choice when he has a point to spend. If he wastes it on picking up new skills, he will still not be competent enough to use them except on a good day with the wind and the sun at his back. Better to invest it in a skill he already knows. Even when he has invested enough in one skill that he is unlikely to fail except the most challenging tasks, the alternative value of spending points on something else is so low, he may just as well go on to become a master even if he only needs it once in a blue moon.

I think this is a pretty realistic portrayal, given that I used to have a high IQ myself when I was young. (It has probably declined somewhat since then.) I did exactly this same thing, fluttered by one skill after another. I picked up some German, a little French, bits and pieces of Esperanto, Icelandic and Finnish. But I never really learned enough to have a meaningful conversation in any foreign language except English, which was my third language.  It was the same with games, musical instruments, cooking, Earth sciences etc. I can bluff my way through a lot of things, but anyone who has studied a skill seriously would see right through me.

I think this is a major reason why talent plays so little role in mastery. Talent rarely is that specific. Rather, you are probably talented in several things if you are in one, and when you are as better than the other newbies, you think you are going to excel without effort, and so you start spreading yourself. By the time you realize that is not how it works, the desperately diligent are far ahead of you, even though they started behind you. Because they are single-minded in their effort.

Well, that is how I see it today. But at this stage of my life, I am not really interested in excellence in anything less than life itself. Not that I am doing too well with that either. But even if I have 30 years left before I start to unravel – and that is if I can dodge cancer and random accidents – I cannot really think of anything worth pursuing singlemindedly except the betterment of the soul. And I don’t think IQ helps much in that regard.

Talent is misunderstood

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The secret to Hikaru’s success is that he learns something regardless of whether he wins or loses. If he loses a game, the important thing to him is that he got stronger – that he learned something he can use in the future. Is this talent?

I’ve bought the Kindle version of the book Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin. It is liked and quoted by Farnam Street, the wisdom-seeking blog, which is a pretty good recommendation. Even Bjørn Stærk has been known to retweet Farnam Street occasionally.

I have only read 19% yet, but it strikes me how similar the impact is to the Japanese manga and animeHikaru no Go, which I have been rewatching lately. (It is no coincidence: One of the Farnam Street quotes got me to start watching it once more.) The book of course is more scholarly than the fiction, although the book is also very accessible at least for us who are used to reading non-fiction.

As the name of the book signals, the author believes that talent either does not exist or is unimportant. The great masters throughout history became great because they started early, were schooled by experts and continued practicing for a long time. For instance, Mozart’s father was a composer and teacher who trained his son from early childhood. Even so, the early works are unremarkable. It was only as a young adult that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart came into his amazing abilities. And even after that, people did not realize how amazing these were until later – in other words, his semi-divine status is a later addition. In his own time, he was just one of the greats.

There are various such anecdotes and scientific studies quoted, all of them implying that being “gifted” (intelligent, in general or in some specific category) only matters in the beginning. After years of practice, only the practice matters. Those who did the right type of practice and lots of it, they are the ones who become grand masters. Those who practiced less or stayed in their comfort zone during practice, they become the also-ran.

This may be so. But I don’t think we should underestimate talent either. I think so based on my own experience, but also an interesting detail that I picked up elsewhere. It turns out that a disproportionate number of athletes are born in January. Now you may think this is proof of astrology, but even astrology does not claim this. Besides, the number of successful athletes continue to drop over the months, to a minimum in December. The explanation is of course that kids start school depending on the year they were born. And they do so at a young age, where months of lifetime still count. So the ones born in January are nearly a year older than those born in December. Naturally they are better at sports. They are bigger, stronger and have better control of their bodies. If there is a competition, they win, and if not, they still get more praise and encouragement. This causes them tolikesports, and do more of it, and over the course of growing up this makes them athletes.

This is my model of how talent works. Talent is when you can practice something so intensely that you make progress, and like it. I know I did with programming. I rarely left my “comfort zone” in the sense that I always did it for fun. Sure it took some thinking, but I enjoyed it. My intelligence and particular talent for programming was the equivalent of being born on January 1st for an athlete. Because it came easier to me, I did more of it; and the more I did, the easier it became. I did not even need to be praised, the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of succeeding was enough for me. And so it became possible for me to create the debt collection software that my best friend’s father made a living from selling for some years, and which helped Norwegian companies save millions.

Of course, the mysterious entities that projected solutions to programming problems into my brain telepathically also deserve credit. But I am told that such muses are common in many arts. You may call them a form of talent too, I suppose?

