I think an important thing to note here is that even the concepts of strategic defeat or tactical victory or the totality warfare are themselves abstractions defined by the interaction between preconceptions of said terms and the processing/analysis of new experience in relation to the preconceptions and related concepts/context. Sure there are external definitions you could reference, but the mental representation of concepts aren't external definitions. The systems of processing and preconceptions are both in constant states of update and are, in of themselves, made up of a totality of inputs dependent on all the interconnected systems of perception, memory (which includes the aforementioned external definition), abstraction, etc... and ultimately the material conditions (whether it be genetics or environment). There is constant feedback from top to bottom and bottom to top; abstraction is necessary to contextualize/perceive experience of the concrete and abstraction arises from interactions between distinct experiences of the concrete. Furthermore, you can't just call it a dynamic process because the experiential, emergent nature of consciously interacting with said concept is irreducible. We have limited attention and cannot consciously perceive the totality from which the reified experience of consciousness arise. Whether it be top-down or bottom-up, we never experience the totality of our entire conceptual mapping nor the experience of physical phenomena from which they arise and which they contextualize; but we still interact with, make judgements, and alter the relationships between concepts arising from such processes despite our ignorance. The act of interacting with a concept (even so much as inquiring as to the nature of its existence as a one's own internal concept) in consciousness, more generally working memory, changes it's relationship to its context all while being unaware of the totality of its context. Even if we could fully map out all neural activity and their feedback loops, we couldn't confirm that these complex systems of input, memory, abstraction, perception etc. actually informed conscious thought in the manner in which we might predict/model due to the failure of introspection. And even if we could miraculously overcome this in study, the resulting knowledge would alter the relationship between all concepts with the inclusion of this new concept(s) informing all others.

I agree that Mao might fail in a metaphysical sense. However I think at least some of what Mao talked about with this work is super interesting in viewing the construction of mental representation of the world. As someone who has spent a decent amount of time studying cognition, I do find a lot of what I read here to be really fascinating in relation to what I've learned/researched.

I'm not sure if I explained this very clearly, but this is difficult shit to explain and deserves way more time and effort (which is actually something I am working on). I would ideally want to go into the models and studies I'm basing a lot of these claims on, but if you're interested I can try to come back and go into it sometime. I think my choice of terms is kinda shitty and something I want to work on. I also would would like to note that I'm not super well informed on Mao, just read this a few days ago and it's the first of anything I've read related to Maoism.