User:RMarshall/Facebook/28MAR2019

Posting by Rick D. S. Marshall on Facebook 27-Mar-2019 at 1:44 PM ·

On "Correct" and "Wrong" in Karate, Medical Software, and Complex Systems: Levels of Study, Deep Principles, and the Emergent Properties of the Cosmos

Our fear of doing something the "wrong" way can hold us back. Yes, we should try to do our best, diligently and meticulously, striving for correctness, but knowing that there will always be something we can improve later.

That is, at all times we are doing things in a mix, partly correctly, partly incorrectly, both right and wrong. Many of the things we do are complex, made up of many subtasks or aspects, and in each of these we can be doing some more correctly, some less, depending on what we understand, have practiced, have experienced, and are attending to at any given moment.

This paradox is perspectival, like all the true paradoxes of nature, caused by the brief and narrow mortal perspective on our multidimensional cosmos.

So to do things the "correct" way or to criticize the "wrong" way is only useful as a guideline so long as we understand its limitations.

This gets more interesting when we appreciate that some of the aspects or subtasks of what we are trying to do can only be understood at deeper layers of understanding.

The human mind and body can only learn so much at a time, and can only practice and master so much at a time, so the study of a highly complex thing must be unfolded into a coherent pedagogy, into levels, so a beginner can focus on the right things to focus on and ignore the wrong things to focus on, ignore for now the things that can only be appreciated *after* they comprehend the lessons they are currently working on.

A failure to appreciate this pedagogical necessity is why so many people who can do things nevertheless cannot teach them.

Bad teachers may be too concerned with what they themselves know now and not enough with how they got there, or too concerned with showing off how smart they are or how hard the subject is and not enough with where the student is at this moment, what lessons they are ready for - and what lessons not only cannot be absorbed now but might actually impede their ability to absorb the lessons they are ready for now.

This shatters our conventional definitions of whether we are doing something the correct or wrong way.

It means that correct for an advanced student may be completely wrong for a beginner, and vice versa - and with additional levels in between, perhaps, maybe even many levels.

So correct or wrong for the level of study we are prepared for is a useful thing to worry about, if our instructors are wise enough to understand what we are prepared to learn, and if they understand what we have already tentatively learned but maybe not drilled well enough to be clear and solid enough with it to move on yet to anything more.

It's why good teachers teach the student, not the subject.

Every student is at a different place in their journey to mastery, and based on the student's background and strengths and weaknesses there are many different different paths to mastery. Trying to force all students into a cookie-cutter model of education - as so many national educational initiatives of recent decades have tried to do - is a grotesque farce masquerading as education, because learning and mastery do not work that way. Yes, there need to be standardized curricula, but there need to be multiple options, not just one, because we each know different things and we learn in different ways - and any options selected for any given student need to be customized and tailored to fit that student.

Part of learning to teach the student - and, when we are the student, part of learning how to learn - involves learning to let go of judgmental attitudes of shame and fear that our culture teaches us to associate with being "wrong."

There's a deep lesson here about accepting that being imperfect is not only inevitable as part of learning and doing better, it is even necessary. There is no Great March of Progress from success to success that leads from ignorance to mastery, but there are many different complicated and branching paths full of experiments, failures, lessons learned, and habits built that lead there.

I wrote the other day about my delight in discovering that I was getting the most common stance in karate wrong all my life. This makes an excellent case study of what I'm talking about here, and it illustrates something really quite profound, not just about how we learn, but about the nature of the cosmos itself.

In this case, the "wrong" stance is a real stance, and it really does have the form I've been practicing all my life, but there is a second, closely related stance I did not know about. The stance I've been practicing in all these places in all these katas is a rare stance that should only be used in a few of these places, but I've been using it everywhere. In all the rest of these places, this second stance should be used instead. That was the specific error I made.

Most of the form between the two stances is the same. There's just a more balanced distribution of weight on the two legs in the new stance, and the front knee does not bend forward quite so much. It's a subtle difference, but in higher-level karate, such subtleties create powerful effects, the difference between a committed stance that goes in one direction (which I've been practicing all my life) and a more flexible stance that can more easily change directions as needed (the new one).

