April 11, 2012

Complex vs. Profound

International draughts board
International draughts board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Once again I managed some energy trying to read Edgar Allen Poe's famous mystery "The Murders In The Rue Morgue", but (again) I failed to reach even the half of it. More and more, I found the books I tried to read were all boring (what's going on with a self-claimed book lover?). However, the unfinished short story stimulated my interest to checker game, and made me thinking a little about "complex and profound"(did I just decide to quit think?)

The stimuli was just a short paragraph of original story, where Allen Poe compared chess game with draughts game (checker in USA): "In this latter (chess), where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound." He believed that it was the games like draughts, who had only simplest rules, can exhibit the highest power of intelligence. (This is the exactly how I feel about Wei Qi).

I found this is indeed a genius thought. As matter of fact, all the modern life seems to become more and more "complex", yet mistaken as "profound" by modern people. A simple example of this is "technology". The computer technology produces more and more technicians, engineers and programmers, who spend most of life time to deal with "complex" of machine, or machine languages, yet end up being utterly puzzled by some basic ideas or language of life itself. Or, if they had ideas about life, they would simply have no time to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, I think this "complex" is unfortunately the direction led by modern life style -  we humans are going to that way. Maybe, in another several centuries (or millenniums), we humans would FEEL less, calculate more, and eventually nothing "profound" exist, only "complex", which handled perfectly by machines - a possible more powerful species by then. And whoever still know how to FEEL, would be the slaves of machines.
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April 7, 2012

Genius, Inspiration and Perspiration

Animal Genius
Animal Genius (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Not sure who said this, but I disagree. I think genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent enjoyment.

Believing genius is 99% perspiration is just a "day dream" which make people believe that anyone can achieve the same as a genius does as long as she/he puts lots of effort . This is totally untrue. To me, such kind of achievement-driven philosophy is neither realistic nor necessary. I think, the only thing one could do to get close to a genius, is to enjoy life in maximum. In this case, one can be 99% same and only 1% difference from a genius (1% of different talent).

Needless to mention, I actually believe we all are genius if we can enjoy our life in maximum.
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