Correct Thinking: Basic Principles Of Clear Reasoning

[Jon Letendre]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

Wrong can lead to right.

--Brant

Not if you throw that filthy, filthy mysticism out before it breeds!

?

[Jon Letendre]

8 hours ago, jts said:

Obscenity Warning:  The following half minute video may be offensive to Objectivists. Parental guidance is advised.

 

100% comfortable with it. But then, my gut is usually right, upon thoughtful reflection. I do also support anyone regularly having the opposite experience to cut back their trust of their gut.

[merjet]

Imagination and Cognition

[anthony]

On 10/1/2017 at 2:53 PM, anthony said:

 Some scientists may call it what they want, "creative" , intuitional, or non-linear, all it means is they understand their mental process no better than you. 

 

1

There's no capability of "intuition". From where did one's knowledge and experience by which to make any judgments/decisions arrive - Sucked out of thin air? Born with it?

People make these huge presumptions, that an expert in his field has to be by necessity an expert in every field. Kasporav proves he's no epistemologist.

There is a). *what* the scientist or chess players, etc. knows - which should not be confused with b). *how* he knows what he knows, and in expressing *how* he knows, he might be as ignorant or subjective or non-introspective as are any.

Would Kasporav suggest to a youngster sitting down to play chess for the first time: "Trust your intuition" ? Would he advise a five yo child: "go with your instincts"?!.

The hell he will, that's nonsense because he understands implicitly or subconsciously that for one to already possess a vast body of experiential/conceptual knowledge, as he does in his field, is THE prerequisite for making quick, so-called "intuitive" decisions, instantly and effectively. Obversely, the snap decision is especially well-facilitated by a conceptualist who perceives, identifies, evaluates and carries his knowledge hierarchically.

In effect, what Kasporav's doing is committing the Stolen Concept fallacy: presuming on the large aggregate of his self-gained, conceptual knowledge in order to negate it.

But we mustn't let that ruin a good tale. All the world loves hearing about the mystique/mystery of "intuition"!! (But not one would trust it to cross a busy street or swallow an unknown substance).

[jts]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

Would Kasporav suggest to a youngster sitting down to play chess for the first time: "Trust your intuition" ? Would he advise a five yo child: "go with your instincts"?!.

Nope.

Kasparov devoted a whole chapter to intuition in his book "How Life Imitates Chess" which I have a copy of. He says in that chapter that in his opinion it is not possible for a beginner in chess to have intuition in chess. This because intuition is based on experience. But you need to understand what he means by experience. He does not mean merely what happens to you; he means what you do with what happens to you. So with Kasparov gaining experience is an active process, not a passive process. Furthermore he says, to develop yourself as a chess player or as anything else, you should seek or create opportunities to gain experience.

So acquiring the intuition of a super grandmaster requires a lot of hard work.

 

[anthony]

1 hour ago, jts said:

Nope.

Kasparov devoted a whole chapter to intuition in his book "How Life Imitates Chess" which I have a copy of. He says in that chapter that in his opinion it is not possible for a beginner in chess to have intuition in chess. This because intuition is based on experience. But you need to understand what he means by experience. He does not mean merely what happens to you; he means what you do with what happens to you. So with Kasparov gaining experience is an active process, not a passive process. Furthermore he says, to develop yourself as a chess player or as anything else, you should seek or create opportunities to gain experience.

So acquiring the intuition of a super grandmaster requires a lot of hard work.

 

When he exhorts an audience to "trust their intuition", he sorta knows that they each ALSO have put in the same "hard work", and - actively - built up a large fund of experiential, reasoned knowledge? If so, he's making a large presumption. He must speak only for himself and his own context.

Besides, the main thing is, either he is contradicting himself - or - using "intuition", idiosyncratically. Intuition is essentially - knowledge without experience. Your "The intuition of a super grandmaster requires a lot of hard work" - is likewise a contradiction in terms then.

From what you explain, I think his method fits very well with Objectivism (which nullifies your dramatic warning to Oists).

I deduce/imagine and do you confirm that a chess grandmaster has played out countless games in his head, taking both sides? A most admirable ability, and along with intense studies of past games. Pattern recognition develops that way, envisaging endless numbers of positions,  no?

