The Stupid Robot
In the 1960s, I was a young electronics engineer designing guided missile simulators.
In the late 1970s, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, of which I had become a member, started a competition for engineers who were interested in robotics and the new field of artificial intelligence to see who could produce a robot mouse that would be able to find its way through a wooden maze in the fastest time. The original competition specified that the robot mouse had to find its way out of a 10ft x 10ft maze and was held in New York. You can read about the history of the competition here.
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Modern Micromouse |
In most “developed” countries, we are taught that the best way to make a "good" decision is by thinking about it. The maxim “think before you act” sums this up well. It advises us to look deeply at what we intend to do and think over how we should do it before we begin to act. It also implicitly warns us that if we do not do so, we will not act “right” and problems may follow. This emphasis on thinking is one of the reasons for the excellent progress made by western civilisation. At the same time, it is the root cause of many of our problems.
Returning to the micromouse for a minute, a successful micromouse does not only use its ability to "think"; it must integrate all the abilities that the designer has given it – memory, processing power, inputs from sensors and motional dexterity – to make an instant decision and to act as a whole. On the other hand, we are taught to stop, think and then act. We are not encouraged to take into account any other inputs to our system. No one will encourage you to listen to your body, to be aware of your stomach or any tensions in your neck when deciding. Over the course of time, we have come to believe that the body and the mind are separate, that the mind thinks and the body acts. That the best way to act is to get the mind right and then use our mind to get the body to act right.
This belief is not always helpful, and often limits our ability to live simple and harmonious lives. But although this is what we are taught to believe, it is often not how we actually live. In fact, we are more like the micromouse than we know. In reality, we do to some extent listen to our body and our mind and all other inputs when making a decision. But because we are taught that we should think about our decision, we give priority to what we think, and don’t fully trust these other inputs. Our action is biased – our belief in the maxim “think before you act” changes or biases the way we act.
Just as the micromouse engineer tunes his little mouse to use all the inputs available to make the right instantaneous decision, so can we. But to do so, we need to learn how to correct the bias towards thinking that our civilisation has imprinted on us. How to describe that? My dear friend John Fraser uses the term “embodiment” to describe the state where we “put the body-and-mind back together” and I like that a lot, so I will use it here. If we let ourselves be embodied – that is, without the bias towards thinking before acting – then we act as a whole being. This is the state studied and written about by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and by Timothy Gallwey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis, and several others. It is often described as “being in the zone” and it is the state that forms the basis of the martial arts.
Dogen describes this embodiment as the buddhist state experienced in zazen and talks about it many times in the Shobogenzo. He talks about the state where we are not embodied with the phrase "tainted". He says that our actions are tainted (ZENNA, 汚染) when we are not embodied. I will look at some of these phrases next time.
Nice blog post 🙂
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