Instead, my main point was: those who side with masters of today, don't do it based on <a brain theory of skill> but based on <a culture theory of skill>. Above, you said <brains are touted>, and I don't think that accurately represents anyone's position.

Just saw your comment at Anand vs Carlsen, 2015 where it is clear that Carlsen does respect the old masters and studies their games, just as Fischer used to. A few years ago, he said that he admires Reuben Fine, "It strikes me that what he was doing in chess is similar to what I was doing." (cited in http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node....)

It implies that present-day players have limbic systems that somehow can memorize short term memories of more than 4 chunks, while the old masters can only manage up to 4. What?! The limbic system of every human in history has been 'hard-wired' by genes by age 4. It's not as if humans born after WW2 have a different 'wiring'.

Perhaps these authors are saying that present-day masters have memorized more opening variations? If so, I agree. But that certainly does not mean that the old masters cannot memorize more variations too, if they happened to have been born more recently; as what the statement to seems to be implying.

<It strikes me that what he was doing in chess is similar to what I was doing>

Fine was known as being a positional monster during his heydays, playing unpretentious openings but aggressive accurate and positionally sound middle games. Well, that's precisely what Carlsen is today.

I can see the similarities of their style and I understand Carlsen's admiration for Fine.

BTW I could never completely comprehend why Fine quit chess so early in his career. Why in the world would he refuse to play in the 1948 Candidates? It was a great loss for chess. I do not think that it was merely to continue with his Psychiatry career.

Samuel Reshevsky beat Reuben Fine 5 to 1, with 14 draws, but before the event it was 4 to 1, and lots of draws.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

Paul Keres beat Reuben Fine 3 to 1, with 8 draws, which is the best record against Fine, and it's not quite dominating.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

Reuben Fine tied Max Euwe 2 to 2, with 3 draws, but before the event it was 3 to 2 for Fine.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ches...

Reuben Fine beat Mikhail Botvinnik 1 to 0, with 2 draws, so Fine had already proven that he could beat Botvinnik.

One is the impossibility of making a living from chess in the USA of his day, and, related to this, the uselessness of the USCF. E.g. they didn't want FIDE to select the obvious Reshevsky and Fine for the world championship tournament, but wanted to pick the American reps.

Related to this was his career in psychoanalysis (really quite a farce overall, with his silly comments about chess and the Oedipus complex etc.). That was a reason he gave at the time, but decades later, he claimed that this was a Soviet fabrication. Fine was somewhat economical with the truth on a number of occasions.

One is the impossibility of making a living from chess in the USA of his day>

“Fine was a formidable player with a solid and sound style that had been compared to Maroczy, Euwe or Karpov. Arnold Denker even went so far as to compare Fine's play to that of Fischer. Fine’s play was rarely flashy and he was always prepared to make a passive, unspectacular move just to bide his time. He was always confident that an opportunity to gain the advantage would inevitably arise because he always thought he was the better player.

“In his notes to one game Fine described his approach: My chief objective was always precision, wherever that would take me. When he needed to win, he didn’t take risks in order to avoid the draw and seek critical positions. Instead he simply intensified the accuracy of his positional play—and scored win after win with surprising persistence.

For ex, the game below could well have been played by Carlsen. Fine grabs material, then just keeps on improving his position from a rather cramped start, and wins in the end playing accurately.

Fine vs Stahlberg, 1937

1. Set up a sound pawn structure. If possible set this up as a classic pawn-occupied center. If not, make sure it is sound anyway.

2. Maneuver pieces behind and around this sound pawn structure, always prepared to grab more space, and create and target opponent's weaknesses, exploit any situational development that can lead to an offensive. Sometimes this entails maneuvering around his first rank, but Carlsen isn't adverse to this.

3. Maintain accuracy at all costs.

His latest game

Carlsen vs Caruana, 2017

shows Carlsen doing this precisely. Note the sequence of moves

9. e4 cxd4 10. Nxd4 Bb7 11. Be3 Bc5

and White has advanced a pawn in the center e4 square and maneuvered his Dark Colored Bishop behind it, targeting Black's weak Queen-side Black pawns and squares.

