enlightenment can't play chess

Very smart people tend to disbelieve in enlightenment because they hold up unrealistic notions of what it is or what it entails. There is a idealization that a perfectly enlightened being will always act perfectly, that they will always immediately know the right thing to do in every moment and that this knowledge will flow through them into perfectly orchestrated action.

Of course this ideal is impossible when you consider the difficulties of the world. Assuming P != NP then no physically-possible being can get around the need for problem-solving, for trying and failing and adapting. Even though rationality is moral, we can't hope for perfect rationality, but at best perhaps a maximally rational meta-reasoning under bounded cognition. So no being will always know the right thing to do; at best they will always act in the most promising way given their understanding of their own limitations.I'm somewhat unclear on the extent to which this is a well-defined concept; I'd like to better understand the formalisms people have proposed.. It's not clear to me that traditional meditative practices even aim particularly at sharpening general intelligence in this sense, but in principle it's a thing you could imagine working towards.

Even so, the universe is infinitely vast, and thinking itself requires domain knowledge. Not only must we throw away the ideal of an enlightened being immediately knowing the perfect chess move to make, we have to recognize that even knowing how to think effectively about chess moves --- for example, which lines of play are worth gaming out in a particular situation --- is itself a chess-specific skill, a wisdom that compresses thousands of games of hard-won experience. No amount of 'generic' spiritual or meditation practice is going to get you there; fundamentally there's no way to get this wisdom without putting in chess-specific work.Or 'downloading' knowledge from an expert who has put in this work, as an AI could do, but fundamentally the work still needs to be done at some point in the process.

What enlightenment and awakening can give, as I understand it, is a certain clarity of view and purity of motivation. When you really hold and stabilize the view that you are not a separate self, it becomes clear that we're not playing the game that we thought we were. Re-orienting towards kindness and compassion, chess for its own sake begins to seem less interesting. The Buddha said "I teach two things: suffering and the end of suffering", and would ignore questions on all other topics. If an enlightened being chooses to play chess, they may win or lose, but it is always ultimately for the purpose of expressing compassion.

This is largely what people mean when they say that enlightenment as a human project is always ongoing, never complete. There is always the opportunity and the obligation to develop new skills, to express compassion more effectively. Because rationality is moral, and rational action requires wisdom which can only be developed through experience, the project of project of perfecting oneself as a moral agent is never-ending.

This isn't in conflict with the idea that 'narrow' enlightenment as a sort of perceptual transformation is achievable, and even perfect-able in a discrete (not asymptotic) sense. I'm not sure if I fully buy this, but it is a defensible and interesting view articulated by people like Daniel Ingram.