Chess fundamentally misunderstands the nature of intelligence

[trenton]

I have been making videos about chess recently, and I am teaching chess from a very different angle than usual. I discuss things like common errors in human thought and social behavior that contribute to paradigm lock and paradigm shift within chess. I have also discussed the foundations of emotional mastery for my future chess lessons.

The biggest weakness of chess is that it fundamentally misunderstands intelligence. Chess is taught as if it can be boiled down to a logical system of thinking even though all of these systems ultimately collapse under concrete analysis. It treats intelligence as if intelligence is thinking when in fact intelligence is consciousness. The reason why intelligence is consciousness is because if you were absolutely conscious of the nature of existence, it would be the equivalent of omniscience. Therefore, raising our conscious is more important for raising our intelligence than practicing a way of thinking until it becomes automatic and habitual. The stereotype that chess is for smart people starts to fall apart when intelligence is viewed through a radically different lens outside from just thinking.

The proper way of calculating in a chess game is not to find a few candidate moves and then calculate. What is required is that you find candidate moves at every turn during the calculation and then calculate the whole tree of variations. This quickly becomes mentally overwhelming. What we need to understand is that in order for your brain to work in this way, you have to become so focused on chess that your mind literally shifts into a different state of consciousness. The difference in states of consciousness is taken for granted in the chess world because it is chalked up to IQ, hence people get frustrated when they follow rules and principles, but they don't work. Grandmasters are teaching chess as if it is about implementing a system of logic, but they neglect the fact that when the mind shifts into a different state, it can cause the mind to work in ways that you previously never thought possible. In fact, intuition is used in chess all the time, but it cannot be logically formalized like the way chess is taught. This state comes with a deeper inner peace to the point that nothing else in the universe bothers. How many different levels of focus and consciousness are there and how can it be applied to chess? This would be a pretty big paradigm shift. 

Chess could be taught in a very different way. For example, I want to discuss how our presuppositions about logic ultimately influence how we use our logic in a chess game. This applies to life in general because the right wing and left wing fundamentally have two different understandings of how logic works. This makes it impossible to understand someone who suddenly assert something like "morality is relative" and it seems like insanity to the right wing. There are ways this ultimately influences our understanding of chess as well.

I have been integrating many advanced teachings into chess. The effect is that it not only impacts how people think of chess, but the wisdom is so much, that changes how we think about life. This makes sense because fundamentally, the way we think about life affects how we think about anything in reality. This includes a chess game and how we play it. Chess therefore cannot avoid epistemology, spirituality, consciousness, and the true nature of intelligence. In a future video I want to talk about the nature of intelligence and how to apply it to chess, but I have a lot of ideas in mind. Right now I am talking about emotions in a chess game and how to master our emotions. I included teachings from Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam because these traditions attempt to describe human nature, hence they have valuable insights into how we can master our emotions. This includes the nature of desires, forgiveness, blame, and the greater jihad.

Chess often serves as a springboard into spirituality for many players. I wonder how dramatically it would impact the way people think about life. I notice that as a chess teacher I feel limited because I want to do more than just teach chess. I want to teach deeper lessons that not only impact us during a game, but also impact how we think about life in general. These are the most powerful teachings and there are ways of integrating them into how we think about chess. My goal as a chess teacher is to improve the trajectory of the children's lives by helping them to realize abilities that they never knew they had.

Here's the channel if you want to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/@trentonrothan9724

[Leo Gura]

Chess is deeply intutive because intution is the highest intelligence. You don't have time to do brute force calculations in chess.

The best math/logic is actually also deeply intuitive. See Ramanujan.

Edited January 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[StarStruck]

22 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Chess is deeply intutive because intution is the highest intelligence. You don't have time to do brute force calculations in chess.

The best math/logic is actually also deeply intuitive. See Ramanujan.

One can't calculate what one can't see with the mind's eye.

Calculations in chess are pretty straightforward. Making the calculations is the most easiest part of chess.
Having foresight is something one can't force. You either see it or you don't.

Chess helped me a lot with understanding my own psyche through direct exp.

[Leo Gura]

28 minutes ago, StarStruck said:

One can't calculate what one can't see with the mind's eye.

Calculations in chess are pretty straightforward. Making the calculations is the most easiest part of chess.
Having foresight is something one can't force. You either see it or you don't.

Chess helped me a lot with understanding my own psyche through direct exp.

What you said does not connect with what I said.

[Magnanimous]

55 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Chess is deeply intutive because intution is the highest intelligence. You don't have time to do brute force calculations in chess.