Then what IMO is a typical Carlsenesque maneuver (complete with a creeping Queen move in the first rank)

12. f3 O-O 13. Qe1 Rc8 14. Qf2

applying more pressure on the Black Queen-side Black pawns and squares, and suddenly it's clear that White has a long term advantage with a strong center and space behind to engage in even more maneuvers. (I am almost sure that Carlsen may have missed a win somewhere in the endgame, but I don't have a chess program to verify this. To is credit Caruana also defended well.) I like the 12. f3 13. Qe1 14. Qf2 sequence.

Fine also seemed to have such a style. It's not flashy, and carried over for the whole of the middlgame and endgame looks dry to many kibitzers. Their moves are not unexpected, and there is hardly a moment for the onlooker (and probably for their opponents as well) of 'Wow! I did not see that coming'.

Carlsen fans will probably flake me for saying this, but IMO there are hardly any interesting twists or imaginatively and unexpectedly creative attacks. But I am not saying that it's wrong. On the contrary, Carlsen may have the most positionally 'correct' style of all World Champions.

I think Carlsen's success has come from creating a style that is very effective against the current level of competition. I'm not sure what the style is, exactly, but less than rigorous openings, a middlegame style that is 60% aggressive and 40% solid, and an incredible ability to grind out wins in the endgame after a drawish looking middlegame that often comes due to a late game blunder by the opponent. I admire it, although I do understand why his detractors don't. I think Lasker is the closest predecessor in style to Carlsen, just a universalist who does what it takes to win. Perhaps Carlsen would evolve a new style if he needed to, but what he's doing now is working.

I've already essentially said so in the past: I think Capablanca would be World Champion today had he been born in the 1980s to 90s. I follow live chess games of top GMs today in the internet (including Carlsen, Anand, Kramnik); and in my subjective view, they commit errors that IMO a prime Capablanca would never have done so. (For instance Capablanca during his unbeaten in 1916 to 1924 run would never have committed the errors Carlsen did in in Carlsen vs I Nepomniachtchi, 2017 or even in Carlsen vs Bu Xiangzhi, 2017 See my posts in those games.)

<An Alekhine of 2017 would blast some of the mediocre openings to pieces in less than 30 moves.>

AAA certainly had the ability to do so. Now there is an argument among some kibitzers that AAA could not do such a thing to modern top level GMs.

That's just plain false. There are dozens of games where he does this to top level masters. I've replayed enough of his games to know that if he gets a sound initiative from the opening (or middlegame) he is liable to blast any one off the board, even the strongest of masters. Ex 1: AAA shellacs a future USSR Champion and one whom Botvinnik couold not beat in their match Botvinnik - Levenfish (1937) right out of the opening, in the style of the classic 'immortal games' Alekhine vs Levenfish, 1912. Ex 2. AAA crushes Keres in a highly tactical double-edged middle game, seeing variations that Keres (one of the greatest tacticians of chess history) could not see Alekhine vs Keres, 1942

<A Karpov of 2017 wouldn't lose, ever, against a less than rigorous opening.>

Since I essentially grew up in the Karpov era, I have seen a LOT of his games, and I do agree. How the heck can you beat someone that plays like is in a match if you play only 'positionally' out of a <less than rigorous opening>? Karpov vs Gulko, 1996 (And this was already a has-been 1996 Karpov.)

<I don't see any equivalent players of this generation who can challenge Carlsen. Aronian had a run, Caruana maybe a year's run, Kramnik still has something left, maybe So, but without demeaning them, I don't think they're an especially imposing bunch of opponents.>

This is an important point. To make it more concrete, I will give a comparison.

Fils in general have nothing much to be proud of in the field of international competition (unless it's beauty contests of which we have won quite a lot recently thanks to a well established highly professional 'beauty' industry.) So when Pacquiao came along, nearly everyone here swooned over in joy.

I rarely watch boxing ever since operating on a boxer that got KO'd in a boxing bout in my residency days. But from what I have seen of his fights, Pacquiao seems to be one of the greatest fighters of his weight category.

