Judo is said to quite definitely a sport rather than a street-fighting art. And the Shoshin Shotokan karate I did was aimed at self-discipline, fitness, and a clear mind on Zen principles. It may well be that an alert mind will help you avoid combat and maximize your chances better than pure MMA- type fighting ability. Or maybe not.

I'm reminded of this piece. It's very long for an internet piece so I'm going to summarize. Some of this is my own words, some directly copied. It in general describes the different perspectives of the brain's hemispheres, based on The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist.

Left Hemisphere: Creates divisions for manipulation, but it doesn't care about accuracy. Its main focus is reinforcing the divisions it's already made. It is less logical than it is usually like a pathological liar. The left hemisphere isn't interested in reality so much as it wants to prop up its own image and stories. The left hemisphere hungers for certainty and as often as possible expresses itself in absolute and certain terms. The casualty here is obviously accuracy. And when certainties clash with what's actually going on, the left hemisphere sides with certainties. The fundamental character of the left hemisphere is to sacrifice the truth for defending its divisions, stories, and certainties.

Right Hemisphere: Generates attention in terms of the whole. It focuses on qualities rather than concepts. For example, the right hemisphere is responsible for recognizing or visualizing the color red. The right hemisphere perceives and imagines in pictures. It is nondual. It focuses on what it happening in full: the specific, particular, indescribable understanding of what is actually happening. It doesn't care about certainty. It's seeing the whole of things, and relating to them as accurately and honestly as possible.

Left-Right Relationship: In experiments with split-brain patients, the left hemisphere answers. The right hemisphere sees the snowy landscape and picks up the snow-shovel card. But the left hemisphere sees a chicken, and is asked to explain why they picked up the shovel card. In short, they make up an answer out of thin air. "Because you use a shovel to clean up after chickens." They chose the card because you use a snow shovel to shovel snow. But the patient tells a story of a rational connection that didn't occur. Why do these people make up a rational connection like this?

A Sharp Left Turn: Why fake a thought process? Why is the brain so fast at faking it that it gives rational-seeming answers on the fly? And if the split brain patients experience this, and are so good at it, doesn't it seem almost as if the left hemisphere might have done this before? It's important what kind of response this is. It's a rational seeming response. And that seems to imply an agenda: despite not having any good reason and fessing up to it, we instead get the rational seeming response which gives us the impression of a rational person. More specifically, that the person has a rational mind. In short, a mind that doesn't exist because no rational process took place. The left hemisphere is able and eager to create the illusion of a mind.

Peacock People: In brief, the mind is not as much a survival tool as a courtship tool. The mind is for building status through displays: poems, language, knowledge, buildings, drawings, carts, cars, phones -- instead of the peacock's tail, you have the products of human creativity, engineering. If this were true, we should expect the mind to be more concerned with making things than understanding the world rationally. In fact this is the case. In some sense, the rational mind is actually the manipulative mind. It's a mind that wants to alter things in the world for the display of status far more than it wants to understand the world.

The Illusion of Self: What draws people to other people is not usually their rational or logical thinking. That thinking might provide a framework and has to at least appear consistent. But the real draw is a person's character. The mind is there to project the image of a mind with vibrance and flavor. That is, a human self.

I haven't read the book he references so I can't say whether its supported well or not, but I think the one insight to take away is that the mind/brain has "make things up" wired into it.

Why do so many top martial arts, as for example Shotokan Karate, focus so strongly on kata, pre-set sparring exercises, and a little punches-pulled sparring?

The senseis are totally focused on their art, and have thought long and hard, and trained for decades, to make it as good as possible.

Possibly it is because they have goals for the practitioners beyond winning a MMA fight, like personal development, but I'm not sure that is the answer.

Hello! My name is Mackenzie, or Mack. Brought here by HPMoR, I have been reading through the sequences off and on for the past year, a little at a time. I can't say I've committed it all to memory, but I feel like I have a good context for the language this community uses. I am a mechanical engineering major in my sophomore [?] year. If I was a humanities major, I could be a senior by now, but two years ago I became fed up with the self-masturbatory nature of that field.

I've always been interested in the objective, rational approach to life. I was a "gifted" (read:obnoxious) child and liked to argue a lot with my religious family. My earliest memory of a coherent discussion on faith was when I was seven. I was irritated with the catechism I was memorizing, and argued in childish terms that it was condescending indoctrination. However, I remained a doubtful theist until I was around seventeen. After a brief attempt at evangelical zeal, I realized that I had to be honest with myself about my lack of faith. I still waver between theist and agnostic. That was around the time that I discovered Overcoming Bias, which I lurked on for a little while. After reading through HPMoR, I found this site as well.

I waited until now to make an account because I've been intimidated by the level of discussion that goes on here. But participation can only help cultivate my ideas and my desire to approach life more methodically.