3 ms·

Trying Not to Try (2016)

• nine_k 8y ago
  Ancient Chinese civilization: When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. And now—now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. My senses and conscious awareness have shut down and my spiritual desires take me away. I follow the Heavenly pattern of the ox, thrusting into the big hollows, guiding the knife through the big openings, and adapting my motions to the fixed structure of the ox. Modern technological civilization: I trained a RNN / CNN / GAN on enough oxen that now it controls the knife precisely, given a stream from stereo cameras as input. The conscious awareness have shut down because a simpler, out-of-consciousness-circuit network took over. This is perfectly normal and mundane; it's now you walk, or how you use a spoon. You have a lot of practice walking; if you had a comparable amount of practice butchering, you'd achieve a similar result. (This is how Master Yoda explains wu-wei to Luke; Desperado tells the same thing to the boy in a more straightforward way: "Practice".)