Chess of life

I have the luck of having been introduced to chess quite early in my childhood and taken a liking to it. Of course, in the digital age, it is a game that tends to disappear and it is not one of the games that spurs creativity as a recent academical article as noted. On the other hand, chess has many advantages for self-development, and it is also a tool to a certain understanding of the world, in an ideal-type of way.

The concept of ideal-type is actually a good one to start up with the subject of chess, as no ideal-type exists in reality. The problem is that every words represent an ideal-type. For example, “ chair” represents something in our mind, but we never see it in the world exactly as we see it in our mind, so we create a group of things we observed that can belong to that group. The problem now is that such groups make sense only in relations to others as the limit of a group can exist only if they are other things that have borders as well.

So if concepts that make sense of the world is stuck in borders of this world, we find our thoughts on a checkerboard. BOOM ! Here I start with my chess concept ( it is not mine, it is actually more Wittgenstein's one, I have just adapted it). So we are stuck with generalisations in our mind of everything that surrounds us. Each generalizations have its limits, and our mind can only collect a limited amount of rules-concepts-generalizations-heuristics-devices. 8 by 8 cases, separated by black and white so we know every time what are the limits more or less. So we have a structure of understand that is a checkerboard. What you can see though is that a checkerboard will never move. It is 8 by 8, it is black and white. Point. It won't transform. It is a tabula rasa of understanding that is slightly useless as though we have understood more or less the limits of our understanding, no one can say that they have not changed there minds and that the relations between concepts have not changed.

So we need pieces. The pieces are the words we are going to define, the cases we are going to give depth to so we have a dynamical understanding of the world. Pieces are shit complicated to understand as they represent something for their modus operandi but their m.o. are useless if they would have been alone on a checkerboard. Indeed, a rook can move everywhere, and then would represent everything, if he had nothing to stop him. Something that represents everything, represents nothing. So again, a piece functions is only defined in relation to others. A bishop can move far and well, compared to a King, but it is kinda stuck, compared to a rook.

So we have dynamical concepts moving around in relations to others, but also in relations to where they start from. And here, we observe a hierarchy of concepts, where we have loads of little understandings, which can be sacrifice because they can be replaced easily by others. Who cares for the word chair, as I have the verb seating, I have stools, I have sofas and armchairs. On the other hand, I do care for future, past or present, because they are important for me to know where ( when actually) I am. And what about Me. Could Me be a king, that I might lose on a checkerboard? Anyway, we have a hierarchy of pieces, that is assigned rather by their uniqueness than by their function.

I would like to make a parenthesis here concerning pawns. A pawn can go a very long way and be transformed into a key piece for someones understanding of the world. Let's say use the color blue, which is not that important ( it didn't really exist in ancient greek, and there are a multiplicity of blues in Inuit ). It is a color. The thing though is that in relation with, let's say phenomenology or linguistic or history of art, we can start detail the color in all its specificities in a culture at a given time and how it might represent part of the view of the world this culture has. Bam ! The blue was a pawn of daily language that became a Queen to understanding the world. The pawn had to travel from its original position, to the furthest point it could go, and by always sustaining its relations to other points without falling out because its position was to be taken by a stronger piece.

What is weird though is that the responsibility of a concept and the power of its modus operandi are different as well. Indeed, let's look at the fundamental concept for a game of thoughts: the King. It's function is to go slowly where it will find a safe roof, which is not really impressive, and yet it is the most important piece. As such, it is only because we have a game that we have King, and it is the importance we put on this singular concept. If we take the Queen, we can make it as relevant we want to the other pieces as we wish. The Queen is the other singular piece of the game and it can do pretty much what we want her to do. Would we wish though to let her stay at home to care for the King, she wouldn't be that important anymore. She has a defined function, but her importance depends only in the relation she has been put with the others.