Yet I also believe he was lucky. He arrived in an era wherein really great boxers in their prime were absent. My nationalistic countrymen will fry me for saying so, but IMO had Pacquiao been active in the time of Sugar Ray Robinson, or in the era of Sugar Ray Leonard/ Duran/ Hearns/ Hagler, then he would not have stood up head and shoulders above the pack. I think he would more likely have lost than won against them.

Good evening:

You have 22 pgn submissions in the system, but 7 of them have a type of notation that I fear will not be processed properly by <Olga>.

This is the notation in question: "�"

Did you keep a list of your current pgn submissions? If so, can you find a way to re-submit them without using the � notation?

Here are two of your submissions on queue- I am not at all certain that <Olga> will be able to properly read the � :

==============

[Event "New Zealand Championship"]
[Site "Dunedin, New Zealand"]
[Date "1974.12.27"]
[EventDate "1974�75"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Garbett, Paul Anthony"]
[Black "Metge, J. Nigel"]
[ECO "C17"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.Bd2 Nc6 6.Nb5 Bxd2+ 7.Qxd2 Nxd4 8.Nxd4 cxd4 9.Nf3 Ne7 10.Qxd4 Bd7 11.Bd3 Qa5+ 12.c3 Rc8 13.a4 b5 14.Qg4 g6 15.Qf4 h6 16.h4 bxa4 17.h5 g5 18.Qf6 Rg8 19.O-O Bb5 20.Bxb5+ Qxb5 21.Nd4 Qc4 22.f4 1-0

===

[Event "Queensland Champs"]
[Site "Brisbane, AUS]
[Date "2019.10.06"]
[EventDate "2019"]
[Round "6"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "McClymont, Brodie"]
[Black "Liu, Yi"]
[ECO "AC03"]
[WhiteElo "2332"]
[BlackElo "2247"]

<Jonathan Sarfati>

The machine won't process them still.

I would try again but with these changes:

===

<1.> Instead of piece figure notation- type out letters only N,B,Q,K,R.

================

<2.> If you include a Date tag or an EventDate tag, it has to have all three time markers filled in. If you don't know the month or day, you need to type in "??"

Not this: [EventDate "2019"]

But rather this: [EventDate "2019.??.??"], or [EventDate "2019.09.??"], or [EventDate "2019.09.22"]

==============

<3.> For annotations, instead of using plain parentheses [ ], use these ones: {}

===

<4.> Be sure to double check that your submission is not already in the database

==================

Here is a sample game that will show my suggestions in the pgn. Just click "view" on this game and you will see the pgn. I would use it as an exemplar:

<Jonathan Sarfati>

Ok of those games you submitted so far that did not get processed and published, re-submit them today and I will take a very close look at the pgns.

<Sanchez quotes Capa as saying that he had a mental lapse and forgot to make a move that would have enabled castling.>

Blackholes Between Mind and Muscle ( January 2025 edition)

By Dr. Jose Ma. Eduardo Palu-ay Dacudao

We trek along the mind-body problem. And encounter a blackhole. The blackhole of the mind. Into the blackhole we enter.

How do we begin our journey into the blackhole? It’s by asking a simple question.

Do scientists know how we move our muscles?

Yes. No. Don’t know. Not sure. Hu-o. Indi. Ambot. Ambot.

Let’s get more concrete. We direct our brain to wriggle our toe. Lo! The toe wriggles.

Feel the top of your head. On the latitudinal boundary between the frontal bone and the parietal bone is a suture which you can feel as an indentation, especially in babies. This is the coronal suture. Located around three to four centimeters behind and underneath the coronal suture is a parallel upraised ridge-like fold of brain tissue called the precentral gyrus. It is the most posterior part of the frontal lobe of the brain, located anterior and adjacent to the deep central sulcus of Rolando, which is what divides the cerebral hemispheres into frontal and parietal lobes.

Like other gyri, it is caused by the brain’s progressive folding in embryological development, as the brain tries to fit in a space-limited skull. This implies that the more folded-up the brain, the more intelligent a species is; and dolphins (surprise!) followed by humans win the top prizes for the most convoluted gyri on Earth. (By the way, that’s why I believe killing brainy sentient dolphins and whales is murder.) In this precentral gyrus is where the upper motor neurons (UMN) reside and since they control muscle movement, this gyrus is also called the motor cortex.

