Martial Tai Chi™

Kung Fu, Game Theory and Morality

Talking To Myself

Interesting bit of game theory: many games are simple contests of opposing goals. A game of chess involves 2 players each trying to immobilise the opponent's King. This typically also involves becoming as powerful as possible through the process of:
1) wiping out the opponent's forces and
2) preserving one's own

Both players have the same goal and they they are directly antagonistic towards each other, particularly when capturing the enemy's pieces. When you are making a chess capture, it effectively scores twice: simultaneously weakening the enemy and strengthening your own relative situation. The enemy's loss is your gain and vice versa.

Poker is more complicated, at least it becomes so when multiple players are involved. Here the goal is to leave the table with lots of money. Whether or not this achieved at the loss of other specific players does not typically concern the poker player. You might be quite happy to share the winnings with another player over the course of an evening providing you had a sufficient level of success to match your hopes. You could play poker with a friend or friends at the same table and decide to be less antagonistic towards them, working harder to squeeze money out of any non-friends present.

Not that I personally have anything to do with Poker, or gambling of any sort. Money is OK if you use enough ketchup. At least, it isn't an evil in itself - it's the love of it that's at the root of evil. Today I heard money described as a great "amplifier." If you are someone who does a lot of good things, having money will make it easier for you to do lots of good things. If you are someone who does lots of bad things, having money will no doubt make it easier for you to do bad things. Makes sense. But I digress

This game theory stuff got me thinking about martial arts seminars and classes...

"When a person comes at you like this (demonstrating a technique), this should be your list of priorities..." and so on and so on... as I demonstrate the process.

"yeah but, right, what if, right..." pipes in a voice "what if there are more than one of them right and they're armed with machetes right and...."

Oh good grief. Yes, there is an answer for everything, but now is not the time to explore 1001 permutations: simply because you don't have any basic skills. Go and practice this technique until you can do it almost without thinking. Then we can explore variations on similar themes, addressing other martial scenarios as we go.

The student just committed a sin.

"Huh? Get real?"

They just made knowledge their G_d for knowledge's own sake. This is what the Eden story is about. Eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil just got idolatrous and that's the problem.

"Jo - since you found out about your Jewish roots and got back into Judaism, you've turned weird."

Ah well. It's my pintele yid - my Jewish soul stirring again - I can't stop it, or at least, I choose not to. But this does all relate to Kung Fu, honest it does. You see, it is necessary to return to Wuji - to always be mindful and receptive - actively mindful. You can't do that when you have a specific agenda - a personal selfish goal - if you're too focussed, for example, on the intellectual process of differentiation. You need to return to the void - let your body and mind return to neutrality - the place from which different differentiations are equally possible. From there you may be called to a higher purpose, but you won't recognise it if you remain self-absorbed. I'll use another analogy...

You are at the scene of a building that is on fire, yourself well out of harm's way. However, you've just seen a beam falling on someone : another beam is threatening to burn through and fall on them soon.

Now you could rush over into the dangerous situation and free the person - that would be a heroic act - putting your own life in danger to save another - focussing on the bigger picture for what you perceive to be the greatest good - well done!

... or you could decide not to. This might be a simple act of self preservation or an active moral choice - you might discern that the greatest good would be better served by your not putting your own life in danger, or you might decide that you couldn't be of much help, or that someone else could intervene in a more productive way and here they come now... or whatever... anyway, it is a simple moral choice.

Or there is another way that you might interact with this situation. You might let your human curiosity take charge and watch and wait. You might wonder whether or not the person under the beam will escape. You might want to wait and see what happens when the next beam falls. You might want to see whether or not others get involved. Whatever your curiosity, you just let curiosity or knowledge for knowledge's own sake become the boss - your top priority. You want to amass information without acting, rather like a wildlife cameraman or TV journalist.

So whether it is the JKD / MMA student who comes to your seminar and asks lots of questions and takes lots of notes but doesn't actually get stuck in....

Or the student who doesn't practice the technique you just showed him because he's got another question and another and another...

