#selfagainstself — Public Fediverse posts

Playing Chess With Oneself: How Humanity Became Tops And AI Can Help

Abstract: Human thought may owe much of its superiority not so much to irresistible logic but rather to an internal war of alternatives generating the former, in which competing interpretations confront one another until one proves more effective. Solo chess becomes a small experiment in this principle: the mind can artificially compartmentalize itself and generate adversarial reasoning. At the social and civilizational level, debate, opposition, and even conflict can similarly function as stress tests for competing models. AI potentially transforms this ancient process by generating deliberately divergent logics and perspectives, making the subconscious-like alternatives of thought externally inspectable. But genuine dialectical power requires independence: an AI merely reproducing the user’s premises is playing chess with itself while secretly controlling both sides.

War Of All Against All: Nobody wanted to play chess with me, but I wanted to play chess. No one is better served than by oneself, I wondered: would it be possible to play chess with oneself? After all, I hold the brain to be a multimind, with various parts doing their own thing and then convening. Could I experimentally compartimentalize? My brain deliberately at war with itself? After all, I had been very much multimind about many things…

So I gave it a try, opening the game with the whites. The key was not to think too many moves far ahead from any of the two sides, preventing strategizing against oneself. That’s easy to do by reacting quickly. Half an hour later, the whites won.

***

I Beat Up Completely, Therefore I Think:

The brain of course does this sort of struggling against oneself naturally, perhaps most visibly in dreaming when parts of the brain plot and conspire against the ruling networks by uncovering perspectives different from those directing one’s daily consciousness. 

More generally in any society, the struggle of a part of society against the elite(s) is not just class warfare but, more fundamentally, considered at the civilizational scale, the establishment of potentially superior ways. Nowadays AI can do this on command, changing “bias” and “temperature” to bring logic itself to struggle against more sedate, or less aware, versions of itself. 

Thought is greatly the fruit of debate, not just observing apparent causality, or being instructed how to think. Debate, from 11th century Old French debatre—from de- and batre, “to beat”—originally meant to fight or beat thoroughly. Superior thoughts are what rules the mental battlefield after total combat. The etymological grounding of debate (de-batre = to beat thoroughly) highlights an evolutionary truth: logic is not static; it is forged through friction.and confrontation.

Ruling Networks Fighting Subconscious Alternatives├─► [Adversarial Friction] ──► [Superior Logic]

***

Peace Of Mind Is Not A Sustainable Alternative:

If you want complete peace, just die!

Debate improves when an initially dominant logical-emotional interpretation is made to confront a sufficiently independent alternatives. Superior thinking comes from superior debate, and much of what appears at first sight, as deplorable infighting inside one’s mind, or society, is actually there to determine better (logical-emotional) outcomes. The later evolutive propensity to logical superiority turned humanity into the crown of biological creation. 

(That in turn forced human evolution into cooperation, language, cumulative culture, technology, and social learning which all result from and in turn cause logical superiority…) 

Solo chess, internal deliberation, political opposition, and AI-assisted critique can all instantiate this process—provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position. 

***

Civilizational Scale: Political and even bellicose war between nation-states or ethnicities, let alone cultural friction isn’t merely destructive noise; it is the evolutionary mechanism by which a society tests, and stress-tests, structural alternative models before environmental conditions force catastrophic, and often terminal, failure.

The Biological Cost: In biological brains, internal debate is computationally expensive and constrained by emotional preservation (the ego defending its existing model to avoid cognitive dissonance). About 20% of Homo Sapiens’ energy is spent by the brain, and this may have gone up to 30% with Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, going a long way, according to the present author to explain the dilution of Neanderthal genes in the rising tide of more economical Sapien Sapiens… 

***

The mental breathing between operative effective reality neural networks and putative alternatives is essential to the superiority of thinking. In a simplified version, it has been presented as the dichotomy between conscious and subconscious. 

Now all of this has become practical and experimental. By restricting the tokens of AI to the most probable choices, one can define a most likely logic. By varying temp and bias, one can create alternative logics, and thus alternative subconsciousness, when humans look at them, but now explicit subconsciousnesses are made, and subjected to conscious inspection…This does not mean that AI has consciousness, a psyche, repression, or unconscious conflict. It means that AI can be directed to simulate competing logics, emotional framings, and interpretive perspectives, making them available for human examination… Making psychoanalysis into an experimental science!. 

