Neteller will start the process for the distribution of US funds by July 30th, 2007.  US members will be notified by email  when the process begins.   American players have until January 26, 2008 to get their money out of Neteller.  This means that I will be $284.06 richer.  Happy days are here again.  When I get the money, I think I’ll put it into a poker room.  I really miss the game.   The question is which online poker room should I join. 

Blindsight is a strange brain/mind condition that philosophers like to discuss in the context of discussions about consciousness.  People with blindsight have a problem with their visual cortex, and as a result are “blind” in an area of their visual field, what is called a scotoma.   Why do I put the word “blind” in quotation marks?  It is because these blindsighted people claim that they don’t see any stimulus in a certain area of their visual field, and there is no reason to believe that they are fabricating, but when asked to guess as to whether a stimulus is present or about specific features of the stimulus, such as whether it is an ‘X’ or an ‘O’, they do considerably better than chance.  These blindsighted individuals still seem to have some sort of awareness - call it “sight” - in the area in which they are blind.   The condition is therefore called “blindsight”.  The cartoon above nicely illustrates the condition.

Some philosophers say that blindsighted people lack a certain type of consciousness, sometimes called phenomenal consciousness, of the objects presented to their visual fields.  These philosophers say things like there is “nothing it is like for these people to see the objects” or “the objects don’t appear any way to them”.  Some philosophers have suggested that non-human animals are like blindsighted people in that they are in some sense aware of what’s going on in their environments, but they aren’t phenomenally conscious of these events.    

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On July 23 and 24, the poker-playing computer named Polaris, will play against two humans, Phil Laak and Phil (aka the Unabomber) Laak and Ali Eslami.  I’ve written about this match here and here. 

One of the interesting features of this heads-up poker duel between a computer and a human is that it is designed to eliminate luck as a factor.  In one room Polaris will play Laak and in another room Polaris will play Eslami, and Polaris will get Laak’s cards when playing Eslami and Eslami’s cards when playing Laak.  

Jonathan Schaeffer, the Polaris team leader, claims that the set up will eliminate most, not all, of the luck.   This raises the question, “In what way can luck still play a factor in this match?”  And of course this question raises the more fundamental conceptual question of what luck means, a question I’ve touched upon in previous posts (here and here).

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