When I started learning, it made sense to practice the harder stance and use it everywhere, because a beginner can only keep track of so many things at a time. And practicing the harder of the two similar stances was good for developing the hips and knees and ankles. But once those habits are grooved into place in the muscle memory, it's better to shift to the understanding that there are two stances here, not one, and that the "new" stance is the easier to get into and out of, the more balanced and flexible. If we have mastered the harder stance, we'll be able to add the easier one physically, while mentally adjusting to the complexity of having two similar stances to keep track of and choose between instead of one.

This pattern of beginning with a simple but interesting form and then unfolding new complexity from it to create a larger and more interesting system of forms is *precisely* how nature unfolds life. From a fertilized egg to an adult human being, step by step, complex systems emerge from simple systems by unfolding new levels of complexity based on what came before.

Architectural philosopher Christopher Alexander wrote about this topic in detail in his four-volume series, The Nature of Order:

1. The Phenomenon of Life

2. The Process of Creating Life
3. A Vision of a Living World
4. The Luminous Ground

His understanding of how complex living systems unfold complexity step by step by step emerged over the decades from his work in architecture and urban planning, which he wrote about in books like A Pattern Language, The Timeless Way of Building, and The Oregon Experiment, but it culminates in its purest form in The Nature of Order, where he finally fully accepts that he is describing the structure of life itself, as it manifests in all sustainable complex systems.

I recommend all of these books. They are some of the most profound, most far-reaching, most illuminating books I have read in my life. They are not potato-chip books to be raced through but rich, flavorful books to be dipped into in small bites, over and over, and thought about in between, to explore what they mean and how it applies to life. What makes them profound is that they apply so widely.

There's something deep here, and it's found in how any complex system is taught, whether the engineering of medical software or the architecture of international human-rights law or in traditional Okinawan karate.

Three years ago I resumed my study of karate, but in the past year I've also been studying its pedagogy, how we learn and teach karate. It illustrates nicely what Alexander wrote about.

The foundational level of karate study involves drilling certain patterns of motion into the body over and over, to strengthen the bones and ligaments and tendons and muscles, and to work the muscle memory until these movements become fast and reflexive. This foundational level is based on a straight-forward interpretation of what the movements are for - a kick or punch here, a block there - and that interpretation is essential to developing the muscle memory.

But once that foundational level has been built within ourself, our karate practice can enter a new level in which we learn that these movements we have grooved into place through thousands of repetitions can be other things than what we thought, indeed, may be far more sophisticated things, like capturing an opponent's punch and converting it into a throw, judo-style. These more advanced interpretations require a lot more brain power and comfort within our own bodies to be able to understand and execute properly, which we can only have *after* we have fully developed the foundational level.

The brain can only handle so many variables at the same time. If we were trying to learn all these captures and arm bars and throws at the same time we were trying to develop our basic balance and coordination, it would have been too much, and we would have done neither well. So instead we first learn a kind of WYSIWYG karate (what you see is what you get, if it looks like a block it must be a block) to guide our early development, then once we have driven those patterns deep into our bodies and into our unconscious mind, it frees up new cognitive space in our conscious mind, so we can learn the more sophisticated and flowing karate.

So being "wrong" is essential to being "right," yes, in the experimental sense of trial and error necessary to exploring a subject. But it is also true in a deeper, subtler way, in which while we practice what we "know" we are doing, like punching, we are simultaneously practicing something else without knowing it, something more important, something we aren't ready to understand yet.

When the time comes when we are ready, our bodies already know how to do the movements, and it's just our brains that need to be brought up to date about what our bodies are really doing, as the same movements we "knew" turn out to have multiple meanings. While we focused on punching with our right arm, we did not think so much about why we were pulling back our left arm and chambering our fist at our hip. But we practiced it diligently, and developed the muscle memory. Later we learn that fist that pulls back might be the more important of the two, because we might be pulling our opponent's arm, pulling them off balance, and all those stable stances we practiced turn out to be important to making it work.

Whole new techniques unfold out of what we were already practicing. They were there all along, being developed without our knowing it, and indeed that may have been the only way we could develop them, until the time comes when we are finally ready to dilate our minds to encompass them.

The Ancient Greeks wrote about this, saying "the present contains the seeds of the future," and "we only become what we already are." They envisioned a universe in which everything in nature is pregnant with teleology, with unconscious patterns of goals that organize our autonomic functions, in which the normal state of things is not static being but dynamic becoming. Indeed, unlike the Latin word Natura, which means "born," the Greek word Physis specifically means "becoming" - a far more radical concept of what it means to exist.

