Vol. 5: A Feeling Isn't a Conclusion: How Perceptual Knowledge Rises to Rational Knowledge in "On Practice"

Hi everyone. Today we're continuing with "On Practice."

At the end of the last post, I left a question.

Why do some people distill real laws from a lifetime of doing things, while others just pile up a heap of experience?

This question actually matters a lot.

Because if someone simply has no practice, the problem is easy.

Like Ma Su: he had no combat experience and dared to apply what the military manuals said straight onto the battlefield. A mistake like that is obvious. Anyone can see it's fighting a war on paper.

But the more common problem in life isn't Ma Su.

The more common problem is someone who really has done a lot and really has built up a lot of experience, yet that experience hasn't brought them any closer to the laws of things. It's only made them better at repeating their old judgments.

That's a real headache.

Because it looks like practice, and it actually is practice, but it never makes the leap from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge.

Starting with Chest Day

Back when I was training chest, I ran into a very typical problem.

I'd read some articles and watched some videos by then. I knew the bench press was a classic chest exercise, and that plenty of people called it the king of chest training.

So I went and did it.

Set after set I pushed. I added weight, did the movement, and it looked like I was doing everything I was supposed to.

But after a while, I noticed something awkward.

I didn't know whether I was actually training my chest.

That sounds a bit strange.

By its name, the bench press trains the chest. By my schedule, I did put it on chest day. By what I actually did, I really was lying on the bench pushing up a barbell or dumbbells.

But the feedback from my body was a mess.

Sometimes my shoulders were more tired.

Sometimes my arms were more sore.

Sometimes I got the weight up but felt nothing much in my chest.

Sometimes after a workout I couldn't tell what I had actually trained.

By the crudest reading, sure, I could say I was training chest, because I was doing a chest exercise.

But that's exactly the problem.

Doing a chest exercise doesn't mean you're really training your chest.

Just as doing a lot of something doesn't mean you really know it.

At that stage, all I had was perceptual knowledge.

Tired shoulders, sore arms, no feeling in the chest, an awkward movement, weight that wouldn't go up. All of it was real. None of it was imaginary or worthless.

But it was scattered.

It was just a pile of signals from my body, not yet a clear judgment.

A Feeling Isn't a Conclusion

In "On Practice," Mao says something very important: what has been perceived cannot at once be comprehended, and only what has been comprehended can be more deeply perceived.

In the gym, this is especially easy to understand.

The first time you do an exercise, your body gives you a lot of sensations.

Soreness, pump, fatigue, pain, tightness, shaking.

Of course these sensations matter. They're your way into knowing the exercise. Without them, you'd have no idea what was happening in your body.

The problem is, sensations don't tell you the truth on their own.

Tired shoulders might mean your shoulders are doing too much of the work.

Or they might just mean your shoulder stability is poor.

No feeling in the chest might mean the bar path is wrong.

Or it might mean the weight is too heavy and you have no room left to control the movement.

Sore arms might mean your triceps are doing too much.

Or your grip width, where you lower the bar, and the direction you press might all be off.

So perceptual knowledge has one very obvious trait.

It's real, but incomplete.

It's direct, but unclear.

It's material, but not yet a conclusion.

If someone stops at this level, they easily reach some very crude judgments.

Like: if you're not sore afterward, you didn't train it.

Like: the bigger the pump, the better.

Like: the heavier the weight, the more effective the workout.

You can't say these judgments are completely groundless, because they all come from some kind of bodily experience. The trouble is that they take a partial sensation and treat it directly as the complete law.

That's dangerous.

Because a lot of wrong experience forms exactly this way.

Later I Found the Bar Path Was Wrong

Later, I started lowering the weight.

That step actually mattered a lot.

Because once the weight is too heavy, all you can think about is getting it up. Whether your shoulders are compensating, whether your chest is being stretched, whether the movement is stable, whether your elbows are in the right place: you can't pay attention to any of it.

When the weight is too heavy, you have no room to observe yourself.

So I lowered the weight and felt out the movement again.

Then I started trying different angles over and over.

It's all pushing, but change the angle a little and the feeling is completely different.

On some paths, my shoulders pushed up first.

On some paths, my arms got sore fast.

On some paths, my chest clearly joined in and the movement felt smoother.

It was in that process that I slowly realized the problem wasn't that I wasn't trying hard enough, or that I wasn't doing enough volume. The bar path was wrong.

I didn't have that judgment at the start.

At the start I only had sensations.

Tired shoulders.

No feeling in the chest.

An awkward movement.

On their own, those sensations were just fragments. But once I lowered the weight, compared different angles again and again, and looked at all that feedback together, it slowly pointed to a clearer conclusion.

The problem was the bar path.

That's the process of going from perceptual knowledge to rational knowledge.

It isn't a sudden flash of insight.

It isn't an answer that pops into your head out of nowhere one day.

It's that you get a pile of messy material from practice, and then through comparing, analyzing, ruling things out, and testing, you finally distill a more stable judgment from it.

That judgment is no longer a simple sensation.

It's starting to approach a law.

Why Doing a Lot Doesn't Mean Knowing a Lot

Back to the question from the last post.

Why do some people distill real laws from a lifetime of doing things, while others just pile up a heap of experience?

It's easy to see now.

Because practice only supplies material. It doesn't supply laws automatically.

If someone has been doing something for many years but just keeps repeating their sensations, all they get is more and more perceptual material.

They might say, this is how I always did it.

They might say, I've been doing this for years, I can't be wrong.

They might say, I can tell at a glance how this should be handled.

