On the other day, I got confused on why we feel in certain emotional
ways on different colors; they simply differ on wavelength. I guess it
is because the environment we lived in. Because fire are red, so when
we see red, we recall fire, and thus feel warm. Sunshine are
somewhat yellowish, so when we see yellow, we recall sunsine. When we
see blue, we recall sky, ocean, pretty cool color. When we see green,
we recall plants, forest. And when we see purple, we recall noting.
(violet is not a pervasive enough thing to be recalled I think.)
that might be why we feel mystic looking at purple, because that's
something we do not see on a regular basis. So imagine if we have a
blue sun, then probably we will feel warm when look at blue.
Probably you will find martial arts particularly interesting at some
point of your life, and probably you want to have it. I went the same
process, and I found it is actually a very instructive subject. I'd
share my view on martial arts with you, and hope it will be helpful to
you.
First, martial arts originated in an era when people could be killed
for being bad at martial arts. If not keep this in mind, you might
learn lots of garbbage useful in that situation but not useful
nowadays. For example, lots of martial arts promotes a mystic
philosophy, which effectively threaten the enemy; such mystic
philosophy would sounds eccentric nowadays if interpreted literaly.
Now you practice martial arts for fun, for health, or for competition,
but not for live/death. The mindset is totally different. But there are
definitely lots of gems in martial arts we can learn and apply to every
domains of our life.
In my modest point of view, martial arts (and science) is build around
the simple concept of speed. There are many many details in martial
arts, but when it get serious, it is always about speed. Power of your
punch is determined by your mass and your speed; you can gain some
weight by tying sand bags to your wrist or use a weapon, but in general
the faster you are, that more powerful you are.
Another meaning of speed is how quickly can you get the right
tantics/strategy (intellectually), and how quickly can you carry it
out. If your opponent kick you on your leg, you can kick his/her leg
before his/her foot touch the ground, that would lie his/her down to
the ground. but how quickly can you think of it, and how quickly can
you do it? After s/he fall to the ground, s/he can grab your leg,
or roll over and kick using his/her other leg, how quickly can you
think of these can deal with it? That's what you need to practice
toward, not to feel your chi, or search for mystic feelings. Frankly
speaking, chi or mystic feelings are useful cues in practice, but it
could be misleading.
About punch power. You may wonder why some people has such powerful
punch, that they can break the stone, wood. That's actually because the
speed up their punch at the very last moment of punch. Such speed up is
partly because they transfer their force from their feet to keen to
wrist to shoulder and to fist. The goal is the speeding up at that last
moment.
Sometimes you may find emotional speed important, espetially when you
are emotionally unstable in a fight. You may see someone very calm and
serene, that's because they act very fast emotionally. Such that you
don't see their reactions.
Final words: I think you might agree with me that when reasoning
get fast enough, it become intuition. And when awareness get fast
enough, it become reasoning. The only different might just be speed.
When you see many different level of skills, no matter how obsessive
they looks, their final goal is probably to do something faster. (If
you have done computer programming, you probably notice that, the
faster your program is, the more things you can do in your
program.) So a cue of practice of martial arts, is to know what
kind of speed you need to improve, and improve it. You will get all
sorts of mystic and artsitc feelings during your efforts, but it won't
hurt to remind your self that speed is one of the simple truths.
I assure that I have not thought this thorough, but I'd try to make it
unbiased. Hope the non-polished words won't hide the content.
Everyone feels pain because they have conflicts, they seek things that
can resolve their conflicts. Such conflicts can reside in any domain,
in any form, and occur at any time. The most important thing in
resolving conflicts is the belief that conflicts can be resolved. Some
conflict may looks unresolvable, for example, when a person is old and
about to die, while s/he don't want to die, such conflict may seems
unresolvable. Actually you may find most of the religions are
originated as a solution to this conflict. Believing in afterlife will
effectively resolve the suffer's emotional conflict, and alleviate the
pain.
Frankly speaking, small conflicts are in some sence more important
because they are pervasive in our daily life, and they lead to bigger
conficts if not resolved. We want money, but don't want to work, we
want to work on what we like, which probably is not what we are working
on. We want to be loved, but may find that it is not free. To make it
worse, sometimes our attempts to resolve our conflicts may even incur
new conflicts, which could be even worse (that is the most desparate
time one coud experience.)
I'd propose a possible solution, which is a packet of thoughts:
1. believe that "ALL CONFLICTS CAN BE RESOLVED." If you feel desparate, read this to yourself.