The alliosis or "othering" that is the natural state of all living things from the Ancient Greek perspective is Alexander's unfolding process in action. We are rivers that flow from state to state, creating the illusion of stasis through our continuous process of change - another cosmic paradox.

So it should not surprise us that the most effective pedagogies for learning complex systems such as karate have that same structure of unfolding, level by level. Similar kinds of layering happen in the study of other highly complex disciplines.

In medical-software development, for example, there are advanced tools for managing the complexity of our growing systems. These tools are almost incomprehensible to beginners who have never created any complexity of their own, but after they have been busy for a few years, the seriousness of the problem of losing track of all the interactions among all the things they have written begins to make sense to them in a way that could not possibly have been taught to them in the beginning - and that's the best time to teach them these new complexity-management techniques, because then they will understand the problem and care about the solution.

I've come to love these transitional stages in the learning curve, when previous successes at one level of understanding have produced enough side effects that a deeper problem finally becomes visible, so I'm ready to learn a deeper principle and the solutions that go with it, things I could never really have understood before that point.

These stages when from an accumulation of quantitative differences begins to emerge some seemingly new qualitative difference are like windows onto some kind of cosmic magic, where we see that people are more than just collections of atoms, indeed, that nothing can be trivially reduced to quantities, because complex systems self-organize according to hitherto invisible principles that reveal emergent properties.

Even life, even consciousness itself, even justice, is such an emergent phenomenon, so when we study in detail a concrete example of how such higher-order properties emerge from growing complexity, shifting from seemingly invisible or even nonexistent to become both visible and powerfully binding upon everything we care about, we are not only studying that specific subject - be it international law or momentum-shifting karate throws - but also studying life, the universe, and everything.

The tough questions of life and death, of consciousness, of love, of meaning, have to do with these emergent qualities that are hidden until things grow complex and organized enough to generate them.

Heraclitus famously said "Nature loves to hide," but he was a subtle philosopher of the subtleties of nature, so his statement contains within it a corollary lost upon too many modern-day students who read his work: "Nature also loves to emerge from hiding." He never said that in so many words, but it's right there in the words he did say.

Like life itself, a river has a paradoxical quality of existing only for so long as it continues to be generated, and of seeming to continue to exist as a thing even while it is relentlessly changing from one instant to the next. Simpler planets with simpler cycles cannot have rivers, because they lack the complexity for this feature to emerge. Even here on Earth, at boundary conditions you get seasonal rivers that only exist sometimes, temporarily, for just so long as their environmental systems can sustain the complexity required for them to exist, until they fade away with the coming of the dry season.

Many of the most important things in nature seem to us as though they appear ex nihilo, and likewise when they end as though they once again vanish back into nothing. To the simian brain, we want life and consciousness and love and soul to be objects, like bananas - maybe invisible, intangible, spiritual bananas, but still bananas, some kind of spiritual object that cannot simply appear "from nothing" nor vanish back into nothing. It's understandable to long for that beginner's simplicity, but complex systems do not work that way. They have and depend upon these emergent properties, which are epiphenomena of the underlying healthy complexity, rather than objects that exist independently in their own right.

Like the rivers that can only flow when conditions are right, so too we can only live when conditions are right, can only be conscious when conditions are right, can only learn when they are right. If we build the prerequisites for the emergent things we cherish, then they can and will emerge, and they will last precisely so long as we continue to invest in their generation.

As ephemeroi ourselves, creatures of a season, like leaves on a tree, we cannot individually sustain the epiphenomena of our identities perpetually. We emerge, sustain ourselves for a while, and then fade away when our preconditions collapse back into simplicity, below the thresholds required for us to exist and be conscious.

This means complex disciplines such as karate or international law or medical-software engineering cannot survive if we hoard them, nor if we treat them as objects, as consumer commodities to buy and sell.

We must engage our students not just in their use but in their production, and then more deeply still in their pedagogy.

The torch we must pass from generation to generation is not just the thing itself that we cherish, but more importantly the process of generating it, layer by layer, following the deep pattern of that universal process of creating life, which is the only viable methodology for such brief, simple mortals as ourselves to manage these systems of such profound complexity, which are the generators of these things we cherish so much. And most importantly the process of teaching all of this, layer by layer.

We bring it to life, unfold it, step by step, in that paradoxical and shifting matrix of correct and incorrect in which we learn and grow.

This is how we make something greater than ourselves, something to outlast our own individual seasons.

We follow Mother Nature's example, because it works.