Binary illusions

In earlier essays I have talked about how our ideas about reality don’t correspond exactly to reality. There are two closely-related inaccuracies that are so common they are worth warning you about. One of them is to think that one sees boundaries when in fact none exist. The second inaccuracy is to imagine that virtually all the attributes of anything in the universe come in pairs of opposites. I don’t know physics very well so I hope you bear with me here: as far as I’m aware, boundaries occur only at the level of quantum physics—and even there they are scarce. My understanding is that electrons jump from orbit to orbit in discrete jumps, without passing through an intermediate state, so we can say that the orbits of an atom have boundaries (conceptual, at least). That’s about the only example I can think of; subatomic particles don’t even seem to have discrete locations. Zoom close enough to anything bigger and boundaries are practically impossible to find; they are all “fuzzy”. Physical boundaries of conceptual entities are just as hard to find. No matter how carefully you define “chair” and “sofa” I could show you something that would be hard to decide whether it was a chair or a sofa. This is true of anything that is defined into existence. Nature knows nothing of chairs or sofas or even apples and oranges. Take an apple and watch it over a long time. When it starts rotting, is it still an apple, or just garbage? If it stops being an apple when you can no longer recognize it (for example when its just a lump of unidentifiable carbon compounds), when was the exact instant it went from apple to non-apple? There’s nothing wrong with concepts—for example, the concept of an apple. The mistake is to think that the concept itself exists outside of your head, complete with tidy little boundaries that correspond to some exact definition of a thing. It’s as if people expect to see national borders drawn on the earth when they fly overhead. Ancient Greek philosophers wasted a lot of time and neural connections trying to figure this one out, and came up with nonsense about “ideal chairs” and “ideal apples” that exist in the universe of archetypes! The other mistake is similar. It is the tendency to see things in terms of opposites such as good and evil, light and darkness, hot and cold, male and female, when in fact true opposites are about as rare as boundaries. Opposites exist mostly only in the form of abstract ideas, like +1 and –1 being additive opposites which precisely cancel each other out. Take the case of hot and cold. Are they really opposites? Is the “opposite” of 10,000 degrees Celsius minus 10,000 degrees Celsius? There is no such thing as minus 10,000 degrees Celsius. Cold is not the opposite of heat; cold is lack of heat—which is relative. Thinking of hot and cold as opposites is a mistake of modeling quantitative differences as qualitative. This is a common mistake. A frequently-heard expression that grates on my ears is “opposite sex”, meaning that male and female are opposites. They are not! Put a man and a woman together and they don’t cancel each other out—poof—then nothing! A man (ideally) has two eyes. A woman (ideally) has two eyes. Men breathe using their diaphragms and lung. So do women. They have the same average body temperature—despite their average size difference! Not only are they more alike than different, but the differences between them are essentially quantitative not qualitative. A man has a little broader shoulders than a woman. A woman has wider hips. Men are nurturing. Women are courageous. Even what people think of as being differences of having and not having are more quantitative and less qualitative than most people imagine—make this a little bigger, tuck that in, and the parts pretty much all correspond. Seeing opposites where there are none is a mistake that makes people dupes for malicious gender-baiting. Here is an interesting case: aren't “rest” and “activity” polar opposites? Mutually-exclusive even? And yet our bodies need both rest and activity! They don't cancel each other out! Our brains are probably hard-wired to model processes as pairs of binary opposites, because binary systems correspond to the most basic binary choices: Opportunity or danger. Fight or flight. The most basic systems are the most reliable; start getting too fancy and you end up like the fox in Aesop’s fable who was killed by the hounds because he couldn’t decide from among all his clever schemes for getting away which one he would actually choose. The cat, who only knew to run up a tree, got away. So there is a good reason why we are susceptible to seeing things in terms of binary opposites instead of seeing them in terms of their true complexity. The problem happens from not being aware of our tendency to oversimplify things. Those who are malicious will try to corner other people with ready-made binary choices. These are called bifurcations and are also known as either-or fallacies. They are one of the commonest sorts of tricks used to try to deceive others. Before the invasion of Iraq, the US media cast the debate in terms of “must we invade now to save time, or should we wait for the UN, so that French and German taxpayers will foot the bill?” Other options such as minding our own business were completely off the table. The British author C.S. Lewis was so concerned about the use of fallacies to deceive that he proposed making logic and debate basic subjects for school-age children. That’s probably an idea worth pursuing. Not all bifurcations are malicious: sometimes we deceive ourselves. Our brains are wired to look for patterns. They could not do otherwise: if the universe were completely chaotic, intelligence would be impossible. Intelligence is a sort of pattern-matching. Unfortunately despite millennia of civilization too many people have a massive bias for seeing the binary opposite pattern where it leads to two bad choices—when there are much better solutions outside of their binary system. Unless the situation really does lend itself to a binary choice, such as one of those life or death situations where you really don’t have time to consider all possible choices (though it might help if the 2 choices you come up with are good ones), then it’s usually worth the extra neural connections to model the situation a little more accurately and coming up with an optimal choice. In future installments I will frequently be exposing fallacious bifurcations and propose alternative models for what is going on. When you are faced with a dilemma, keep in mind that there might be more than two choices, and that the two choices you are considering might both be poor choices.