
Trying Not to Try (2016) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/trying-not-to-try
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nine_k
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".)