(Note for pundits. When doing Neurosurgery, I always avoid even touching this area as much as possible, as damage to it can cause motor weakness.)

The neuronal cell bodies of the motor cortex undergo depolarization. Specifically, a change in the permeability of the cell membrane allows positive sodium ions to enter and temporarily change the total charge within the cell from negative to positive. The temporary change is called an action potential or AP. This initial AP in turn causes a similar temporary change in permeability in the adjacent membrane, which in turn does the same to the membrane next to it. Consequently, a succession of AP’s propagate along the membrane as an electrochemical nerve impulse. This electrochemical signal travels down the UMN’s axon located in the brain’s pyramidal tract. The tract decussates to the contralateral (meaning opposite) side at the level of the cervico-medullary junction (the boundary between neck and head) and so the impulse it carries also crosses over to the opposite side. The signal travels down the lateral corticospinal tract in the spinal cord to the lower motor neuron (LMN) located in the side of the cord at the lumbar level. The LMN is induced to fire another impulse. This signal travels via the LMN’s axon toward the muscle. At the tip of the axon, the action potential causes the release of neurotransmitters from the presynaptic membrane (of the axon). The neurotransmitters cross the synaptic cleft and makes contact with the postsynaptic membrane (of the muscle). The muscle’s membrane depolarizes and so propagates an action potential in turn. The muscle contracts.

Note that the brain’s motor cortex directs the contralateral muscles in our body because the UMN nerve impulse crosses to the other side at the cervico-medullary junction. That’s why if we have a stroke on the right side of the brain, we have weakness on the left side of the body. And if we have a stroke on the left side of the brain, we get paresis on the right side of the body.

Back to the voyage to the blackhole. We direct our upper motor neuron to wriggle our toe. Lo! The (opposite) toe wriggles. (Now we understand why it’s the opposite extremity.)

You might say that it’s the sensory inputs to the brain that triggered the UMNs to fire. There are several sensory inputs. Smell ‘travels’ through Cranial Nerve or CN 1, the olfactory nerve, of the frontal lobe. Vision ‘travels’ along CN 2, the optic nerve, to the calcarine fissures of the occipital lobes. Hearing and balance ‘travel’ along the vestibulocochlear nerve, or CN 8, to the pons (also called the metencephalon). Taste in the anterior 2/3 of the tongue ‘travels’ along the facial nerve, or CN 7, to the pons; and in the posterior 1/3 of the tongue, taste ‘travels’ through the glossopharyngeal nerve, or CN 9, to the medulla oblongata (also called the myelencephalon). Pain, temperature, light touch from the rest of the body and head eventually go to the post central gyrus. The only people I know that try to memorize these connections are Neuro people since we use the knowledge to localize which part of the brain got injured, or infarcted, or hemorrhaged. Since these details will take pages to explain, I will spare you these, lest these bore you to sleep.

Speaking of sleep, the ‘opposite’ in layperson’s terms is ‘wake’. There are degrees of wakefulness. Neuro people usually use the term sensorium. The more awake you are, the higher is your sensorium score (I’m not going to bore you into a coma with more details of this.). The sleepier you are, the lower is your sensorium score. Sensorium is mediated by the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), which is said to be the anatomical basis for consciousness/ wakefulness, etcetera (as inferred by the fact that damage to the ARAS by strokes or accidents causes a decrease in sensorium).

Therefore, sensing and volitional movement cannot happen if the ARAS is depressed or shut down. Let’s put it concretely. If the ARAS is depressed, you become progressively sleepy, stuporous, or even comatose. You barely sense anything or you sense nothing at all.

To elaborate further, for the MIND to function we need be conscious in the Neurological sense of having an appropriately high enough sensorium. An unconscious person is a mindless one. That probably means that the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS), plays an indispensable role in whatever the MIND is. Nullifying the ARAS denies the MIND its grounding to one of its important anchors in the concrete anatomy of the brain.