So what is left within a game are the rules of the games. Indeed, the modus operandi and the rules are slightly different. First of all, the rules are set in the times of the games. For example, first moves can be different from other moves, and the clear example is that a pawn can move two steps if it is its first move. It is afterwards restricted. Another example is the King and the move called castling, where he moves two steps to hide behind a rook. He can't do so if he moved previously, or the rook moved previously, or if he is moving through a mate. Such moves are therefore constricted by the rhythm of the game. Rules are also quite tricky as they are sometimes unknown by most of the players. For example, en passant is a rule that not everybody knows, where a pawn can take a side pawn that moved its initial two steps. So the more rules a player knows, the better off he is.

So now we have introduced the player. Rules apply to him. Would he touch a piece, he has to move that piece and would he stop touching that piece, he can't change his mind to move that piece until it is his turn again. The player is constricted by the rules but like a piece can move within the rules limited by him. The main rule being the goal: mating the king ( not as finding him a suitable queen, but attacking him and living him no escape). The player assign the importance he wants to each of the pieces to defeat his opponent. That's where the opponent enters our realm of understanding. The game is Manichean, it is one against the other. To play well, the importance is not only to put your piece in a favorable place in relation to the other pieces ( and even the pieces of his own colors which assure his defense but also his moves to come) but to anticipate the other players move.

That's where it becomes tricky. Concept fights one another, over an important idea. We are almost in a Hegelian fight between a thesis and an antithesis. We are actually exactly there. As personalities that compose the self are nothing more than define in opposition with other personalities. We anticipate the other players move and most of the time, you anticipate the other player's best possible move. This is where the game gets tricky, because the best move can be set three turns afterwards by a succession of apparently irrelevant moves. We have to put our shoes in the other player's mind and assuming that he is slightly more stupid than we are ( would we think he'd be smarter, he would anticipate our anticipation and counter the our own counter-move). Would he be more stupid though, we can find ourselves at lost, since we foresaw wrong and would change tactic in mid-way leaving maybe an unexpected opening. The argumentation never goes as expected.

That's why we can fight ourselves at chess ( and the here-presented symbolic chess). Indeed, you just need to turn the checkerboard to see from the opposite perspective what has been going one and even better, you know what is anticipated from the opposition and go on this eternal fight of counter-anticipation. Internal discussion over what is right or wrong, over we should follow passion or reason, are set within a checkerboard, where there is a king one side and the other, and there are different arguments for one and the other, which are set within the limit of our mind and sometimes, unexpectedly, a pawn through experience would become more important that when it started and would reverse maybe the game we thought was set for ourselves.

Of course, we can cheat. To cheat we just have to be sure the opposition hasn't seen what we did or ignore the rules we have set ourselves. A game of chest, professionally, is noted down, so there is always a repercussion to inconsistencies of a game.

There are so many things to say about the games of chess set in our lives. We can observe that it is a relation game, and it is not necessarily because you have a lot of concepts on your side that you will win. It can for example mean that you did stay on a good defensive the whole game, but you went nowhere to attack the other, and worse, you stuck yourself and an opponent horse came through to stalemate you where you haven't left place to escape. Too many words can block winning an argument because of confusion when the other can move its concept freely to counter or attack.

The infinite variations of games means it is impossible to know how a game will end. It does depend on the players level of the game, but even then, every body forget pieces or make mistakes. It is of course impossible to apply a chess game to reality, but somehow, all of reality is applicable to a chess game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose but we always lose a little, rarely it is a stalemate. And there is always another game coming.

Applied Spider-Man Theory

'With power comes responsibility' is Spiderman motto and a well observed rule that we can observe sometimes in our society throughout history. There are maybe though exceptions and to find these exceptions, I would like to explore to what extent is that motto true. If it was entirely true, would the Green Goblin really go on rampages like he does ? Well, that might not be the best of examples, since he is held responsible for his actions by Spiderman, and punish, maybe not accordingly in a fair way ( a lot of times Spider-man would be too nice to the different people who impersonated the Green Goblin, from my point of view).

Anyway, first we have to start with a definition of power, and I will use classic sociological theories to do so. First of all, any power is characterized by an inter-dependent relationship. You do need two people for one to exert power over another one and there must be a need for these two to be in such a relation. For example, it could be two lovers, in which case they are dependent on each other for their feelings to be kept alive.