The best math/logic is actually also deeply intuitive. See Ramanujan.

So Leo, we all know that every chess player gets better with practice; Does this mean that by playing chess we can develop our intuitive abilities? Even if we can't improve them as rapidly as someone who's talent for intuition is simply just better than ours? Or can we not, and the chess masters are stuck with the intuition they were born with and learn new game material which their intuition feeds back on in live games.

[vladorion]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

Chess is deeply intutive because intution is the highest intelligence. You don't have time to do brute force calculations in chess.

The best math/logic is actually also deeply intuitive. See Ramanujan.

Only true for blitz/bullet games. 

There's very little place for intuition in classical games. Everything has to be meticulously calculated.

[Ulax]

@vladorion To my understanding, there is a lot of reliance on intuition at the top level, i.e. magnus Carlson

[Consept]

I play 1 minute games so they're pretty much 100% intuition and almost like a muscle memory of the moves you make in certain positions that have worked before 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Magnanimous said:

So Leo, we all know that every chess player gets better with practice; Does this mean that by playing chess we can develop our intuitive abilities?

Chess develops a very narrow kind of intuition. It's an intuition for the mechanics of the pieces on that board. Of course your intuition for chess is massively developed through play. Doesn't mean it will translate into other parts of life. It almost certainly will not because it is so deeply tied to the mechanics of those pieces.

That intuition will hardly even translate to another board game like Go.

47 minutes ago, vladorion said:

There's very little place for intuition in classical games.

You speak nonsense.

Edited January 22, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Aiwass]

1 hour ago, Magnanimous said:

So Leo, we all know that every chess player gets better with practice; Does this mean that by playing chess we can develop our intuitive abilities? Even if we can't improve them as rapidly as someone who's talent for intuition is simply just better than ours? Or can we not, and the chess masters are stuck with the intuition they were born with and learn new game material which their intuition feeds back on in live games.

Don't take it so much at face value lol. There is limited evidence that you can increase your intuition solely through chess. The nature of intuition is not a concrete thing that you can just toy with. 

Yes, genetics plays its part.

Aleister crowley was a Grandmaster in chess

[vladorion]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

You speak nonsense.

 Not as much nonsense as you.

[trenton]

@Leo Gura very true, chess is deeply intuitive.

Nevertheless, chess is taught through different systems of thinking, and these systems of thinking never account for all situations, thus counter examples are always possible. This is a limit of teaching chess.

[Leo Gura]

3 minutes ago, trenton said:

@Leo Gura

Nevertheless, chess is taught through different systems of thinking, and these systems of thinking never account for all situations, thus counter examples are always possible. This is a limit of teaching chess.

Irrelevant to what I said.

[trenton]

@vladorion it is important to realize that being a cold hard calculator is one of many paradigms in chess. There have been many paradigm shifts throughout the history of chess.

I mentioned this is one of my videos. Analysis has its limits. Not even computers can calculate everything and they make mistakes as well. According to Carlsen, he usually plays the intuitive move, but most of the time spent calculating is double checking.

[trenton]

@Leo Gura are these quotes relevant?

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift" -Albert Einstein

"Of course analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it's just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check."
-Magnus Carlsen

[Aiwass]

1 hour ago, trenton said:

@Leo Gura are these quotes relevant?

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift" -Albert Einstein

"Of course analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it's just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check."
-Magnus Carlsen

1.】"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a Construction"

2.】Logical Intuitions 

[Magnanimous]

Leo, if you do, would you and why would you recommend a person going into chess?

Andrew Tate speaks positively about it as a means to represent life, but I feel that some of his logic might be corrupted. Such as sacrificing pieces and how that translates into the world; they way you sacrifice someone might be horrible. I was wondering if you had any proclivities for taking up the game without being toxic.

[Breakingthewall]

Until 2016, no computer could beat a Go master, since the number of possible combinations was so large that it was impossible to calculate them. It was necessary an AI that, in addition to calculating, used intuition for a machine to beat a human. The question to analyze is: what is intuition?

Edited January 22, 2023 by Breakingthewall

[caspex]

I have been playing chess as a hobby recently. Needed this advice thanks.

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Magnanimous said:

Leo, if you do, would you and why would you recommend a person going into chess?

If you enjoy it, play it.

But don't fool yourself that you're doing anything important. You're playing a game, that is all. The obsession some people have with chess is delusional.

To devote your whole life to playing chess is as insane as devoting your entire life to bouncing on a pogo stick. It requires a very special kind of stupidity to spend your whole life obsessing over chess.

Edited January 22, 2023 by Leo Gura