For the nerds and intellectuals among readers, briefly the Ascending Reticular Activating System (ARAS) is made up of the neuronal cell bodies adjacent to the ventricular system in the upper pons (metencephalon), midbrain (mesencephalon), and thalamus (diencephalon). These neuronal cell bodies must be activated for the mind to do any minding at all.

To sum up so far, we have sensory inputs to the brain and their pathways as briefly explained above. We have an activated ARAS for us to be conscious enough to be aware of these sensory inputs and to subsequently act volitionally. We have the upper motor neurons (UMNs) to enact volitional movements through pathways briefly explained above.

In the philosophy of the mind there is a thing called goal-directedness. We sense, perceive, integrate in memories, emotions, and aspirations, and after all that we use the data we had perceived to direct our actions in ways that can achieve our goals. But the devil is in the details. We have learned that there is a well-defined process by which the UMN directs the LMN to direct the muscle to move.

So what is the process by which the MIND chooses it options based on inputs from the sensory areas of the brain? It’s a blackhole. How does the MIND direct the upper motor neuron to fire? It’s another blackhole.

There are blackholes in between the MIND and volitional movement.

Let’s repeat it for its importance. For generations, medical students have been hearing countless lectures on the following process:

Upper motor neuron fires. Lower motor neuron fires. Muscle moves. But, the question remains: WHAT fires before the upper motor neuron?

As far as I know, there is nothing much in literature that offers testable hypotheses on the subject of how the mind creates volitional movement.

Perhaps it’s because we ourselves do not fully comprehend the MIND. Even if it’s our own personal MINDs.

The most popular hypothesis that I have heard of is that from monist materialists (who believe that everything is material), that the MIND is some kind of emergent phenomenon from the physical existence of neurons, the stuff that composes them, and the stuff they do. There are historically other types of monism and materialism, but the monist materialists are the ones that presently dominate discussions on the MIND.

If we were to follow monist materialism, then we would have to entertain the hypothesis that it is the brain’s electrochemical activities that create the MIND.

It is a given that we all know subjectively that it is our MIND that chooses to move our muscles.

Thus, the brain’s constantly changing electrochemical activity creates the MIND, which triggers the UMN to fire. The blackhole before the UMN is the MIND itself. And all its putative characteristics that are hot philosophical issues such as inward accessibility, subjectivity, intentionality, goal-directedness, creativity, and consciousness.

That doesn’t make much sense to me. Rather it is more sensible to think that it is changes in the electrochemical activity of the brain, specifically the cortical neurons, that directly triggers the UMN to fire. But it is still the MIND that causes that electrochemical activity.

Admittedly when it comes to the topic of the MIND, I know that I do not know. I do not know its genesis or nature. Just its effects, and only on other persons when it causes muscles to move. All behavior and every act from us are mediated by moving muscles.

There is another viewpoint. There are those that believe that the mind is as fundamental to the Universe as the fundamental constants of nature. That makes them a kind of dualist (as Descartes was), rather than monists.

In addition, since our MIND’s decisions are obviously influenced by our subjective emotions, then the purported anatomical seat for emotions, the limbic system of the brain, must be involved as well. This system is mostly made up of several nuclei of neuronal cell bodies deep in the cerebral hemispheres.

The neurons of the cerebral hemisphere are constantly firing, creating electrochemical patterns all over the cerebral cortex and deep gray matter. It is hypothesized that these patterns may form the basis for memories. Perhaps even the MIND, as mentioned above? If so the MIND cannot be localized by us Neuro people. The electrochemical signals that form the MIND may encompass the whole brain or specific components or areas of electrochemical activity that travel around the brain.

It’s also possible in my opinion, that that electrochemical signals and patterns they form that results in the emergent phenomenon of the self-aware MIND can only form such a powerful phenomenon because the component neurons are communicating very fast, perhaps even instantaneously. This is what makes the MIND self-aware.