First question that arises then is that most relations are asymmetrical at a given time, meaning that someone will always make a decision that the other(s) will have to follow. There is nowadays a view that power is unfair, but it is bound to exist in the sense that if two persons try to exert power on the other, they would nullify each others decision and nothing would move. That's why that in the example of two lovers, the decisions would have to be balanced, either in time or in the theme of what has to be decided.

Now that we know that every inter-dependent relations will have a power relation, we have to observe in which way the power goes. One has power over another one, if he controls some uncertainty to come. I hold a gun to your face, I'm dependent on you because I want your wallet, you are dependent of me because I'm holding some uncertainty about your future ( life or death). It does not have to be a threat but the uncertainty control can be a reward. I ask you to clean my shoes and you'll get a big fat check, I get to decide the quality of the cleaning.

The third element of power we need to find, if we want to see the verstehen, it is the will to make someone do something. It does not have to be conscious, but it has to be accepted. Back to lovers: I want new shoes and someone in love with me offers them to me. I can accept them and offer back gratitude or more or I can refuse them and reject the person courting me. Have I exerted power in both cases ? In the first one, I would say that I did, as I have accepted that I hold a way to make someone do something for me, in the other one, even though I made someone do something I have reacted in such a way that it will not ( hopefully) happen again. In the second case, I have not exerted power, but the image the other had of me did and as such, he forced himself.

Now, what are the different types of power we can observe in society?

The first one is the power of Coalition. Meaning that many can form peer pressure, or threats to make someone do something. Unions are a good example, though it has to be noticed that they are trying to counter another form of power. They do though exert a form of pressure to act in a certain way in an inter-dependent relationship by holding cards over the future.

The second one is Hierarchical Authority. I have a boss, I have to obey him. We both work for the same institution, but this institution has given this guy the power to tell me what I have to do otherwise he will ask that some sanctions will be applied to me. He represents the power of the institution into which I am a part of, and as such, it is not directly the person who has power.

The third one is the power of the person holding an Information. In social sciences, informations ( and it is slightly similar in physics) can represent anything. So someone holding money for example, holds information that will make anyone do something. A better example might be, in theory, the University professor ( in a perfect world) who can ask his audience to be quiet, otherwise he won't share what he knows.

The fourth one is the Mastery of a process. Imagine that a prisoner is given the right to serve whoever he wants in a prison, well, people will have, to some extent, obey him otherwise they won't be sure what they will be served. He is not an authority, as he was not given power, but is one in practice.

The fifth one is the power of the Expert. Everybody knows this power: the doctor who can prescribe you a good drug or tell you everything is alright and you should go to work. The lawyer who tells you you'd better settle or loose in court, even though in your mind you are totally right. The architect who tells you that another floor will really not fit the general symmetry of the building.

The sixth one is the power of the Network. It is a vicious power that everybody to some extent uses. You know a guy who knows a guy so you can do something that someone else, who knows no one, can't do. The person with the network, does not have a power of coalition, because it is not a fixed group, he does not have to be an expert or an authority, but he is just a pal with the person who has some power.

Finally, there is the Manipulation. It is all the form of power that are based on simple manipulation of the pathos of the other. The other one is in love with you, well you don't have to go and get your coffee anymore. The other one is stupid and get enraged easily, well you have heard that this guy you hate told something against him in his back and he better get his ass slapped. Someone you never met does not know you're bluffing when you say your his boss's son, he will also get your coffee.

Now, all these powers have limits and consequences. To have limits and consequences, the power relation has to be observed, felt and understood. If I went to see ' Eat, pray, love' 5 times with my girlfriend because I'm telling myself I love that film, the power my girlfriend has over me is probably limitless. If I suddenly become a pure existentialist in front of man holding a gun in front of my face and decide I might as well die here, he can shoot, but he won't have made me handed in my wallet.

The thing is that sometimes, we see the power and dislike it, but without observing what gives this power its limits. The limits of power are a lot of times set by the responsibility this power has in an inter-dependent relationship. For example, a King of France has an almost absolute power over his kingdom. He has so only though as long as he can hold his kingdom together. Now if he starts going crazy on spending and taxation and people do not recognize their country anymore, they will find a way to fight this power. The opposite is kind of true, someone who has a lot of power, but use it in such a way that everybody in the relationship is happy, will hold to this power very long. If women are portrayed as the weaker gender, men will have to be polite and courteous because they are the protectors. If now women want to be seen as equal, men do not want to hold the responsibility anymore.

