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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Poker is like real life.  You have to make decisions on the basis of imperfect knowledge and you often have to bluff in order to achieve your goals.   One might think that computers cannot do these things, or at least do these things as well as humans can.   On July 23 and 24, we might find out whether this is the case.

On July 23 and 24, the poker-playing-computer named Polaris, built by the AI computer scientists at University of Alberta, will play Texas Hold’em against Phil (aka the Unabomber) Laak and Ali Eslami for $5000.  What is especially interesting about this match is that it has been designed to eliminate luck as a factor. 

How do the scientists plan to eliminate luck as a factor?  In one room Polaris will play Laak and in another room Polaris will play Eslami.  Polaris will get Laak’s cards when playing Eslami and will get Eslami’s cards when playing Laak.  

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In Poker and Philosophy: Pocket Rockets and Philosopher Kings, edited by Eric Bronson, and published by Open Court, there is an essay by Gregory Bassham and Marc Marchese titled “Don’t Play on Tilt!  Avoiding Seven Costly Critical Thinking Errors in Poker“.  As the title of the essay suggests, it is about seven types of critical thinking errors that bad or tilting poker players make too often and that any poker player needs to avoid making in order to play well.  One of these critical thinking errors is falling prey to the fallacy known as “the gambler’s fallacy“. 

The gambler’s fallacy is a mistake in reasoning when a person believes that the likelihood of some event can be affected by some other past independent events.  For example, suppose I flip a fair coin and it lands on tails three times in a row.  Suppose you think that on the next flip of the coin it will be likely to be heads, because it landed on tails three times in a row.  Your reasoning would be fallacious.  The likelihood that the coin will land on heads is actually 50-50, and the three prior flips of tails have no bearing on the future likelihood of any given flip.  In short, the past doesn’t affect the future when it comes to coin flips.  To think it does is to make the gambler’s fallacy.

Bassham and Marchese give some good examples to illustrate the gambler’s fallacy.  But I take issue with the following example they give. 

In basketball, imagine a player who is a career seventy-percent free throw shooter has gone 5 for 5 from the line so far.  He goes to the line again.  You might hear the TV commentator say he is due to miss this one, which implies that he is more likely to miss the next free throw rather than make it.  Wrong!  The odds say he will probably make it (seventy-percent chance he will make the shot).

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