But sometimes there's a problem hiding in those words.

They may never have really analyzed why they succeeded in the past.

Did the environment help them, or was the method really right?

Did the conditions just happen to fit, or is that simply how the law works?

Was their judgment accurate, or was luck just on their side?

If those questions never get asked, then so-called experience easily stays at the level of perceptual knowledge.

Working out is the same.

Someone who has trained for years will of course have a lot of sensations.

They know which exercises feel comfortable, which feel awkward, which workouts leave them sorer the next day.

If they don't keep digging, and don't sort those sensations into clearer judgments, the experience will hardly rise into laws.

They might train for years and still just be training by feel.

Training by feel isn't completely useless.

The problem is that if someone only ever goes by feel, they'll have a hard time explaining why something works, and a hard time adjusting when the situation changes.

That's also the most troublesome thing about empiricism.

It isn't that there's no practice.

There is practice, but the perceptual material from it never gets further reworked into rational knowledge.

Where Rational Knowledge Comes From

Rational knowledge doesn't drop from the skies.

Nor does it come from someone sitting there thinking in a vacuum.

It comes from perceptual knowledge, but it can't stop at perceptual knowledge.

Take training chest. There's no way I could know what was wrong with my bar path just by watching videos without training.

But I couldn't just train, either.

If I just pushed again and again, felt tired shoulders, sore arms, and nothing in my chest again and again, and never compared, adjusted, or analyzed, then the more I trained, the more I might just be getting good at the wrong movement.

So for perceptual knowledge to rise to rational knowledge, there has to be a processing step in between.

Sort out the messy sensations.

Separate accidental phenomena from stable ones.

Separate surface feedback from deeper causes.

Put your own subjective feelings back into the actual movement and test them.

That process is the key.

A lot of people take "knowledge comes from practice" to mean that as long as you practice enough, your knowledge will naturally improve.

I don't think that's enough.

Practice is of course the source of knowledge, but after practice, you still have to process the material.

Unprocessed, material is just material.

When I was training chest, tired shoulders were material, no feeling in my chest was material, and a smoother path after lowering the weight was also material.

Only when that material is put side by side and compared can we reach a judgment:

So my bar path was wrong.

That's when knowledge truly takes a step forward.

Back to Life

The gym works this way, and so does work.

When someone runs a project and it fails, of course they'll feel things.

Anxiety, defeat, anger, a sense of being wronged. Others weren't cooperating, the resources weren't enough, the boss kept changing the requirements.

All those feelings are real.

But if they stay inside those feelings, what they end up with may just be emotion, not knowledge.

They need to keep thinking.

Why did this project fail?

Was the goal unclear from the start, or did execution get out of control?

Was it a communication problem, or a misjudgment of resources?

Was my own ability lacking, or did the organization's structure itself not support this thing?

Only then can that failure turn from a painful experience into real knowledge.

Writing works this way too.

When a piece doesn't turn out well, the most direct feelings might be: nobody read it, the numbers are bad, and I'm not happy with it either.

But that's just perceptual material.

If you stop there, you'll feel bad, but you won't necessarily improve.

You have to keep taking it apart.

Did the opening fail to grab people, or did the logic go slack in the middle?

Were the examples not concrete enough, or was the argument too vague?

Was the writing unclear, or did the topic just not hit readers to begin with?

Only once you've taken it apart this far can writing experience turn into writing ability.

Otherwise you may write a lot of pieces and only build up a lot of emotion.

Studying the Selected Works is the same.

When I read "On Practice" at seventeen, what I read was words.

After going through some things, I read it again, and what I read was more than words.

Not because the book had changed.

Because I had built up more perceptual material in my life, and started being able to match that material to the theory in the book.

So the same sentence, read when I was young, was a sentence. Read later, it was a structure.

And that may be what perceptual knowledge rising to rational knowledge really looks like.

So the Key Isn't Experience, It's Processing Experience

Now we can go back to the question we started with.

Why do some people distill real laws from a lifetime of doing things, while others just pile up a heap of experience?

Because experience doesn't automatically become knowledge.

And practice doesn't automatically become laws.

What really matters is whether a person can take their sensations, experience, failures, and successes and analyze them again.

Discard the dross and select the essential.

Proceed from the outside to the inside.

Find the thing that really matters in a pile of messy feedback.

Back when I trained chest, all I got at first was a lot of sensations.

Tired shoulders, sore arms, nothing in my chest, an awkward movement.

Only after I lowered the weight and tried different angles again and again did I slowly learn that the problem was the bar path.

It was a small process.

So small it was just an ordinary gym experience.

But it was also big.

Because that's actually how knowledge of many things comes about.

First there's sensation.

Then comparison.

Then analysis.

Then judgment.

And finally, a law.

Perceptual knowledge rising to rational knowledge isn't a reward that shows up naturally after practice. It's a result you can only get after reworking the material of practice.

So what's really worth watching out for isn't a person with no experience.

It's a person with a lot of experience who has never seriously processed it.

People like that are the most likely to mistake familiarity for understanding, repetition for law, and feeling for truth.

What "On Practice" wants to tell us is exactly the opposite.

Feeling is only the beginning.

Understanding is what makes feeling go deeper.

Of course, once rational knowledge has formed, the story isn't over.

Because no matter how reasonable a judgment sounds or how beautifully a law is summed up, whether it's right still has to be tested by going back to practice.

That brings us to the next question in "On Practice."

Knowledge comes from practice and rises from perceptual to rational. Why does it then have to go back to practice?

We'll talk about that in the next post.