2. be sensitive to real conflicts. (sometimes we
failed because we try to solve the wrong problem. a simple way to
identify real conflicts is that by solving it, your life should exhibit
positive changes. good luck on this.)
3. be sensitive to potential conflicts. (taking care
of your health when you are in twenties will save you a lot of trouble
when you are in eighties. the best way to kill the deamon is to not let
it born. )
from time to time, I believe you will deepen your understanding of
conflicts, how it could reside in physical, emotional, or even
spiritual domains, how it is reflected in art and science, how other
people deal with it, how it affect our life and world. There are lots
of serious conflicts worldwide today, to solve them you need to solve
your own first. A healthy person is a confict-free person, a healthy
society is a conflict-free society.
A person is enlightened, when nothing is counterintuitive to her.
On the other way I got the idea of defining beauty in terms of goodness and truth. I guess goodness could be whatever promoting your life, and badness the opposite. (as you sensed what is good and what is bad for you.) And truth could be whatever you believe, you understand. (as you sensed what is true and what is untrue.) Then what is beauty? I am not satisfied with "whatever you sensed beautiful", or Hegel's chunk book. What about the idea of "good but untrue"? Think about it, cause it could be totally subjective, so I hope to know how other people perceive it. Also it implies what is true and good cannot be beautiful, also ugly = not beautiful = bad and true.
If there is one thing that machine definitely does very well, that is execution power. Machine execute commands with high accuracy and speed, that might be one reason why machines has taken so many jobs from human. Business people should be excited, because execution is one cornerstone of a successful business, and truly almost all the legendary businesses have excessive use of machines. The powerful a machine is, the wiser its user is required to be. And the wiser a user is, the more he/she knows how to avoid being hurt by machines, which is very likely in a highly machinized world.
two interesting questions:
1. The universe exhibits the most awe-inspiring executing power, does it in some sense resemble a machine?
2. Which comes first, human or machine?
When a machine's humanity battery is low, it turns out to be robotic, when it is strong, it turns out humane.
Let's stop thinking about whether machine can feel, the fact is that,
if human A tell a machine what he/she feels, then the machine can
transfer this message to other human, create a illusion that the
machine can feel. However if the machine tell the same feeling over and
over again, it will be clear that it is simply repeating, and destroy
the illusion that it can feel.
But if a large number of human constantly charge the machine with their
own feelings, i.e. charges the machine's humanity battery, the illusion
could theoretically last a arbitrarily long time.
several interesting question:
1. how efficient is this battery?
It largely depends on the breakthroughs of AI research.
2. could the efficiency be larger than 100%?
If it is higher than 100%, then strong AI is probably possible.
3. does human also in some way have such a battery?
It is clear that if a person isolated him/herself from the society,
including literatures, he/she has a tendency of becoming less humane;
and very social people, or people who read some literature, intuitively
have a tendency to become more humane. However, I have no data.
For the best guess, the efficiency could be arbitrarily near 100% but
never equal or higher than 100%, therefore the suprising aspects of a
potential AI industry is that, it turns out to be one of the most
human-intensive industry. Which is very counterintuitive to me, because
AI somewhat implies automation, and machines did everything by
themselves. But I can imagine a scenario where a huge number of human
feeding a AI machine just to keep it working.
Imagine from today one, human stop maintainnig machines, could machine
continue to work by its own? If so, how long? The answer I got is yes,
and for arbitrarily long time. In the manufacturing process of machine,
there is no such steps that cannot be done by machine itself, the only
step that machine cannot be gauranteed to do by itself is designing, or
say creativities in solution. But that's not the point, the point is
once human give a good enough robust enough design of machine, it can
last a very long time by itself. What does this imply? Thie imply two
things, first it implies the potential possibility of a crucial
elements in evolved intelligence -- autonomy, second it implies a
possibility of symbiosis between machine and human.
Possible scenarios of machine autonomy, and possible scenarios of
machine-human symbiosis underway. (no ethical questions, only
technical.)
Today I start to think about PEI and AI; Perceivablly Equal Intellignce
(PEI) focues on how it is perceived, and its equalness with human
intelligence. It's not strong artificial intelligence. Artificial
Intelligence is a word invented decades ago and starts to smell a
little bit stale. A convenient update is 'Acquired Intellignce' which
is still AI but featuring a more modern understanding of intelligence.
a few further discussions underway.