I've found myself (with lesser games) in positions I immediately knew what to do "instinctively" - I'd have the sense: "I have been here before". Because I had, I had 'practiced' many scenarios in my head, as well.

[regi]

9 hours ago, merjet said:

Imagination and Cognition

"'The conclusion ought to be, therefore, that imagination is absolutely central to human rationality, ...' --Johnson"

I guess that means blind people aren't rational, heh!?

Imagination is a wonderful thing as long as it is guided by one's rational thinking and one doesn't make the mistake of believing their imagination actually provides information. When one's imagination runs on its own and one believes it has some kind of meaning it is called schizophrenia.

[jts]

54 minutes ago, anthony said:

I deduce/imagine and do you confirm that a chess grandmaster has played out countless games in his head, taking both sides? A most admirable ability, and along with intense studies of past games. Pattern recognition develops that way, envisaging endless numbers of positions,  no?

I've found myself (with lesser games) in positions I immediately knew what to do "instinctively" - I'd have the sense: "I have been here before". Because I had, I had 'practiced' many scenarios in my head, as well.

There is a book "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess". It is for beginners. He puts the reader in an active role. He gives a small amount of information and then a diagram and an easy question applying the information. For example he describes what checkmate is and then asks whether the king is checkmated. He goes thru every variation and nuance. And he builds from the simple to the complex. I thought at the time that his manner of presentation (from frame to frame) was genius. After covering the rules of chess, the rest of the book was about back rank checkmating combinations. The effect that book had on me (speaking for myself, not for anyone else) is I had a better eye for back rank combinations, seeing them almost automatically, even more complex ones than those in the book.

To my knowledge there is no other book about chess with this manner of presentation. If there is, I doubt it is as brilliantly done as Bobby Fischer did.

I imagine in principle this manner of presentation could be applied to more topics in chess and topics outside of chess, maybe Objectivism. Maybe some day someone will write a book titled "[ name of a person ] Teaches Objectivism" and it will be done in the same methodical frame by frame style as "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess".

To answer your question:  It is said that Magnus Carlsen knows 10,000 games from memory. Kramnik, when he was world champion, went thru about 3000 or 4000 current games per week to as part of his job. Kasparov has extreme knowledge of openings, someone described the amount of his knowledge as 'obscene'. There are stories about Bobby Fischer's memory, like he never forgot a single move of any important game he ever played. I suspect that in the brain of a genius, in addition to a good memory and huge amount of knowledge, it is organised well. By 'organised well',  I mean we may be talking about patterns, principles, concepts, a system.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

On 9/30/2017 at 9:42 PM, regi said:

That's obvious!

Thanks for the demonstration.

Randy

Are you an ignoramus or are you doing an impression of an ignoramus?  If it weren't for physicists and mathematicians creating in non-linear ways you would not have a computer to be stupid with.

[BaalChatzaf]

On 10/1/2017 at 8:53 AM, anthony said:

So if one doesn't know how they think, it follows "how" they think is above human understanding? It's like you haven't heard. Conceptual thinking is multi-level and -directional. Some scientists may call it what they want, "creative" , intuitional, or non-linear, all it means is they understand their mental process no better than you. Whatever you may call it, all thinking is reason and all reason is conceptualism applied to reality. Men -and scientists - don't have access to any powers beyond that. From their conclusions, any thinker can deduce the conceptual process they followed -- without needing to know every detail - as with Newton who arrived brilliantly at his identification of gravity - Essentially: "This" is "that". One universal force. (Perception, induction, differentiation - and integration - and deduction - therefore, by the conceptual method). I've seen you prefer to keep the myth of scientists' mysterious powers alive - i.e., one is "mind reading" if one dares to make inferences while not being a privileged insider. 

It is not enough that skeptics claim that men can't know - what also follows is, we cannot know the fundamental process by which some "authority" claims to "know". In fact, a process every living individual shares. Science + mysticism = scientism. ;)

I know how several mathematicians thing (including myself).  One must interact with them to get a notion of what they are doing.  Unfortunately it is not the sort of thing that can be reduced to  a set of rules....  That us part if the reason why computers cannot be programmed to create new mathematics...