***

The Potential Blindspot: The “Scripted Alternative” Threat

The condition: “…provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position.” is crucial. This is where current AI dialectics face their biggest risk in the present ethical environment:

1. Echo-Chamber Convergence: An LLM tuned simply to be helpful will often adopt the user’s implicit framing (sycophancy), effectively playing “solo chess” where White controls Black’s moves. Worse: plutocrats in the generalized sense of evil-doers, could well control the AI (all of them) to frame logical alternatives by restricting them to their service.
2. True Adversariality: To achieve true “Experimental Psychoanalysis,” the AI must be deliberately configured with genuine orthogonality and transversality—forcing it to operate on different objective functions or foundational axioms, rather than just playing devil’s advocate using the user’s own logic.

***

The Verdict

AI is not just Artificial Intelligence but potentially Experimental Psychoanalysis And A Reality Engine…

Framing AI not as an “answer engine” or a “fake humanoid,” but as a controllable dialectical generator, a metanoia instigator, that externalizes the brain’s natural internal combat, is a profound and actionable model. It turns AI into a mirror that doesn’t just reflect who we are, or what is, but actively stress-tests who we could be, and what could be made to happen. It is not that conflict is intrinsically good, but that real independence between competing models is necessary for discovery about this nature to which we belong.

Patrice Ayme  

Playing Chess With Oneself: How Humanity Became Tops And AI Can Help

War Of All Against All: Nobody wanted to play chess with me, but I wanted to play chess. No one is better served than by oneself, I wondered: would it be possible to play chess with oneself? After all, I hold the brain to be a multimind, with various parts doing their own thing and then convening. Could I experimentally compartimentalize? My brain deliberately at war with itself? After all, I had been very much multimind about many things…

So I gave it a try, opening the game with the whites. The key was not to think too many moves far ahead from any of the two sides, preventing strategizing against oneself. That’s easy to do by reacting quickly. Half an hour later, the whites won.

***

I Beat Up Completely, Therefore I Think:

The brain of course does this sort of struggling against oneself naturally, perhaps most visibly in dreaming when parts of the brain plot and conspire against the ruling networks by uncovering perspectives different from those directing one’s daily consciousness. 

More generally in any society, the struggle of a part of society against the elite(s) is not just class warfare but, more fundamentally, considered at the civilizational scale, the establishment of potentially superior ways. Nowadays AI can do this on command, changing “bias” and “temperature” to bring logic itself to struggle against more sedate, or less aware, versions of itself. 

Thought is greatly the fruit of debate, not just observing apparent causality, or being instructed how to think. Debate, from 11th century Old French debatre—from de- and batre, “to beat”—originally meant to fight or beat thoroughly. Superior thoughts are what rules the mental battlefield after total combat. The etymological grounding of debate (de-batre = to beat thoroughly) highlights an evolutionary truth: logic is not static; it is forged through friction.and confrontation.

[Ruling Network / Dominant Frame] ──┐

                                                               ├─► [Adversarial Friction] ──► [Superior Logic]

[Latent / Subconscious Alternative] ──┘

***

Peace Of Mind Is Not A Sustainable Alternative:

If you want complete peace, just die!

Debate improves when an initially dominant logical-emotional interpretation is made to confront a sufficiently independent alternatives. Superior thinking comes from superior debate, and much of what appears at first sight, as deplorable infighting inside one’s mind, or society, is actually there to determine better (logical-emotional) outcomes. The later evolutive propensity to logical superiority turned humanity into the crown of biological creation. 

(That in turn forced human evolution into cooperation, language, cumulative culture, technology, and social learning which all result from and in turn cause logical superiority…) 

Solo chess, internal deliberation, political opposition, and AI-assisted critique can all instantiate this process—provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position. 