With the loss of power therefore might also come the loss of responsibility, which might be the vicious side of this story. Imagine the owner of a company. He gets to decide who works where and what salary they'll have, and if he abuses of that power, like the king, he would be in trouble. But now, a CEO, who does not own his company, is not responsible for anything, as he would point at the shareholders and say that they hold control over future uncertainties. These shareholders though, will point at the market and consumers to say that they hold the control over the future uncertainties of the company. Everybody has some power, meaning that everybody is responsible, meaning that nobody is.

We can find this disappearance of power and responsibilities in a lot of strata of society I think. Certainly in politics, in economy, in class inequalities. The best way to avoid the costs of power is obviously the tendency for synopticon. The synopticon is the process of everybody looking at one person. This person will look as holding a lot of power, and yet it is only because everybody looks at him that he will look as being responsible. A National football trainer would look responsible for his team, but it is just because he is the one put up front by the team and the owners of the club. Mubarak is also good example of someone who looks like he is in power of a country and held responsible for the inequalities in this country, but he was just a front figure for a whole clique.

People are afraid to look powerful, because they do not like the cost of power, the responsibilities. They prefer to put up masks. If you want to make something positive for the world though, you do need to have power over what goes wrong. I don't know on this one if I really prefer Spider-man over Superman.

Lure an Instant Blast. Past-Present-Future

Well, it is almost confirmed: neutrinos go faster than light. Which raises the question of what else could go faster than light? Well, if a fundamental particle goes faster than light, can we still believe that the rest of the world follows the speed limit? There are no sanctions against going faster than light, otherwise Switzerland ( and I love this scenario) would have been warped in a black-hole and never heard off again.

The recent study that is left apart from the mainstream media is a research done at Cornell University where a psychologist managed to prove that some people are precognitive, when compared to the average. Which means that they could guess the event coming, even if that event was random and not capable of being calculated. I know, it sounds crazy, but how come it sounds more crazy than neutrinos going faster than light? Isn't it in the end maybe the same paradigm forbidding anything to go faster than light that forbids us to think that the future exists before we make it ?
So here is the theme of this article: the paradigms of time.

It will of course be composed in three, because so far we are only capable of doing such a taxonomy: past, present and future. What it might be is also an evolution in humanities evolution, in a very weird way and I hope that I am wrong, because Copernican revolutions are starting to be annoying, in the sense that we always restart from the start all our thoughts and at the same time feel the need to work at filtering the ideas from the past that should not be taken for granted.

I'm not sure how to structure this article, as dividing in it three and it looks like I'm repeating point, but if I work thematically, it will be worst as I would lose myself or repeat arguments, the perfect ingredient for boredom ( if you aren't already). Just to throw out my thesis before everything, and try not to be too linear, I will try to defend the idea that we have not concentrated enough on the future, though it is, in the public, only part of our society since the end of the nineteenth century ( thank you sci-fi), it will become ever more important.

How and why and what the fuck are three good questions to this erratic claim. What I want to observe though is that in antiquity and in our history, until I don't know when, it is actually relative to societies and individuals, we have concentrated ourselves on the past as a way to see the world. It is of course logical, in the sense that we can more easily generalize and make sense of the world if we have examples we can build on. It is though more than the logic. The past has been a way to legitimize our present and our future.

We were anchored in rituals and mythologies that would tell us 'eternal' truth that guided us. It is why these societies had a slightly more deterministic outlook that our present. It wasn't scientific determinism, in the sense that everything was the consequence of some cause indirectly related to the Big Bang, but that everything was already written or the choice of some unearthly human-looking god figure. This god(s) figure would also be related to the human in power, through some kind of story or ceremonial selection. And the gods always came from a long time before humanity and only our memory served us. Knowledge, then represented the accumulation of stories and rules.