Don't make knowledge your priority. There is a Chinese martial saying that knowledge is the treasure chest but practice is the key. Looking at the very nature of knowledge a bit deeper, you could say that martially speaking you don't know a technique until you can do it physically - that's what martial knowledge is - intrinsically and inseparably linked to physical realisation.

...it is better to be able to do one thing well than lots of thing in a mediocre way, or not to be able to do them at all, but just to know of their possibility.

"What has this got to do with game theory?"

I'm not sure if it still has anything to do with it.

Hmmm.

Mmm. Maybe we should just let that bit go.

No - wait a minute - I remember now - it's the cake thing.

What cake?

Conflict resolution. If you want to resolve a conflict you get both parties involved in the solution. So... say you've got two children squabbling over the sharing of a cake. Get one of them to cut it in half and the other to choose which piece he wants for himself. Both now have an interest in the cake being cut properly in half and divided accordingly. The cake cutting child can't afford to make either piece bigger as that would result in the other child choosing it for himself. Now this situation becomes a lot more complicated if other siblings are involved, but when they are not, the situation is simple - easily resolved.

So it's all about not unnecessarily complicating matters. It is about letting things be as simple as they are, without imposing your own personal cleverness, agenda or identity slant on them. It's about being receptive, intelligent and adaptable - about not drowning out situations with your own voice. It's about not assuming that just because an idea has shown up in your head, it is a good or relevant idea. It's about not fixating and focussing and presupposing.

"To be honest, I'm struggling to link any of this together..."

Maybe it is also about linking things together that don't flow together well...

It can about lack of faith too - about cynicism. The student who raises the question of the machetes and the multiple opponent's might want proof that your system works before he is prepared to believe it is worth his efforts to learn. I've seen this quite a lot - some people float around in martial arts circles asking lots of questions but never learning anything.

He might feel like he's holding out until he finds an art that is good enough for him, but more often than not, he's fallen prey to the myth that knowledge is power. In and of itself - he thinks that Knowledge is Power and he idolises that Power and wants it for himself.

But practically, philosophically and morally, I'd say that knowledge is limited in its usefulness - it is only as valuable as the thing it teaches you to do. So rather than just living up in the conceptual or spiritual world of your head, you need to get stuck in - hands on - be in the world. Then you can use your intellect to exercise your free will in a positive way. During combat you can make moral and strategic choices because your head is not full of technical considerations. You can't afford to try and fight with your intellect - combat is the time to let everything you've learned come out naturally, but it won't be there unless you've drilled it in assiduously. Martial training can afford to be a more intellectual pursuit, but actual combat will fall back on the skills you have trained to be automatic. There will ideally be a degree of martial intelligence going on too - some trained adaptibility, but you won't be using the actively conscious bit of your brain you use for reading articles like this.

During your martial training you should, by all means, use discernment then, but it is critical to use it well by understanding the PURPOSE of any given exercise. Or you can do some movements and purposely decide what purpose you are going to superimpose on them at this specific moment in time - what specific area of weakness you are going to work on whilst going through the motions.

Like - sometimes we'll practice a bit of lianhuan - some linked form movements. We might be doing a sequence someone somewhere has done before - the form might even have a name and be part of a system that includes specific movement sequences. Or we might do a sequence I'm making up as I go along, talking the students through it at the same time. Or we might be doing a form sequence where I ask the students to call out movements they'd like to go into next, inspired by the feelings in their bodies of where it might be good to go next. That's OK too - it teaches you something about cause and effect - about differentiation itself - when you go one way you naturally create the potential to go the other and vice versa. But then someone might ask "is this an official form - do you want me to learn this? Is this part of the system?"

Well, I don't really mind, though I groan a little at being asked. If they want to learn a set of forms and this is one of the set, then by all means, they can and should learn it. They should also listen when I explain the main purpose of that form to them. There should ideally always be specific applications in mind that dictate and regulate the specific shapes, alignments and angles involved. But there will also be a more generic purpose to the form - it will be intended to teach their body some other skill or develop some other quality - such as how to adapt to changing circumstances, how to use gravity to aid the power of their kicks, how to generate short, sharp, shocking power, or whatever.