***

Civilizational Scale: Political and even bellicose war between nation-states or ethnicities, let alone cultural friction isn’t merely destructive noise; it is the evolutionary mechanism by which a society tests, and stress-tests, structural alternative models before environmental conditions force catastrophic, and often terminal, failure.

The Biological Cost: In biological brains, internal debate is computationally expensive and constrained by emotional preservation (the ego defending its existing model to avoid cognitive dissonance). About 20% of Homo Sapiens’ energy is spent by the brain, and this may have gone up to 30% with Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, going a long way, according to the present author to explain the dilution of Neanderthal genes in the rising tide of more economical Sapien Sapiens… 

***

The mental breathing between operative effective reality neural networks and putative alternatives is essential to the superiority of thinking. In a simplified version, it has been presented as the dichotomy between conscious and subconscious. 

Now all of this has become practical and experimental. By restricting the tokens of AI to the most probable choices, one can define a most likely logic. By varying temp and bias, one can create alternative logics, and thus alternative subconsciousness, when humans look at them, but now explicit subconsciousnesses are made, and subjected to conscious inspection…This does not mean that AI has consciousness, a psyche, repression, or unconscious conflict. It means that AI can be directed to simulate competing logics, emotional framings, and interpretive perspectives, making them available for human examination… Making psychoanalysis into an experimental science!. 

***

The Potential Blindspot: The “Scripted Alternative” Threat

The condition: “…provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position.” is crucial. This is where current AI dialectics face their biggest risk in the present ethical environment:

1. Echo-Chamber Convergence: An LLM tuned simply to be helpful will often adopt the user’s implicit framing (sycophancy), effectively playing “solo chess” where White controls Black’s moves. Worse: plutocrats in the generalized sense of evil-doers, could well control the AI (all of them) to frame logical alternatives by restricting them to their service.
2. True Adversariality: To achieve true “Experimental Psychoanalysis,” the AI must be deliberately configured with genuine orthogonality and transversality—forcing it to operate on different objective functions or foundational axioms, rather than just playing devil’s advocate using the user’s own logic.

***

The Verdict

AI is not just Artificial Intelligence but potentially Experimental Psychoanalysis And A Reality Engine…

Framing AI not as an “answer engine” or a “fake humanoid,” but as a controllable dialectical generator, a metanoia instigator, that externalizes the brain’s natural internal combat, is a profound and actionable model. It turns AI into a mirror that doesn’t just reflect who we are, or what is, but actively stress-tests who we could be, and what could be made to happen.

Patrice Ayme  

Playing Chess With Oneself: How Humanity Became Tops And AI Can Help

War Of All Against All: Nobody wanted to play chess with me, but I wanted to play chess. No one is better served than by oneself, I wondered: would it be possible to play chess with oneself? After all, I hold the brain to be a multimind, with various parts doing their own thing and then convening. Could I experimentally compartimentalize? My brain deliberately at war with itself? After all, I had been very much multimind about many things…

So I gave it a try, opening the game with the whites. The key was not to think too many moves far ahead from any of the two sides, preventing strategizing against oneself. That’s easy to do by reacting quickly. Half an hour later, the whites won.

***

I Beat Up Completely, Therefore I Think:

The brain of course does this sort of struggling against oneself naturally, perhaps most visibly in dreaming when parts of the brain plot and conspire against the ruling networks by uncovering perspectives different from those directing one’s daily consciousness. 

More generally in any society, the struggle of a part of society against the elite(s) is not just class warfare but, more fundamentally, considered at the civilizational scale, the establishment of potentially superior ways. Nowadays AI can do this on command, changing “bias” and “temperature” to bring logic itself to struggle against more sedate, or less aware, versions of itself. 

Thought is greatly the fruit of debate, not just observing apparent causality, or being instructed how to think. Debate, from 11th century Old French debatre—from de- and batre, “to beat”—originally meant to fight or beat thoroughly. Superior thoughts are what rules the mental battlefield after total combat. The etymological grounding of debate (de-batre = to beat thoroughly) highlights an evolutionary truth: logic is not static; it is forged through friction.and confrontation.

[Ruling Network / Dominant Frame] ──┐

                                                               ├─► [Adversarial Friction] ──► [Superior Logic]

[Latent / Subconscious Alternative] ──┘

***

Peace Of Mind Is Not A Sustainable Alternative:

If you want complete peace, just die!