Then came the present in our mind, and we killed the gods, and we invented free-will. Free-will is the lie of the present. When the past uses memory, we uses perception to make sense. We look left and right and study how the world goes through repeating experiments and transforming them into formulas. No matter we know that the formula can always be discussed. Which is the bases for contemporary knowledge: discussing what has been accumulated. The present is the most important time at present ( haha), in the sense that we tend to see history as something that glue us, but we are not ready to build a better future because present problems seem more important. The present is also seen as somehow accidental, so legitimacy doesn't come from the past, but from the fact that things are the way they are.

And the future will come some day as the main perspective. Of course, I will not be there to see a society of individuals future-oriented I think. Hopefully though, I will help towards that like many others have in the past. How would that look though. Well first of all, we would be more morally responsible, as a better future for each of us is the only reasonable answer to the ultimate question of ' why be good ?'. More than that, the future is based on imagination, which might be the faculty the makes us different from animals. It is also the faculty that made our reality nowadays. For all the Ian M. Banks readers out there, if they do read scientific publication, they would understand that a lot of the new physics theories or engineering marvels come out of his books, just like Isaac Asimov invented ethical robotic and the concept of Earth as a self-regulated-system otherwise known as Gaia.

Overall, it is difficult to understand that we need to forget our memory, we need to not trust what we see, but only imagine what is to come to jump unto the next realm of understanding. I know that it is still a limited way to absolutely understanding the world, but it is always within limits that we have understood the world, and every time the limits have grown. Which might also be the center of limited-rationality, that we act as rationally as we think we can, but only because we do not understand our limits. Would we consider a future, where our limits have augmented, we already are opening our frame of decision and extending our rationality.

So now, I will try this difficult task of considering futures, even near futures and then think about how the present can lead to the different scenarios. The past and the present will then be mixed into one since they are the same from a future perspective. The question about the present will only be how it will be judged, though that's actually a trick of our present-oriented mind, since a future-oriented mind won't have to judge the past. All in all a difficult question, where I've lost myself in this free writing exercise which I feel will lead to somewhere.

Socio Scooby Logy Doo

So I am writing an article on monsters and it might look childish but science is in the end just fiction confronted with reality and there are probably some realities in our cultural monsters. Of course, the fascination for monsters is not shared by everybody, the fact that I have grown in geeky culture through and through is either the chicken or the egg of this fascination. Now I will present here some observation about the contemporary monsters we encounter in our comics, films and books. While reading this, let's keep in mind that monsters have existed since the dawn of humanity and are as important memes as deities and some deities happen to be monsters. I will though speak only of contemporary monsters and I will not work on their evolutions as it would have to follow the evolution of society. ( Yey, I have here the idea for another article to come ).

Let's start with the basic for any analysis: a simple definition and a simple taxonomy ( an Aristotelian organization) of monsters. The definition will be 'a supernatural threat to humanity'. And the subgroups of monsters are the big monsters, the hunter monsters and the swarm monsters. As you can see, it is pretty basic ( basic reflexion has time and time proven to be really infinite and might actually be an oxymoron). Now we have to see what I mean by these subgroups.

Well the big monsters are most probably the oldest monsters humanity had. They are the giants and the titans, the cyclopes and the leviathan, the king kong and the godzilla. They are the top of the food chain that everybody expects but never meet. They have also been embodied in science with mega-volcanos, intergalactic crashes, surprising tsunamis and lunatic suns. The newest kind of big monster I can think of is the alien spaceship. The aliens in themselves can embody different kind of monsters, but the spaceship usually represents what is too big to be controlled. The fear behind monsters is probably the one of finding something we could never have control on. We have to thank though hollywoodian mythology which always finds a way to destroy the threat and makes us forget that destruction is not a synonym for control.

Now a monster that I think has appeared only at the end of the 19^th century ( though this has to be verified) is the swarm monster. The best example is of course the zombie. They have the power to increase exponentially and though they are small and weak, get us because of their number. I said that the first swarm I can think of in our culture are the morlocks in the H.G. Wells ' The Time Machine'. They represent the mass of workers having evolved in subhumans and are the enemy of the small elitist communities of Eloi. There is so this elitist representation of the proletarians that we can find in the end in zombie movies as well. Of course, swarms are also represented by science nowadays though diseases and infections, but the fear I think is the lost of power of the few who think themselves smarter against the mass of slow, small minded beings.