Back to the anime Hikaru no Go. The secondary character Touya Akira is the son of one of Japan’s best Go players (a board game played with white and black stones) and the son (an only child, it seems) is trained from he is little more than a toddler. This is exactly the recipe for creating super “talented” people according to Geoff Colvin’s book. The main character Shindou Hikaru has a more peculiar origin, as the ghost of an ancient Go player attaches itself to him toward the end of junior high school. His original success is as a medium for the ghost, which causes Touya to blink him out as his rival. This becomes Shindou’s motivation for practicing day and night once it is him and not the ghost that plays. He learns first from spending every day of the summer vacation watching the game, and later from playing every day. He plays against ever harder opponent, getting out of his comfort zone, exactly as recommended by the book. And he gets timely feedback, another crucial factor. From the book, it is not hard to guess that these two boys are going to go far.

So, the anime is a great way to learn what talent really is. But if you want to go outside your comfort zone, by all means buy Colvin’s book. ^_^

Solitary confinement is Hell?

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Save me! I beg you! Save me!

A damned soul in Hell? Or someone in solitary confinement? The difference may be less than we believe. (Not recommended bedtime reading, I guess.)

I read something weird from Mouravieff again, and it made me think of a number of other things, as I tend to do. He wrote that people who are not born again die their second death 40 days after the first, at which point their astral bodies die as well. Even though that seems at odds with the religion he claims to represent (the Orthodox Church), I can totally see what he means. And yes, this bears directly on the torture of solitary confinement.

What struck me was the similarity to the 40 days and nights Moses spent on the mountain and Jesus spent in the wilderness, alone with God. What if I were alone with God – would I survive 40 days? Even without the fasting those two did, I am not entirely certain. I like to think so for my part, but I am not sure. I have never been anywhere near that situation. And I am extremely solitary for a human.

***

Dolphins, being even more social than humans, will simply stop breathing after a few hours without company by their own species or, failing that, humans. (Dolphins have evidently always been aware that we are sentient creatures, whereas we have found out only recently that they are not big fish.)

Humans are somewhat more resistant to death by loneliness, but solitary confinement is still considered “cruel and unusual” by all civilized countries. When I was young, I read as a fact that primitive tribes would condemn people to death by ignoring them. I am not sure whether that is actually possible without the tacit accept of the condemned. People are really good at making themselves noticeable. But the very fact that this idea has taken root shows how important it is for a human to be in contact with other humans.

Solitary confinement is an old, proven method to make people confess to crimes regardless of whether they have actually committed them. After a few weeks, the person has no idea what crimes he may have committed or really even who he is, apart from his name and some such basics. Memories dissolve, sleep and other biological functions become erratic, self-damaging behavior may occur.

Normal solitary confinement in contemporary prisons is not absolute: The prisoner is in some contact with guards and may have access to various forms of media. When solitary confinement is used as torture, the isolation is absolute and the victim not even allowed to read or write. Please bear in mind that human contact – in a similar way to money, actually – has value on a logarithmic scale: A small amount will keep you alive, while it takes much more to make you feel comfortable. So there is a big difference between hearing people talk to you and only hearing footsteps, for instance; or seeing other people versus just knowing that they can see you, but may or may not actually be doing so right now.

Total isolation tends to cause breakdown and outright madness, and it usually happens in a matter of weeks. Normal people will start showing abnormal behavior in as little as one week.

***

So if we first assume that an “astral body” or “ghost body” survives the physical death, as described by many survivors of heart stop, then it stands to reason that they would suffer tremendously if unable to return to the spirit world and commune with God, angels or saints. Drifting around ignored by everyone, they would be in the ultimate solitary confinement, forever unable to communicate with anyone. It stands to reason that their psyche would unravel over the course of 40 days, and if the astral body is some kind of construct of the mind, it would basically dissolve like a snail trying to cross the road on a sunny day. A hellish fate!

I don’t see any mention of such a fate in the holy scripture of the world’s great religions. I would not be surprised if most damned souls would prefer demons with pitchforks rather than roaming a deserted world until dissolving in utter madness, alone in the void. (Incidentally, no demons with pitchforks in the scriptures either. People have an amazing imagination.)

***

As you may expect, the thought has visited me: Could I spend 40 days alone with God even while alive? Never mind the fasting. I happen to have seven weeks or so of vacation on book… If I stocked up on dry food, paid my bills, turned off all telephones and computers and refrained from touching any paper, I could presumably do this experiment this fall. If I started on November 1 when I usually start NaNoWriMo, I would finish two days before my doctor appointment on December 12.

There is a tiny part of me that is fascinated by the thought. But it is quite tiny. Chances are I am going to spend my “solitary” month the same way as earlier years, alone but writing furiously and hanging out with my Sims. I don’t know about you, but I can definitely live a month without touching or smelling humans, as long as I can communicate with your minds. I think this already sets me apart from neurotypical humans, yes. But I don’t seriously consider me in the same league as Moses or Jesus. Although who knows what I would think after 40 days in solitary confinement. Perhaps I would discover that I was actually a god from outer space…

Or perhaps I would stop breathing, like the dolphins.