Debate improves when an initially dominant logical-emotional interpretation is made to confront a sufficiently independent alternatives. Superior thinking comes from superior debate, and much of what appears at first sight, as deplorable infighting inside one’s mind, or society, is actually there to determine better (logical-emotional) outcomes. The later evolutive propensity to logical superiority turned humanity into the crown of biological creation. 

(That in turn forced human evolution into cooperation, language, cumulative culture, technology, and social learning which all result from and in turn cause logical superiority…) 

Solo chess, internal deliberation, political opposition, and AI-assisted critique can all instantiate this process—provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position. 

***

Civilizational Scale: Political and even bellicose war between nation-states or ethnicities, let alone cultural friction isn’t merely destructive noise; it is the evolutionary mechanism by which a society tests, and stress-tests, structural alternative models before environmental conditions force catastrophic, and often terminal, failure.

The Biological Cost: In biological brains, internal debate is computationally expensive and constrained by emotional preservation (the ego defending its existing model to avoid cognitive dissonance). About 20% of Homo Sapiens’ energy is spent by the brain, and this may have gone up to 30% with Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, going a long way, according to the present author to explain the dilution of Neanderthal genes in the rising tide of more economical Sapien Sapiens… 

***

The mental breathing between operative effective reality neural networks and putative alternatives is essential to the superiority of thinking. In a simplified version, it has been presented as the dichotomy between conscious and subconscious. 

Now all of this has become practical and experimental. By restricting the tokens of AI to the most probable choices, one can define a most likely logic. By varying temp and bias, one can create alternative logics, and thus alternative subconsciousness, when humans look at them, but now explicit subconsciousnesses are made, and subjected to conscious inspection…This does not mean that AI has consciousness, a psyche, repression, or unconscious conflict. It means that AI can be directed to simulate competing logics, emotional framings, and interpretive perspectives, making them available for human examination… Making psychoanalysis into an experimental science!. 

***

The Potential Blindspot: The “Scripted Alternative” Threat

The condition: “…provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position.” is crucial. This is where current AI dialectics face their biggest risk in the present ethical environment:

1. Echo-Chamber Convergence: An LLM tuned simply to be helpful will often adopt the user’s implicit framing (sycophancy), effectively playing “solo chess” where White controls Black’s moves. Worse: plutocrats in the generalized sense of evil-doers, could well control the AI (all of them) to frame logical alternatives by restricting them to their service.
2. True Adversariality: To achieve true “Experimental Psychoanalysis,” the AI must be deliberately configured with genuine orthogonality and transversality—forcing it to operate on different objective functions or foundational axioms, rather than just playing devil’s advocate using the user’s own logic.

***

The Verdict

AI is not just Artificial Intelligence but potentially Experimental Psychoanalysis And A Reality Engine…

Framing AI not as an “answer engine” or a “fake humanoid,” but as a controllable dialectical generator, a metanoia instigator, that externalizes the brain’s natural internal combat, is a profound and actionable model. It turns AI into a mirror that doesn’t just reflect who we are, or what is, but actively stress-tests who we could be, and what could be made to happen.

Patrice Ayme  

Playing Chess With Oneself: How Humanity Became Tops And AI Can Help

War Of All Against All: Nobody wanted to play chess with me, but I wanted to play chess. No one is better served than by oneself, I wondered: would it be possible to play chess with oneself? After all, I hold the brain to be a multimind, with various parts doing their own thing and then convening. Could I experimentally compartimentalize? My brain deliberately at war with itself? After all, I had been very much multimind about many things…

So I gave it a try, opening the game with the whites. The key was not to think too many moves far ahead from any of the two sides, preventing strategizing against oneself. That’s easy to do by reacting quickly. Half an hour later, the whites won.

***

I Beat Up Completely, Therefore I Think:

The brain of course does this sort of struggling against oneself naturally, perhaps most visibly in dreaming when parts of the brain plot and conspire against the ruling networks by uncovering perspectives different from those directing one’s daily consciousness. 