To put it in another way, let’s examine self-awareness. It is an unexplained phenomenon that occurs only in creatures that have large brains. I opine that these brains have to be large enough to host self-aware MINDs for self-awareness’ to exist, so as to be able to host in turn large areas of coordinating electrochemical patterns that cause the emergent phenomenon of the MIND to occur.

In my opinion such electrochemical patterns have to be able to communicate especially fast. In other words, for the component neurons and electrochemical signals to form the emergent integrated whole that is the self-aware MIND, they have to integrate their communications nearly instantaneously. Now here’s a catch. The larger the brain and the areas for such coordinating electrochemical signals to occur, the slower it would take for a signal to travel around the activated areas. I’ve already opined that for such a powerful phenomenon as self-awareness to occur, the coordinating areas of the brain must be communicating with each other very fast.

If these communications are occurring not only fast but instantaneously, one solution is that these communications are occurring non-locally in the physical sense. In brief, it involves the collapse of quantum pilot waves of entangled neurons, and signals. This would allow the emergent phenomenon that is the self-aware MIND to communicate with each and all of its components instantaneously, which strangely enough is a requirement (communicate with each and all of its components instantaneously) for the MIND to emerge in the first place.

How did this exactly happen if true? Another blackhole?

I can conceive of an experiment that monitors the electrochemical activities of the cerebral cortex as a whole, and with emphasis on the particular part of the motor cortex in the precentral gyrus of the frontal lobe; and the somesthetic cortex of interest (the somesthetic cortex is a part of the postcentral gyrus on the parietal lobe). If you find these incomprehensible, just know that certain parts of the brain have to be monitored closely and accurately.

Other experiments could be done for other muscle groups, specific muscles, and volitional speech (in the latter, one must monitor the brain’s speech center, the Broca’s area in the temporal lobe).

The devil will be in the details again. Does present science and technology have the capacity to do such close monitoring of the brain’s electrochemical activities? The monitoring instrument must be quick enough to detect the changes in the electrochemical pattern of the brain’s cortex in the time interval from the decision to move a muscle by the MIND to the firing of the UMNs, and be super accurate to boot. The only things that I can think of that can approach such capability is the PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography), or perhaps some kind of supersensitive EEG (Electroencephalography). But there may be others I am not aware of.

If such an experiment is possible, then it should be done. But even if such an experiment is done, I don’t think it will fully answer the question of the nature of the MIND. What you will see is only certain areas of the somesthetic and sensory parts of the brain and certain areas of the motor cortex light up during the PET scans. But how the MIND, the subject’s self-aware conscious volitional decision making system, directs the sensory areas of the brain to trigger the motor cortex’s UMNs to fire would remain a mystery.

To confound matters, there are other questions.

Suppose we are able to answer the above. There will be a next question. Say how is the ARAS involved? And a next. Say how is the limbic system (deep neuronal cell bodies in the telencephalon and their connections, said to be the seat of subjective emotions) involved? For each question, we must be able to do experiments that require quick and accurate monitoring of those parts of the brain that are involved.

Soon we will see ourselves getting to the point of asking again: what is the nature of the MIND? Because that’s where volitional movement decision-making starts.

By the way, there is another field where the MIND seems to be involved. It is the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, especially the Copenhagen type interpretations of the collapse or reduction of the wave function. It’s a pretty long topic, and not my specialty, so the reader is encouraged to read up on Schrodinger’s cat and Wigner’s friend, which I think gives easily comprehensible ideas on how direct observation (possibly by the MIND) ‘collapses’ a smeared out dead and alive cat into a cat that is definitely dead or alive. Before the observation, the cat does not physically exist as definitely dead or alive.

A way out or loophole is to assume the Universe is superdeterministic. That would imply that the MIND is also superdeterministic. Now how in the world are we going to test for that, that the MIND is subject to superdeterminism if we do not even know what it is? As this whole essay explains, we do not even know how the MIND triggers the Upper Motor Neurons of our cerebral cortex.

(Caveat: My intuition tends to favor the notion that the MIND is NOT superdeterministic at all, and can choose freely between multitudes of options.)

Do scientists know how we move our muscles?

Yes. No. Don’t know. Not sure. Hu-o. Indi. Ambot. Ambot.