[regi]

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Are you an ignoramus or are you doing an impression of an ignoramus?  If it weren't for physicists and mathematicians creating in non-linear ways you would not have a computer to be stupid with.

You have no idea how much you have pleased me. I designed computers and documented cutting edge digital electronics for years, and was paid handsomely for it. Just think, even without thinking "non-linearly" I could make all that money. If that makes me an ignoramous, I can certainly live with it.

[regi]

3 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I know how several mathematicians thing (including myself).  ...  That us part if the reason why computers cannot be programmed to create new mathematics...

I've been sharing your posts with my wife, and she criticized me for perhaps not understanding you. She would like to know if English is your first language. It is obvious it is not a language you use well, and I apologize if I have misunderstood you.

[Brant Gaede]

57 minutes ago, regi said:

I've been sharing your posts with my wife, and she criticized me for perhaps not understanding you. She would like to know if English is your first language. It is obvious it is not a language you use well, and I apologize if I have misunderstood you.

That post by Bob was an outlier. His English is excellent.

--Brant

[Jon Letendre]

16 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

That post by Bob was an outlier. His English is excellent.

--Brant

He knows that. The quoted lines are quite easy to understand, for anyone trying to do so.

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, Jon Letendre said:

He knows that. The quoted lines are quite easy to understand, for anyone trying to do so.

Oops!

--Brant

 

Edited October 4, 2017 by Brant Gaede

[anthony]

On 10/2/2017 at 10:46 PM, jts said:

I suspect that in the brain of a genius, in addition to a good memory and huge amount of knowledge, it is organised well. By 'organised well',  I mean we may be talking about patterns, principles, concepts, a system.

 

2

An "organized" "system". It would seem we are agreed then. You see the fallacy of intuitionism. All knowledge is gained and held by a mind's scope and hierarchy. Someone's "genius" only determines how much deeper and broader it is -potentially- able to go. End of the mystique of intuition.

[regi]

13 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

That post by Bob was an outlier. His English is excellent

If you say so. Odd, he can't answer for himself, though.

[Ellen Stuttle]

20 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

That post by Bob was an outlier. His English is excellent.

--Brant

There's no problem with the English in the quoted excerpt (below), just with the spelling.  Bob is careless about proofreading, that's all.

 

Quote

On October 3, 2017 at 6:33 PM, BaalChatzaf said:
I know how several mathematicians thing (including myself).  ...  That us part if the reason why computers cannot be programmed to create new mathematics...

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

10 hours ago, regi said:

If you say so. Odd, he can't answer for himself, though.

Doesn't isn't the same as "can't." I simply know him well enough to doubt he would answer that post of yours so I made my post.

Bob doesn't answer a lot of posts.

--Brant

[jts]

Here is an example of how a great chess mind works. Tal was world chess champion 1960-61 and he was known for his tactical skill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tal

One amusing anecdote frequently quoted from Tal's autobiography takes the form of a hypothetical conversation between Tal and a journalist (actually co-author Yakov Damsky). It offers a modest, self-deprecating view of his reputation for unerring calculation at the board:

Journalist:   It might be inconvenient to interrupt our profound discussion and change the subject slightly, but I would like to know whether extraneous, abstract thoughts ever enter your head while playing a game?

Tal:   Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.
And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanović Chukovsky: "Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".^[26]

I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder.
After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.

And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice.

— Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.

There you have. That is the thought process of a great chess mind.

 

[anthony]

On 10/2/2017 at 11:43 AM, merjet said:

Imagination and Cognition

Thank you. I think this is really worth reading as a comprehensive over-view, although I haven't taken it all in (it is quite densely packed)

[BaalChatzaf]

5 hours ago, jts said:

.

 

There you have. That is the thought process of a great chess mind.

 

Non-linear....Intuitive.... And according you Our Regi,  not thinking.

[merjet]

20 minutes ago, anthony said:

Thank you. I think this is really worth reading as a comprehensive over-view, although I haven't taken it all in (it is quite densely packed)

You are welcome. My densely packed writing has been noted many times. A few times it has led to trouble.