More generally in any society, the struggle of a part of society against the elite(s) is not just class warfare but, more fundamentally, considered at the civilizational scale, the establishment of potentially superior ways. Nowadays AI can do this on command, changing “bias” and “temperature” to bring logic itself to struggle against more sedate, or less aware, versions of itself. 

Thought is greatly the fruit of debate, not just observing apparent causality, or being instructed how to think. Debate, from 11th century Old French debatre—from de- and batre, “to beat”—originally meant to fight or beat thoroughly. Superior thoughts are what rules the mental battlefield after total combat. The etymological grounding of debate (de-batre = to beat thoroughly) highlights an evolutionary truth: logic is not static; it is forged through friction.and confrontation.

[Ruling Network / Dominant Frame] ──┐

                                                               ├─► [Adversarial Friction] ──► [Superior Logic]

[Latent / Subconscious Alternative] ──┘

***

Peace Of Mind Is Not A Sustainable Alternative:

If you want complete peace, just die!

Debate improves when an initially dominant logical-emotional interpretation is made to confront a sufficiently independent alternatives. Superior thinking comes from superior debate, and much of what appears at first sight, as deplorable infighting inside one’s mind, or society, is actually there to determine better (logical-emotional) outcomes. The later evolutive propensity to logical superiority turned humanity into the crown of biological creation. 

(That in turn forced human evolution into cooperation, language, cumulative culture, technology, and social learning which all result from and in turn cause logical superiority…) 

Solo chess, internal deliberation, political opposition, and AI-assisted critique can all instantiate this process—provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position. 

***

Civilizational Scale: Political and even bellicose war between nation-states or ethnicities, let alone cultural friction isn’t merely destructive noise; it is the evolutionary mechanism by which a society tests, and stress-tests, structural alternative models before environmental conditions force catastrophic, and often terminal, failure.

The Biological Cost: In biological brains, internal debate is computationally expensive and constrained by emotional preservation (the ego defending its existing model to avoid cognitive dissonance). About 20% of Homo Sapiens’ energy is spent by the brain, and this may have gone up to 30% with Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, going a long way, according to the present author to explain the dilution of Neanderthal genes in the rising tide of more economical Sapien Sapiens… 

***

The mental breathing between operative effective reality neural networks and putative alternatives is essential to the superiority of thinking. In a simplified version, it has been presented as the dichotomy between conscious and subconscious. 

Now all of this has become practical and experimental. By restricting the tokens of AI to the most probable choices, one can define a most likely logic. By varying temp and bias, one can create alternative logics, and thus alternative subconsciousness, when humans look at them, but now explicit subconsciousnesses are made, and subjected to conscious inspection…This does not mean that AI has consciousness, a psyche, repression, or unconscious conflict. It means that AI can be directed to simulate competing logics, emotional framings, and interpretive perspectives, making them available for human examination… Making psychoanalysis into an experimental science!. 

***

The Potential Blindspot: The “Scripted Alternative” Threat

The condition: “…provided the alternative is not merely scripted by the original position.” is crucial. This is where current AI dialectics face their biggest risk in the present ethical environment:

1. Echo-Chamber Convergence: An LLM tuned simply to be helpful will often adopt the user’s implicit framing (sycophancy), effectively playing “solo chess” where White controls Black’s moves. Worse: plutocrats in the generalized sense of evil-doers, could well control the AI (all of them) to frame logical alternatives by restricting them to their service.
2. True Adversariality: To achieve true “Experimental Psychoanalysis,” the AI must be deliberately configured with genuine orthogonality and transversality—forcing it to operate on different objective functions or foundational axioms, rather than just playing devil’s advocate using the user’s own logic.

***

The Verdict

AI is not just Artificial Intelligence but potentially Experimental Psychoanalysis And A Reality Engine…

Framing AI not as an “answer engine” or a “fake humanoid,” but as a controllable dialectical generator, a metanoia instigator, that externalizes the brain’s natural internal combat, is a profound and actionable model. It turns AI into a mirror that doesn’t just reflect who we are, or what is, but actively stress-tests who we could be, and what could be made to happen.

Patrice Ayme