LMA's Wu Wei: Synthesizing Dialectical Materialism, Daoism, and Physics for Better Energy Transfer
What is dialectical materialism?
Dialectical materialism holds that change arises from inherent contradictions—both within and between things. These opposing forces drive a process of constant motion and transformation. The resolution of contradictions creates new material realities, each giving rise to further contradictions. In LMA, change is movement, and learning is change—for something new to be learned, something old must transition. Thus, the cycle of change continues.
Materialism, in this context, emphasizes that the material world precedes and shapes consciousness; our thoughts and ideas are products of our lived, material conditions. Lived experience is not a byproduct of thought but the active process through which the world impresses itself upon us.
Dialectics emphasizes the interconnectedness of things and the importance of understanding change through the interplay of opposing forces—never as fixed or isolated entities.
Unity of opposing forces
In dialectical materialism, the unity of opposing forces means that what appears as contradiction is, at a deeper level, a form of connection. Opposing elements—tension and release, rest and movement, agonist and antagonist, life and death, something and nothing—are not just related but interdependent, forming a whole and driving change as a system. This aligns with Daoism, where the dance of opposites reveals the greater whole and deeper truth: the Dao.
Movement according to dialectical materialism and physics
There are two principal kinds of contradictions in dialectical materialism: external (between) and internal (within). Physics explains that "contradiction" is the driver of physical movement.
External contradiction
Physics teaches that force is relational. When you push into the ground, the ground pushes back. The unity of these opposing forces gives rise to a new reality: motion. This is Newton's third law of motion, expressed as ground reaction force.
Stillness is the absence of this dynamic opposition.
Internal contradiction
Within the body, the same principles apply. Physics explains that when you rotate or launch a limb, you need a platform to push against—even if it's another part of your own body. This is internal opposition: force requires an anchor, even if it's your own mass or motion. Creating contradictions allows for efficient energy transfer and force generation.
If these muscles stopped working in opposition—if agonist and antagonist muscles did the same thing—movement would be impossible. You would have stasis, not life.
At its most granular, life is motion.
The necessity of contradiction: physics and life
On a universal scale, if there were no more entropy—no more disorder, contradiction, or opposing forces—there would be no movement, no change, no life. The universe would be reduced to a state of perfect, frozen uniformity: a static, symmetrical, absolutely consistent, maximally ordered death. It's the inconsistency, the ever-present friction, that makes activity and complexity possible—and life worth living. Perfect stillness is the absence not just of movement or life but of possibility itself.
– Sam