Finally, I add the hunters. The hunters are actually like human beings but generally feed on humans. The differences are only the differences we want to see. As such, it works like racism does, in the sense that we generalize an evil on a specie more or less similar to ours and the legitimization for hunting them down is the prejudice, without considering their weaknesses ( except as a mean to eradicate them). What is funny is that at the end of the 20^th and the beginning of the 21^st century, we have seen an interesting evolution that tries to show an open-minded humanity which seeks to understand how these hunters are unique individuals that might deserve life. I am of course speaking of this attitude towards humanizing vampires, werewolves, witches and the such to involve them in romances with humans. We are now trying to glamorize their weaknesses and show their powers as tools given to the chosen few to protect humanity ( from itself usually). We could ask ourselves if in our culture, there is not a slow glorification in the media for the sociopath as a rational egoist, which happened to be the perfect human in a neoliberalist system.

There is a fourth group which I do not want to consider at this time: the ghosts. They represent too many things at the same time ( gods, hunters, different teleologies on life,...).

Ok, so we have different monsters, and we have humanity. What humanity represents most of the time is a specie-centered group which loses any ideal of being one with an ecosystem. Of course, modernity has disconnected us ( except through different resistance group which tried to present a positive organic perspective of the world) from this reality for the illusion of control. Monsters though show that we cannot control everything. As I have pointed out, big monsters cannot be controlled like sheeps and swarms are by definition overwhelming. Here, the interesting part about control and the environment is that when we have increased our capacity to travel, we have had to write down laws, as norms are not shared for every communities. Laws represents how everybody should act within a given-space. Hunters represents what laws cannot stop. Hunters are far more problematic for humanity because they also represent the excuse for humanity to be unlawful. Of course, in the middle-age, we managed to legally condemned witched through godly trials but we have stopped believing ourselves and now we have no laws to hunt hunters. We do now give them the rights we give ourselves or the one we give animals.

In a lot of cases with monsters, we become so obsessed with the survival of our species that we do not even consider other animals we used to live with. All the stories turn around the humans and how they confront the new threat. Of course, animal centered stories are not that common. It does show that monsters reinstate the dichotomy human vs. nature. They somehow legitimize our superiority because we can talk about our fear of them and find ourselves as victims ( what christian societies love to see themselves as). It is a human vs. nature where the sign-system disappears. With monsters, who cares that Britney Spears was a best-selling artist. The past and the future disappears, so knowledge of the signs created by humanity get in the background, excepted possibly for the hunters where their weaknesses are often hidden in some old books.

It is a paradoxical situation, to see that monsters represent the end of modernity and also the end of traditions. Traditions have never disappeared, but most of the time just transformed themselves. When I use the word tradition, I am speaking of ritualized social interactions. This is especially true with swarms. They oblige the humans to be constantly on the move to find an island of peace. This constant traveling, continuous escape, might be actually the ideal-type of true modernity, where no one is bound in a space or a time but has to always reflect. It does of course challenge our ethics, as knowing whether protecting the weak is something the group has to do, as it might put in danger everybody.

The final question when doing a laying down the problematics of a sociology of monsters is the question of the Nation-State. I will repeat the Weberian definition of the nation-state as the entity that has the legitimized monopoly of violence. Of course, this notion is anchored in the Hobbes' prince to whom we give all our force so this prince ( State) can protect us. The Nation-State though has rarely got the power to save us from monsters. It does echo the previous paragraph that states that modernity becomes ambiguous with swarm monsters, but the nation-state problematic appears with all the monsters. If the State cannot protect us, it is also too big to unite us all, it is too slow to pass useful laws and it is why militia appears and it is not even some form of idealized anarchism that takes place. The question of reinstating a State at the end of stories is not even often raised ( the exception I have in mind is Independence day where running the State becomes a hereditary profession).

So, I will stop here with just to never diminish the potential of fiction to question our society and I will dwell into more reflective entertainment now for our next discussion.