More often than not, I teach forms with multiple purposes in mind and tell people that they can bring out a specific purpose on a given day. It's about having a toolkit - about making your training your own. That way, you'll never be short of having something to train and you'll always be able to build on your previous training in a conceptually and practically coherent manner. When you know the movement rules and the requisites of a well rounded fighter, you can do something new every time you train if you wish to, or you can stick to a tried and tested systematically ordered plan... or you can do a bit of both.

Sometimes you might practice a form or a bit of shadow boxing - it might be pre-ordered, improvised or semi-improvised. Why?

Initially an ordered sequence will teach you how to flow certain movements together, whether because they are fundamental sequences you might need a lot, or because they flow together very naturally on momentous arcs; or because they coil and uncoil (plyometrics) into each other naturally.

Alternatively an ordered sequence might exist precisely because the movements are difficult to flow together. This teaches your body a more advanced level of proprioceptive co-ordination. Hopefully, if the form has been composed well with certain specific combat scenarios and responses in mind, the form will also teach your body how to transition between important powerful movements in a martially meaningful, i.e. plausible way. There should be credibility and purpose throughout every movement, even if the purpose of a given limb at a given moment is to do nothing.

Now when you know a form sequence well, it puts you in a good position to work on other considerations whilst performing it. You can work on long power movements or short sharp ones - on rotation or undulation - on moving as one or rippling from the ground upwards. You can work on precision or you can work on moving at full combat speed.

Speed is crucial if you ever want to be able to use the movements in a fight. One of my sayings is "somewhere between wild, uncontrolled flailing and meticulous precision lies the truth." You must lay down the right kinds of muscle tissue and martial reflexes in your body, which is why there is no substitute for, or alternative to, contact training. There are other ways to train as well - solo ways - but hands-on training is best and absolutely necessary. Solo training isn't necessary, but it is almost always a good idea to include some of it in your training programme.

A semi-improvised sequence will also teach you a lot about what flows easily into what and from there it might also teach you what doesn't. You might make the focus of your training during a given session feeling the difference between the movements that flow naturally and ones that don't.

Perhaps you could ask yourself how realistic it is that you might need to flow those movements together - how often are you likely to use them. You might not want to prioritise working on them during your training time if they belong to a highly unlikely set of circumstances. It is generally best to focus on the basics. Learn the rules, drill the rules, then make the rules your own and notice when they can be broken. That said, respect them: don't drill the exceptions to the rules into your body. You don't want to make yourself less reliable at performing the basics. The "cheats" will come quite naturally anyway, if you need them.

All that said, recognise that ultimately the rules are just tools - guidelines for how to train your body. When you understand the principles, you can do anything you like and should do anything necessary to ensure survival.

Another use for the semi-improvised sequence is working through all the different permutations you can think of - all the subtle variations in shape or stepping position. You might want to go into a looping sequence that alters a little each time. Make it mindful - always know what you are doing in relation to an opponent and why.

A completely improvised sequence is good because it is entirely mindful and responsive to your imagined scenario - hopefully. It is often said that entirely improvised training is the ultimate goal of Baguazhang practice. This makes sense as the art has been described as a set of principles rather than a set of forms. Its forms are just examples of those principles - this is a great idea providing you know what the principles are.

So always have a sense of PURPOSE in every walk of life. Know which joint every warm up exercise is meant to warm up, which muscle every stretch is designed to stretch, what every developmental exercise is meant to develop. Know what every movement you make is for. But also learn to stand still when you are at a junction - when you have no purpose. Know when to be receptive - when to weigh up a situation and see what needs to be done, if anything. Don't just do something. Don't just fill space with you. Avoid the habits.

Go directly from where you are to where you need to be with no unnecessary movement. Never give up territory. Never be a slave to a form - recognise when a movement has done its job - fulfilled its purpose - or when it hasn't and something else needs to be done.

Fall back on your instincts only when survival calls for them. And make sure you have trained and continue to train your body well so that it performs efficiently when it switches to auto-pilot.

Always understand why you are raising your hand. Is it to divert an oncoming attack? Or is it to ask an unnecessary question?