I assume that the point this post is making is that the cerebral logic exercised by the spinning wheel must be much richer, as you’re performing an optimization in continuous physical space, which requires coordination of many muscles in very subtle ways, which depend quite specifically on your orientation and position on the wheel; whereas (supposedly) Go is very discrete and thus can’t necessitate the same degree of cognitive complexity/multidimensionality. Managing to stand and walk on uneven terrain is something that our cerebral machine has been trained for as long as things have legs (i.e. around 350 million years) and prepared before, and it has remained a crucial element of evolutionary fitness, so must have been honed for all this time to great precision. I don’t doubt that there is more “total depth” in processes involving physical interaction.
However, Go is a process which we perform consciously, as opposed to walking and staying upright, which is overwhelmingly unconscious. There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it. We could probably reduce the problem to a mathematical model, but that would forgo the depth we’ve assigned it above (the resulting complexity would be comparable to Go). In Go, we are able to analyze the step and introspect its decision process, to—if desired—absolute precision, while still observing the heuristic that produced the step (unconsciously). That’s the depth I find stimulating and interesting. I’m aware of no person that has been enjoying spinning wheels for years, hours a day...
(Also, FTR, Go and even Tic-tac-toe typically have humans sitting opposite you, interaction with which is just as deep and more fulfilling than running endlessly on your lonely spinning wheel!)
Edit: After actually following the vendor link in the post, I see that there is potential for interactive multiplayer fun on these. The above reflects purely on solo player experience (or for Go, playing online/against an engine). Not sure if anyone would want to play on these for years with other people either, though.
There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it.
[Epistemic status: personal observation of mental states which are difficult to describe well]
This doesn’t quite match my experience (though I haven’t had much of this experience for a while, so take this with some extra salt). What I remember is being able to have deep conscious interaction with an ongoing complex motor process like that, but in a less synchronous way. Activities like playing board games involve conscious manipulation in the same subjective timeline as the main flow of action: you consciously think about what move to make, then you reach out to make it, then you consciously observe what your opponents are doing, then repeat (depending on the game of course). Activities like playing music or running, by contrast, involve primarily unconscious cycles as the “main” flow of action, but the conscious mind can still watch it happen and then reach out and touch it in parallel, placing constraints and nudges and altering parameters. What it doesn’t get is waited on for a say in every microdecision, because those are happening too fast—but consciously remembering a finer-grained history lets you try to extrapolate what nudges to give to create the pattern you want next time, which is how I would realize the loop of deliberate practice in motor skills, which I just now notice does make the “(consciously) think, then act” pattern again, but one level of temporal chunking up. And it’s possible to have a conscious say in an upcoming microdecision if the conscious mind predicts them far enough in advance and the unconscious mind has enough spare processing power that the information can be integrated in time.
I assume that the point this post is making is that the cerebral logic exercised by the spinning wheel must be much richer, as you’re performing an optimization in continuous physical space, which requires coordination of many muscles in very subtle ways, which depend quite specifically on your orientation and position on the wheel; whereas (supposedly) Go is very discrete and thus can’t necessitate the same degree of cognitive complexity/multidimensionality. Managing to stand and walk on uneven terrain is something that our cerebral machine has been trained for as long as things have legs (i.e. around 350 million years) and prepared before, and it has remained a crucial element of evolutionary fitness, so must have been honed for all this time to great precision. I don’t doubt that there is more “total depth” in processes involving physical interaction.
However, Go is a process which we perform consciously, as opposed to walking and staying upright, which is overwhelmingly unconscious. There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it. We could probably reduce the problem to a mathematical model, but that would forgo the depth we’ve assigned it above (the resulting complexity would be comparable to Go). In Go, we are able to analyze the step and introspect its decision process, to—if desired—absolute precision, while still observing the heuristic that produced the step (unconsciously). That’s the depth I find stimulating and interesting. I’m aware of no person that has been enjoying spinning wheels for years, hours a day...
(Also, FTR, Go and even Tic-tac-toe typically have humans sitting opposite you, interaction with which is just as deep and more fulfilling than running endlessly on your lonely spinning wheel!)
Edit: After actually following the vendor link in the post, I see that there is potential for interactive multiplayer fun on these. The above reflects purely on solo player experience (or for Go, playing online/against an engine). Not sure if anyone would want to play on these for years with other people either, though.
[Epistemic status: personal observation of mental states which are difficult to describe well]
This doesn’t quite match my experience (though I haven’t had much of this experience for a while, so take this with some extra salt). What I remember is being able to have deep conscious interaction with an ongoing complex motor process like that, but in a less synchronous way. Activities like playing board games involve conscious manipulation in the same subjective timeline as the main flow of action: you consciously think about what move to make, then you reach out to make it, then you consciously observe what your opponents are doing, then repeat (depending on the game of course). Activities like playing music or running, by contrast, involve primarily unconscious cycles as the “main” flow of action, but the conscious mind can still watch it happen and then reach out and touch it in parallel, placing constraints and nudges and altering parameters. What it doesn’t get is waited on for a say in every microdecision, because those are happening too fast—but consciously remembering a finer-grained history lets you try to extrapolate what nudges to give to create the pattern you want next time, which is how I would realize the loop of deliberate practice in motor skills, which I just now notice does make the “(consciously) think, then act” pattern again, but one level of temporal chunking up. And it’s possible to have a conscious say in an upcoming microdecision if the conscious mind predicts them far enough in advance and the unconscious mind has enough spare processing power that the information can be integrated in time.