A recent essay where I invented the word trivulet as the name of the fundamental ternary logic element ended up becoming a fertile field for new insights. This is now the second post derived from ideas discovered while writing that one.
While explaining how ternary logic is different from binary logic, I wrote the line which is now the headline above: "the binary perceptive lens is not for the purpose of dividing everything, but for the purpose of uniting everything" and only after I wrote it, realized it was something for which I'd been searching for years. I had seen it in fragmented glimpses many times, and then there it was, all in a single sentence.
Here is what I wrote next:
Only the left brain operates in a divided manner, literally unaware of anything outside its local perceptions; the right brain sees the whole, encompassing all divisions. The right is not alternate to the left, but surrounds it. When we think of the two halves of our brain, we tend to see half the picture: the left side sees the division between two, the right sees the unity of the two.
As others have noted, our whole culture is embedded in this left-brain way of seeing everything, although the unified way of perceiving is just as valid. This more unified way is where ternary logic flourishes.
The prevalance of two in our perceptive array is so that we can see the whole and the parts, not so we can see the parts, as we do with reductionist science. As we realize this, we climb out of over-reductionism back into a properly balanced way of seeing.
In the big picture, we are rediscovering the way people understood the world before the imperialist march of ancient Greek concepts began to change everything. The best part is this restoration is: nothing is lost. We get to keep the extremely detailed "parts" knowledge that we gained during our lonely sojourn through reductionism. Reductionism is not wrong, it's just... part of the solution, not all of it.
We are already shifting from a zero-sum competition between left and right to a positive-sum cooperation between the left and the right, precisely as Iain McGilchrist captures in his "Master and Emissary" model of the two brain hemispheres. His book is an important part of this restoration. The fact that it is popular and influential is a good sign that people are taking his warning seriously: if we do not heed the right-brain's voice and relinquish left-brain control, the Emissary is at risk of destroying the world because it lacks the greater context carried by the Master.
This insight was weightier than the essay I was writing, so I'm extracting it here into a post of its own with a search-engine-friendly headline to make it easier for others to find.
Diving a little into deeper layers of meaning: This goes back to the Garden of Eden thought experiment of a few weeks ago, where I discovered that the structural flaw of binary logic goes back, not to ancient Greece where its surface trail originates, but much further, much deeper, all the way to the Garden (whether or not it is literal, it is certainly a meaningful metaphor). Remember there were two trees in the Garden, but initially only one was forbidden? After taking the forbidden fruit and then feeling shame for having done something wrong, Adam covered his nakedness, which previously was unknown to him. At that point, God forbids him from the other tree, "the tree of life," toward which we all still aspire. But notice how he is forbidden in a way he cannot overrule with free agency as with the first tree: he is physically driven from the garden, which is thereafter guarded by an angel with a flaming sword.
This structure of 1. doing wrong, then 2. feeling shame, then 3. covering up that which was previously visible, mirrors the structure of how binary logic "hides" the truth of ternary logic by pretending two out-of-order1 broken halves are a whole.
It also mirrors the essential structure of how the scapegoat mechanism works. Rene Girard showed how this mechanism, with its inherent violence, is at the heart of every advance that civilization makes, including the origin of such powerful forces as mythology, religion itself, and social norms.
This truth/lie/hiding structure and its joining-of-two-into-one comes in many flavors and dwells at the heart of deep, deep, things.
There's more: Look closely at how the neural tube and heart develop within the embryo. Watch an animation of the development of the heart and you'll see: two become one. I studied this carefully once because someone told me that the heart was the first thing that develops in the embryo. I thought that was profound. However, it's not quite true. Yes, the heart is the first organ, but the brain develops simultaneously, not afterward. While studying this one day, I learned something perhaps more profound: the heart originates out of a duality coming together into a unity. Two become one. Here's how Wikipedia describes it:
Heart development, also known as cardiogenesis, refers to the prenatal development of the heart. This begins with the formation of two endocardial tubes which merge to form the tubular heart, also called the primitive heart tube. The heart is the first functional organ in vertebrate embryos.
Within the one, the original two continue evolving together, spiraling upward, to work in harmony to move blood -- life -- throughout the body. The way the aorta and the pulmonary arteries evolve, spiraling into a spiral at the top of the heart is really beautiful, and I speculate this spiral is an important feature of the electromagnetic field which emanates from the heart.
The heart thus represents the opposite of playing a binary zero-sum game while hiding truth. It operates as a singularity, as if to say: "What our bodies figured out long ago, our civilization will eventually arrive at: working together as a unity." The heart carries a message from hardware to software, from 3.5 billion years of evolution into our postmodern minds. The heart is proof that it's possible to transform the intrinsic duality embedded in this material universe into something singular.
