I. Tea-master

You've probably heard this tale before, but please bear with me.

A tea-master was strolling through Kyoto when he bumped into a ronin on the busy street. He apologized profusely, of course; but the swordsman, like many who lack honor, had filled himself with vanity instead. As he raised his katana to slaughter the hapless man, a sudden whim took his fancy: drawing his unblooded wakizashi, he slapped its hilt into the master's quaking palm. "Meet me by the gate at noon tomorrow," grinned the ronin, "and we'll have some sport. Otherwise I'll hunt you down."

By a stroke of what we (who cannot see the Pattern) must call fortune, the tea-master's house was being honored by a visit from a legendary samurai, an old friend from Lord Yamanouchi's court. In desperation, the master begged his guest to teach him the ways of the blade. "Very well," the warrior said grimly. "Fetch my bokken at once."

But after a few hours, it was miserably clear that the tea-master had no aptitude. "It is hopeless," he mumbled. "Tomorrow at noon, I shall be slain."

The old samurai nodded. "Yes. Come, friend, let us have tea together one last time."

Bent with misery, the master began to perform the ancient rituals of his Art. And the samurai noticed something strange: as the tea-master handled the fragrant leaves and steaming pots, every trace of terror drained away. Past and future lifted from his shoulders--all techniques became one technique--he moved correctly with no constraint.

"Stop!" barked the samurai. "Do you want to kill your enemy tomorrow?"

The master stared. "You said there is no hope."

"Not of survival. But do you want to die like a man? Do you want to take your enemy with you?"

". . . Yes. Yes, I do."

"Then do what you are doing now," said the warrior.

"But I am not doing anything!" the tea-master objected.

"Exactly. Do not think, do not feel. Simply raise your sword, cut, and die."

The master, being a master, understood.

When the ronin arrived the next day at the place ordained for the combat, he found the tea-master already waiting. The honorless swordsman chuckled and stepped closer, unscabbarding his weapon--but then he paused. Where was the cringing buffoon from only a day before? The tea-master was naked to the waist, his wakizashi gleaming in the sunlight, motionless. The ronin drew nearer still, scanning the tea-master's countenance for signs of weakness, but he saw nothing. There was neither hope nor fear, neither anger nor despair. There was only death.

The ronin lowered his quaking katana. "I cannot defeat you," he said. And the masterless swordsman slunk away.

II. Way of the Void

In "Twelve Virtues of Rationality," Yudkowsky-Senpai quotes Miyamoto Musashi: "The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him."

I'm no longer young, but I am a youngling in the Way of Bayes. Everything I've read here on LW has struck chords of insight, even inspiration--but it wasn't till I recognized Musashi's exhortation that I began to feel truly at home. My personal background isn't in AI or neuroscience, but the martial arts; I've studied and taught Jiu-Jutsu for almost thirty years.

In Jiu-Jutsu, the Way of the Void is the same as Musashi's, with one small change: substituting "choke" for "cut." Every move, every breath, is focused on getting to the enemy's back and cutting off the bloodflow to his brain. If you happen to break his arms and legs in the process, then well done, he's beaten and you needn't complete the choke--but the point is, always, that you attacked his limbs on your way to achieving that choke.

Again, please forgive me if you know all this already. The Japanese word "ki" (that which the rear naked choke cuts off) can mean a bewildering number of things: life, spirit, blood, breath, energy, and more. And it struck me as I read "Twelve Virtues" that, while the path of Rationality is vastly different from my own Art, the end goal is exactly the same--to cut the power to a mind that harbors falsehood. To dam the flow of energy, by the most efficient means, to any system of thought which uses that energy to de-optimize others. The point of the Art does not ultimately reside within itself--one does not follow Rationality to be rational, nor Jiu-Jutsu to be good at Jiu-Jutsu. Rather, one trains because one has something to protect. Hence, as we like to say, the point of the Art is to win.

This all struck me in a sudden gestalt without words or sequence, an irreducible core comprehension, all because I have taken a few halting steps in the Way of the Void. The essence of that Way is encapsulated in Bruce Lee's famous remark, "The highest art is no art. The highest form is no form." This, of course, does not mean that discipline is unnecessary, but just the reverse: it is precisely by the arduous mastering of any given Art's nuts and bolts, the endless practicing of its sometimes tedious details and routines, that one finally transcends the form to become one with the spirit of the Art.

Now, as you know, a prevailing definition of intelligence is "cross-domain optimization," examples of which (in my chosen field) might be a sculptor using her knowledge of anatomy to better attack the enemy's elbow joint, or a med student more accurately striking the enemy's liver. These domains and sub-domains analogize to the nuts and bolts of Rationality: the basic math and science upon which the edifice is founded. But in the wake of my little micro-epiphany about the converging end goals of Bayescraft and Jiu-Jutsu, I began to wonder if it might not be possible to peer from one Void directly into another. Could I use my past experience to catch a glimpse of the transcendent gestalt surveyed by true Bayesian masters, and thus perhaps shed a few photons on the road by which they got there? After all, both Arts insist on using every possible advantage; and even the briefest flash of lightning can make all the difference, when you're walking in the dark.

III. Reductio ad Jiu-Jutsum

Like many suburban white kids who had never been in a fight, I spent much of high school speaking knowledgably of how things worked on "The Street." I'm still not sure where The Street is, or why its denizens are so affable about attacking you in exactly the ways you've trained for; but if Richard Hamming had asked me back then about the most important problem in my field, it would have been solving the mystery of, "Which martial art works the best on The Street?" When Royce Gracie exploded onto the scene in '93, we all thought we had our answer, and I began a love affair with BJJ which has only grown deeper through the years.

