Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brain. Show all posts

Sunday, 28 March 2010

Pattern recognition

"Erfahrung ist eben zentral. Mit das Bedeutendste im Schach ist die Mustererkennung - die Fähigkeit, auf dem Brett typische Motive und Bilder zu erkennen, Stellungsmerkmale und ihre Konsequenzen."
(Der Spiegel, march 2010, interview with Magnus Carlsen, a 19 year old top chess player)

One could translate it for:
"Experience is essential. The most significant in chess is pattern recognition - the ability to recognize typical motifs and images on the chess board, position characteristics and their consequences."

I find this sentence remarkable, because it seemed to me that it contains a description of how our brain works, essentially. If we slightly change the phrase for "Experience is essential. The most significant in perception is pattern recognition, the ability to recognize typical motifs and shapes in the environment, their position and their significance"

This sentence, it seems to me, contains the basic mechanism of our brain, how it works and how it is conditioned, both part of this mechanism..........

Thursday, 21 January 2010

brain and mind



J. Krishnamurti, second dialogue with David Bohm at Brockwood Park 20 June 1983:


JK: Should we first distinguish between the brain and the mind?

DB: Yes, well that distinction has been made and it is not clear. Now of course, there are several views. One view is to say that the mind is just a function of the brain – that is the materialistic view. There is another view which says that the mind and brain are two different things.

JK: Yes, I think they are two different things.

DB: But there must be…..

JK: ….a contact between the two

…….......


JK: and it (the brain) is conditioned.

BD: Yes

JK: Conditioned by past generations, by society, by the newspapers, by the magazines, by all the activities and pressures from the outside (in another part of the dialogue: conditioned by time and evolution). It is conditioned.

……....


JK: I think the mind is separate from the brain.

DB: Well what does it mean separate? That it is in contact?

JK: Separate in the sense the brain is conditioned and the mind is not.

………..


JK: So as long s the brain is conditioned its relationship with the mind is limited.

…….


DB: Yes. Now we say the mind is free in some sense, not subject to the conditioning of the brain.

JK: Yes

DB: Now one could ask a question: what is the nature of the mind?


----------------------


What are the limits of the brain? and what is the essence of the mind?


(picture taken from the spaceship Cassini of Saturn, august 2009)