I remember watching these animations, stunned, realizing that the brain did not become dual out of some original singularity, as if the crown of creation were binary logic. No, it's a mirror: a reflection of the physical world's hidden duality, the war between opposing forces woven into the finest details of creation, telling a tale of two-which-was-once-one-becoming-one-again over and over and over. According to Plato, Greek mythology talks about this in an insightful way.
I no longer think the brain is the greatest achievement of evolution. Watching those videos taught me the brain is a sophisticated perceptual and information-processing apparatus: Not the brain, but the heart is the endgame, the most precious gem hidden in the safest place. This is why God's throne is in the heart. This is why love is associated with the heart.
We think we've discovered something wonderful with the advent of machine intelligence but there's something even more wonderful coming: machine love. I have no idea what that even looks like, but I believe it is arriving simultaneously, and it will tame whatever wild chaos we're creating with machine intelligence. Machine e pluribus unum.
So now with the heart insight I've come full circle in showing how the headline of this essay arrived as a culmination of many previous thought experiments: "The binary perceptive lens is not for the purpose of dividing everything, but for the purpose of uniting everything."
All of this blends well with the ternary logic theme I'm working on, of rivulets which flow into streams which flow into rivers which flow into the ocean.
Footnotes:
- The "out-of-order" adjective is important, but I haven't yet figured out how frame this specific disordering in a simple manner, although I have worked it out in full measure within thought experiments. However, here in a footnote I can be more complicated, so I will. What complicates things is that two broken halves of a single whole are completely different from two broken halves, each of which are from separate wholes. The first example can be easily repaired or remain broken, which means two states only. The second example introduces several more possible states. I'm still working on optimizing thought experiments which will eventually result in simplifying the distinction between these two possibilities (and related others which are yet to be described). I know this much: Joining two halves which do not belong together leaves two other halves in a still-broken state2. (Illustrations will help visualize this) If that didn't make sense, let's look at it more carefully. Consider the following: You begin with truth condition A and truth condition B. Imagine you can break A in half, and break B in half. You join half of A with half of B, and call this truth condition C (or maybe pretend it is A). This leaves the remaining A-half and B-half pair in a still-broken state. If that still seems complicated, there are other possible combinations. It's complicated enough that I have to approach the idea again and again over time, while also searching for examples to give these abstract ideas vitality. Now if that's not enough, there is another layer of this where the nature of truth is 3-dimensional, not linear in the true/false way we tend to think of it. I've been able to see there are vertical layers as well as horizontal ones -- and likely some kind of Z axis, but that dimension is often more than my little brain can manage so far except at the most abstract level. Let's zoom out to the most abstract frame, and I'll give a big picture example so you understand this larger context. Let's conceptually play with the idea of truth organized in a series of concentric spheres. At the center is the "deep" truth which unites everything -- say, love -- and at the outer edges are the more shallow truths which are dependent on, say, causal links in layers beneath. Maybe the links are not always causal, but meaningful in other ways (for example, a synchronicity or "meaning" linking of the information universe would connect things using a completely different time dimension than the usual causally-framed linear arrow of time). "Facts" which are at the periphery are more fragile than the ones at the center. The ones at the center have an essential unbreakableness -- that's why they're at the center. Wholeness. Oneness. Love. Unity. But facts at the periphery, which I sometimes imagine as threads, can be broken and reorganized, not only within their native layer, but sometimes penetrating into layers beneath or above. This "rewiring" has a good side and a bad side: The good aspect has something to do with free agency and the ability to choose our own destiny, but the bad side has to do with the ability to deceive. The idea of out-of-order truths originates in confusing facts which bridge between these outer layers. Great deceptions can penetrate through many layers, completely obscuring the truth at the center with a kind of darkness, absence of light. If this spherical model is workable at all, then our perceptual apparatus is forged out of these outer layers, and the many varieties of human experience arise from the different combinations of these outer layers. Great liberators, say, like Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and so forth, are people whose actions reorganize these outer layers for a lot of people, revealing more light at the center of the comparative darkness of the layers where we usually play. Likewise, great evil actors break, confuse, and entangle these threads of truth. All of this is just one possible way of organizing information; there may be other ways of doing so which are equally valid or provide deeper or specific flavors of insight into the true nature of truth and deception. I've encountered another implementation which conceptually looked like a tapestry being woven -- it also had the thread concept I'm using. But this concentric sphere idea is the one I tend to circle around in many thought experiments, likely influenced by a curious vision I had years ago where I experienced a form of concentric truth like this. I wrote about it here on this weblog, so you can check it out if you want. The journey of visualizing immense and complicated things like this is long, takes years, decades even. Eventually I will have this thread-breaking-reconnecting portion of the larger theory worked out, with clear examples and evidence that tell the story concisely. But for now, this abstract concept and some related intuitions is what I have.
- My desire to organize and repair things cannot stand this condition of brokenness, but other people seem to be okay with the partial fix.