But, as with any great love, part of that deepening was a realization and acceptance of imperfections within the beloved. I feel like I've already talked a bit too much about punching and wrestling on a forum devoted to the Art of Rationality, and I hope I haven't tested anyone's patience, so let me just skip to the point. BJJ ultimately became MMA, and MMA is really (I guess I'm going out on a limb here, but so be it) the final evolution of a process that began when the samurai were first formalizing their martial system.

You see, Jiu-Jutsu (the Gentle Art!!) was never meant to be a complete fighting style. It was one element of a comprehensive method that included strikes, kicks, and throws--to say nothing of the yet larger framework of armed combat. Grappling was what you did if you lost your squadmates and your horse and your weapons, and you were too close to boot the other guy in the head. But over time, inevitably, those fighters who happened to enjoy and excel at grappling began to specialize more and more in that particular branch and its ever-ramifying network of twigs. And the same, of course, happened with Karate and Judo and all the dividing and multiplying sub-sub-styles, and then particular demographics became associated with particular disciplines, and there followed all the usual corruptions and degradations that we're eternally pushing back against. It wasn't until extremely recently that global travel and communication became so commonplace that masters of every vanishing twig-point from around the world could really, truly work together to brush away the kudzu of history and politics, and finally rediscover the Tree.

(How is this relevant? I promise we're almost there.)

In my very limited understanding, the core principle of reductionism is that, while our map is necessarily multi-level--because no single discipline can (yet) encompass the full cosmological context--we must fight to remind ourselves that the actual territory, the Cosmos itself, is an absolute whole, governed by a unified set of laws. Thus, quite rightly, Science is always branching out into new fields of specialization. And here's the key point: Every branch, as it develops and ramifies, becomes far stronger in its own specific area of expertise. A samurai freed from the obligation to keep up with his Kenpo training can naturally devote more time to teasing out the hidden possibilities of Jiu-Jutsu. And, because it takes years--centuries--of experimentation to develop the Art to its fullness, no one can be a master of twenty different styles that are still in the frontier of development. But now, in the wake of all that specialization, the heirs of the Arts can be swiftly taught what it took generations to learn.

But the full potential was there all along. Nanotechnology was already present, waiting, in the creation of the first wheel.

IV: The Tree and the Box

MMA, Mixed Martial Arts, is misnamed. In truth, it's not a "mix" of martial arts, but rather a reunification. A confluence of all the diverging roads that ultimately lead to Rome (where Rome=beating the crap out of the other guy). But it's not just a recovery of hunter-gatherer-fu. It's a radical advance on what the first warriors were able to accomplish, precisely because a once-unified whole was split into multiple different paths. By the time they reconverged, every one of them had grown far stronger; the whole became greater for having been decomposed into its parts.

So. What, at long last, does this perception--the fruit of my brief, clumsy experience with the Void of my Art--have to do with the Art of Bayescraft? In "Where Philosophy Meets Science," Yudkowsky-Senpai argues that the former is the womb of the latter: questions that begin with scratching one's magnificent mustache and ruminating at the moon, conclude with building rockets to go up there and look around. In "Religion's Claim to Be Non-Disprovable," he argues that religion was initially a sort of palpitating blob of mysterious unchallengeable edicts, which has gradually dissolved into the systems we now know as jurisprudence, history, medicine, genealogy, ethics, and--of course--Science. And each of these branches, decomposed from its original unified whole, has been growing for a long, long time.

Now, every white belt secretly wants to challenge the sensei, but I agree with Dawkins: Reason is not a game. I'm not just playing Devil's Advocate here, nor looking to surreptitiously proselytize on behalf of any particular faith. I consider myself a Rationalist; I don't put science and religion into separate magisteria; I don't separate "Truth" and fact. And yet, I believe in ki. I believe it is, strictly defined, a supernatural phenomenon--an interaction between a single point in Barbour's Platonia and some kind of reality from "outside" and "before" space and time. Its effects on our reality must be, in principle, experimentally detectable (and of course, there's a whole cottage industry of parapsychology, about which I don't know enough to have an opinion); but the question is, what is causing those effects? Numinous awe could certainly be an evolutionary hangover from our pre-rational days, but it could also be the insistent whispering of a fundamentally rational instinct to seek strength and knowledge from a power that is--well--outside the box.

But this is sheer unadorned wool-gathering. Putatively "mystical" experiences are great and everything, but are they falsifiable/predictive/reproducible? Well, here's the twist: that question is actually not rhetorical. I'm genuinely asking you guys. I have no grounding in physics beyond that of an interested layman. Insofar as my knowledge of the Void allows me to see from my isolated twig-point back down to the roots of the Tree, I think I've been able to intuit the outlines of a coherent question, which I now place before the followers of a vastly different Art: is there any validity in this notion of Cross-Void Optimization? As far as I can see, the only intelligent way of testing this is in the opposite direction from my own approach--that is, from the Void-point of a true master of at least one hard science, having recourse to a non-adjacent branch of Truth to return with real (if potential) data. Like Kekule, except in a consciously controllable way.

I see the folk of LW talking about Moloch and Elua, and I know, I know, these are simply lexical conveniences, and yet--are we sure it's utterly incompatible with Rationalism to think they might be more than just metaphors? Let us, by all means, take joy in the merely real, but what if even greater joys are possible? I read, in Scott Alexander, "Elua is still here. No one knows exactly how. And the gods who oppose Him tend to find Themselves meeting with a surprising number of unfortunate accidents." And I can't help thinking:

"The master, being a master, understood."