Can anyone play a private game of chess? He can to the extent that he can simulate being two different players. The simulation would be very poor in ordinary circumstances. The contents of his mind would be fully as accessible to himself during the game as before. There would be no substantial way to keep his two different players’ strategies hidden from one another.
Yet let us take for example a madman who can no longer distinguish between what we conveniently call fantasy and reality. When he pretends that he is two he loses track of the pretense and believe his own make-believe. He, more than any ordinary person, becomes two functionally separate individuals each with their own hidden and mutually inaccessible thoughts. Thus one body can play a private game of chess only to the extent that that mind can become a tiny community.
Community then is built upon incomplete agreement. The potential to disagree is necessary for any real community.
If both minds were perfectly in agreement then the madman could not play a private game of chess. Yet without any agreement, such as how to move the pieces, then they (the two “people†in the mind of the madman) also could not play a game.
It could be done if there was a space of time between each move. This would depend upon the individual and their ability to focus on life beyond the game.
We all have a touch of madman in us so it depends on state of mind. Is the game forgettable as the day unfolds? Could you forget that you were even involved with the game at all giving you the illusion that you were in a brand new game with each move after this designated period removed from the table? Or did you have a set time span in mind?
Am I madwoman for answering this post? Probably, but I found it an interesting prospect to play by myself after all the bullshit here this week.
an acting excercise i once did was to play chess against you’re self
regardless of you’re perception of the game, you have to be at a certain level of play, becasue you’d always been evenly matched if each “player” was trying their hardest.
How can I tell that none of you have actually tried to play yourself in a game of chess? Because it is as easy in practice as asking a rhetorical question, and then answering it - which is essentially talking to yourself. Presumably you wouldn’t also hold the same opinions for something like holding an internal debate (like whether I should take out a gym membership and pay the expense).
Your analysis xanderman is old fashioned, it puts theory before experience. like you always do.
If you were a chess player you would know that nobody thinks so many moves in advance… people play by general principles… for example, a bishop or a pawn three squares in front of a knight will block forward movement and force the knight to the perimeter - where you want him.
This is your only reason for thinking a person can’t play a game of chess against himself:
It assumes you need a strategy to play a game of chess. And even if you did, the best chess players usually know the other person’s strategy anyways - thats why they’re the best chess players.
So would me playing against myself be pretty evenly matched? Yes, obviously. …But I would win.
I’m so glad that we have someone with such a keen mind as yours here on ILP. What would I do with my feeble mind/thoughts (and jokes) without someone like you?
Is this kind of “talking to yourself” anything like having an actual conversation? I would argue that they are different. “Talking to yourself” is a pretend conversation. It is less like an actual conversation than talking to a program that fails the Turing test.
Don’t presume too much.
Well, shucks. What can I say.
Would than victory be anything like an actual victory?
Either this is honest, and you’ve recognized an analytic rigor that is rare on this forum. Or this is sarcastic, and you are insolent. I can’t tell.
Xanderman, do you want me to trail off on your petty, directionless, and irrelevant nitpickings? Or will it suffice to remind you that (if indeed you intend to argue something) you have not substantiated your original, and only, reason for thinking I can’t play chess against myself.
namely,
Do I need to remind you of the idiotic truth that victory is like actual victory?
I don’t know Mono, I keep getting a sense of what, collage aged philosophy student testing out “the practice to thinking” and arrogantly thinking, “I am the only true thinker in the world!” when I read your posts. I’ll hold off any conclusions until I read more. Initial impressions, however leave me shaking my head.
OK, here’s a little chess challenge, and not entirely off-topic because in this type of problem, you actually DO play both sides of the game. The object is to reach the diagram position in the fewest possible moves, starting from the normal opening array. That the moves played make no sense in a real game is considered completely irrelevant.
Position after Black’s 6th move. What was the game?
I guess it would be best for you to do whatever you think is proper. I ask questions because that forms one of the big methods of inquiry. I ask the questions that I do because sometimes one has to try and find a unique angle of inquiry to get to where you think you want to go.
Let me try again.
Proposition: An entity would have to be of two functionally separate minds to play an actual game of chess against itself.
A normal human cannot have two functionally separate minds.
Now let look at your example of your own One Man Chess Game. I am imagining that you sequentially moved a white piece then a black piece, moving the pieces according to the rules of how the pieces move and eventually arranged the pieces into a checkmate position. Maybe you even got up between moves and sat down on either side of the board to further enhance the simulation.
It was a simulation of a chess game and not an actual chess game. You went through the motions of a chess game, but it wasn’t actually a game. True when two participants set down they could have studies the traditions of the game and they could have studied each other’s histories. Yet there is still a remainder of uncertainty about each other, an uncertainty that is dependant on the inaccessibility of each other’s minds. The independence and uncertainty make the actual game possible.
The One Man Chess Game recalls a ventriloquist and his dummy, using timing and a carefully planned script to simulate a conversation, but “they†don’t actually have a conversation. One mind and two voices, or we can call them two characters, does not make a conversation.
Doesn’t game theory say that the most harmonious direction for two confronting forces to proceed in is ‘up’? To do this, of course, requires trust. The trust here is with yourself, or perhaps I should say a certain comfortability in the dissolution of the traditional competitive ego. A stalemate is the real victory of course – the ultimate test of restraint, where you are playing the game for the pure purpose of creating something to be admired.
you are inquiring about something that you expect to take you somewhere particular? you have your conclusions in mind, somewhere, and its just a matter of validating them? are you even inquiring?
why call this a simulation of a chess game? doesn’t it seem like a chess game to you?
why is there no uncertainty in this “simulation”? … I’m playing myself, but presented with any given senario can I not make different moves? do I always order a big mac combo?
how does uncertainty depend on two different people? do you hear what i say to people? do you know i feel like a stranger to myself sometimes. you’ve never wondered why you did something? you think you make the same choices everytime? you think you’re the same person as you were reading the previous sentence? why?
Perhaps the type of person best to seperate into two identities is not just a madman but a solitary person.
It is like being the devils advocate against yourself. If you are the type that argues with yourself then you can set up moves with out the other side knowing. I do this all the time. The world is not black and white and I prefer knowing options, good and bad or just different or opposing, so when the two seperate sides are done, the whole gains the information.
but, I must say it gets hairy when the third and fourth points decide to join. One can get lost for hours when that happens, and become quite incoherent to the outside, if you are not experienced in self control.
