To transcend retardation , you must embrace it first

To illustrate the great quote by Miyamoto Musashi, the Japanese sword warrior, here we give two stories. One from ancient world, one from modern world. As you will see the wisdom provided by this is timeless as illustrated by these examples.

Two stories on transcending retardation - Case of Mr. Demis Hassabis

A beautiful game of chess

In a documentary about DeepMind and AI, Nobel price winner Demis Hassabis, the British mathematician and scientist describes his inspiration for studying AI. Apparently he was an intellectual with a promising career in chess when he was young. And one day he was playing with an opponent in a room filled with hundreds of other players playing in parallel to him. And after a mini battle in his own mind he lost the game, to the other guy, who for a brief moment was able to mock his career as a chess player. In his own words, it had made him feel like what a waste of human consciousness. In an imaginary game of chess. Not only his, but all the other chess geniuses in the same room, battling individually with their thought power to win an artificial mind game with endless possibilities. What If he could somehow connect all these powerful minds so they can work together for a goal. That is a motivation to research on AI. However the fact I would like to point out is that, he did not realise playing chess would be a waste of time until he lost and accepted he sucked at chess, will never reach the top to be the best chess player ever. So, this is a practical example from the modern world which shows, we shouldn't be afraid to embrace our foolishness of understanding so we can be free to chose wisely what actions we should take. In case of Demis, he won the Nobel price in chemistry, 2004 for his works on protein folding problem, using AI. If you do not know structure of a complex protein is all that matters to save millions of lives, as they are building blocks, drivers and motors of human physiology. By embracing his foolishness in chess, Mr. Demis had transcended retardation.

Case of the man who walked into the mud.

The second example comes from one of my friends. I'm not sure the origin of the story, but can be related to Eastern philosophy. Imagine a man walking into a pit of mud. And as he walks he progressively gets buried in mud, at one point he is almost buried up to his nose. Somehow, at this point he realizes that he is going to get drowned and perish if he continued forward. And he turns back. But that moment, the flash of time he had embraced his retardation, that he had been a fool. Is the moment paradoxically change the trajectory of life towards transcend. Sounds familiar? This is exactly what is mentioned by Socrates In different words. Unexamined life is not worth living.

A man who walked into the mud

In this sense I would say, human world is a balanced situation. Where we are equally exposed to both good and bad. If we were exposed to either one of these continuously the knowledge will not improve as there is less chance of knowing the other side of the equation. So, when I feel like a fool I would embrace this feeling. And accept so I can start a mini journey to transcend myself to a knower.

More you know, more you realize, you don't know - Aristotle