Recent studies have determined that the natural life
span for human beings based on D.N.A. researches is 38 years. That made we
wonder a little about the life span of a human mind and its health.
Top elite chess players tend to be young and play at
peak level no more than age 38 or 40. The effort to calculate and dead reckon
complex positions requires a lot of brain energy as well as physical stamina.
There may be other reasons why it is difficult for Super GMs to stay in the top
ten rankings in the world beyond age 40 (although former world champion V.
Anand is 50 and still a high ranked Super GM) including the fact that younger
players know the games of older elite players while the older elite players
haven’t had the time to study so many games of numerous potentially elite
younger players since it’s easier to study the few at the top of the
pyramid for younger players at the
bottom than vice-versa. Chess might be used by some as a yardstick for the life
expectancy of elite mind power, yet not all activity of the mind demands the
same kind of work effort.
While the human body may have evolved to physically
life for a certain span for various evolutionary reasons, the human mind grew
in knowledge and wisdom in an unequal and slower pace. A human brain that
supports a mind is physical and can begin to decay as does the body. The mind
is not a purely physical item though it occurs because of the physical brain. A
human mind is more like the artificial intelligence of a computer if A.I. were
actually fully sentient.
A mind empty of knowledge is not the same as a mind
stuffed with a lifetime of learning and intelligence. Thought the physical capacity
of the mind may degrade comparably to the body in some cases, the mind itself
may continue to increase in ability and knowledge. With intentional effort and
reasonable work to increase knowledge, the mind as a sentient power may actually
increase its competence within the brain while the brain loses some ‘computational’
power.
It is as if the central processing unit of a computer-
the chip that processes instructions, and the storage area of a computer- the
solid state drive and random access memory- were a tabula rasa without an
operating system to start with and given only the most basic bios instructions
on the CPU. BIOS (Basic Input/Output Instructions) is a booting up set of
instructions written on the CPU that are the first think to start to ‘think’
when the power is turned on.
If the CPU, ram and SSD were designed to last 38 years
and started slowly breaking down after that, yet the computer had increased its
knowledge and became sentient, the sentience could be far more powerful than it
was early in its life, or even at age 38, when more time –maybe decades- had
passed.
Sentience is life a spiritual fire that becomes alive
in-itself. It exists in a physical body that sustains its operations and provides
information from the Universe of which it is a part. AS the fuel that sustains
sentience become spent and cannot medically be replaced, as the physical body
ages, sentience continues perhaps brighter than ever as an increasing fusion of
ideas that perishes only with the last consumption of health of the body.
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