True.. but false…?
So… binary is a bit troublesome to start because… definitions. So.. binary can mean that there are one of two things- a binary star is two stars, a binary epoxy uses two chemicals etc. but.. binary can also mean base 2. So most of us know a “base 10” counting system- numbers- each “digit place” holds up to 9 of the previous digit and then we must create a new digit. So .9+.1 does not equal .10, .10 would just be .1 and you generally can’t odd positive integers together and end up with LESS. .9+.1 becomes 1.0- 1. 9+1 equals 10 not 1.0, 90+10 is 100 and forth. We can’t go above 9. So base 2 gives us a system where no number can be written higher than 1. Giving is 0 and 1.
So when you count in case 10, you take the lowest digit and each time you add one or more of itself you increase that digit until you reach the maximum that digit place can hold- a 9. You then carry or overflow the extra to the left in a higher digit space.
7+4… we cannot store that number in one digit with base 10. 7+4 counting becomes 8+3 then 9+2, but we can’t store higher than 9 in a single digit so we move the overflow to the left and we get a 1X. So if we keep counting it is 10+1, the 9 becomes a zero, an empty value, and the lowest actual value is placed to the left. Then we count on to 11+0 and end at 11. Ok. So binary we have 0 and 1. One is the highest digit than can occupy a spot.
So what if we have wanted to count 4 apples being added to our order?
In binary, one apple is… 1. So we have 1+3. So we add another apple and have 2+2- but binary can’t display a 2 so we reset the right most digit to 0, nothing, and we carry our 1 to the left. So 2 expressed in binary base 2 is…
10. So now we have 2+2 and we add one to get 3+1… which we can’t have a 3 in binary so it is.. 11. In binary what we see from 0 is:
0 (no apples) add 1 and we see 1. Add another 1 and we see 10. Add another one and the lowest digit place (the right most
digit which is a 0 in this example) gets incremented by 1- so it is now 11. When we add one more, we can’t go above 1 so we reset the right most digit to 0, carry over the the left but can’t go higher than 1, so we reset that to 0 and then carry over to the next left place and 4 would be seen as 100.
5 is 101, 6 is 110, 7 is 111, 8 is 1000, 9 is 1001, 10 is 1010 and so on.
So the thing is that wether something is binary depends on which use of the word we mean. Base 2 binary can represent a theoretically infinite spectrum of information whereas the other definition of binary implies there are only 2 posible choices.
So it does get tricky if we confuse or conflate meaning. That said, a spectrum is…. Well… it depends. If we go down to a quantum level there are… well… as we understand it a quanta can spin clockwise or counter clockwise which implies binary. It can have a positive charge or a negative charge which implies binary. That said- those properties do have relationships and so the spin of quanta is generally described as charge and direction such as “Positive clockwise” which gives us 4 states of spin. Of course there are also “colors” so a quark might be said to have positive blueness or positive greeness, negative redness or negative blueness etc. so we have 3 accepted “color charges” for a quark or gluon and 2 spin directions and a negative or positive state. In theory every complex structure or force can be distilled down to a point where it’s behavior is being defined by some binary state- but those binary states combine to produce basically everything that we know of that exists.
Of course that deviates from the definition of binary as just two” because we are talking about using a complex system of math and organization to a count for the states across each position to define the whole. And of course it is less that the universe runs on such a system than it is that we created the concept of a binary system to give us the ability to understand and communicate concepts with language.
In other words, even if we argue that something is binary a some basic level- that something is it or isn’t, that something spins left or spins right, that something is purple or black- that isn’t relevant on any other level. It doesn’t tell us the relationship in the system. Light as we know can exist as a particle or a wave, that doesn’t tell us anything about the light or define the light. A flashlight and a laser are both light aren’t they? There is more to the state of light or how we might interact with it than simply that singular aspect expressed in binary.
@guest_ ponder that you currently are on a spectrum between alive and not alive. Breathing makes you more pink while not more blue. Somewhere between total dark and fairly bright. . .. and at some point, you've typed JUST enough to capture people's awe of your depth & breath of knowledge.. but you keep pushing. You are the red shift my dude. The number 3 is ALWAYS red for my synesthesia. You, are always moving further down the spectrum. .. little #3 matchbox car.
Lol. Indeed. And not. Thoughts on depth or breadth asides but to the issue at hand- are you always between two states, or are you in one state or the other and that condition is one of constant momentary transience, or are you simply one or the other, or is it none of the above?
There is a nuance beyond nuances.
Most things that start or involve “in nature” are by default self debunking- are we not part of nature? Does nature exist in vacuum from us? But let’s ignore that. Let’s call it semantics and unimportant and assume we know what “in nature” means and it isn’t to be taken at face value- enter the larger issue.
As far as we can tell, “nature,” the “laws of reality” contain no system of or internet in classification. Binary, a spectrum, tertiary, it doesn’t actually “exist” in any sense. We generalize our perceptions to make understanding reality and communicating thought and experience convenient. Nature doesn’t deal in black and white any more than it deals in a spectrum of color. We perceive things a certain way, organisms with different anatomy and such perceive things differently. Colors and shapes and numbers and names for things don’t “exist in nature” in any sense. History and the modern age are full of things we didn’t or don’t know of because we couldn’t or can’t perceive them. Advancing technology and better math allow us to see or theorize about things beyond our physical perception- but reality has four leading theories to its existence.
It either is a construct- created with willful purpose by some entity, a god, an alien or extra dimensional being, an AI simulation, your own mind… or it is just.. here… and exists iteratively through luck and coincidence and maybe some input from thinking beings, or it doesn’t exist at all as we perceive it, or some combination of those things. We are unlikely to solve what reality is and all there is to know of everything- if not ever at least anytime soon, but in the meantime we, and other organisms, are here contending with existence as we understand it. So at the most basic level there is what we perceive to work and that we do not. What we believe and what we do not. On the surface that seems binary- but could doubt be considered a part of a spectrum there? One might think so if said doubt we’re crippling to the point one didn’t do anything because one was unsure of reality and if even breathing should be done… though that practice would likely end in death which one could then
classify as “does not work” in the game of life, returning is to binary.
The larger point though is it isn’t really relevant in my view if things are binary or not because the classification of binary or non binary are arbitrary. They are a label of perception. By default that is a relative lens. The #3 matchbox car moves down the track… or not. Movement is relative to the observer. We can’t measure movement without having a frame of reference to measure against. You’re moving at hundreds of thousand of miles per hour right now, but relative to the system you are perceiving you are stationary or at most perhaps moving at 600 or so miles per hour most likely if you’re in one of the fastest vehicles you might be able to read this from. So down the track or up, red shift or blue shift, it’s relative to the observer.
Now- let me not dance around this. I think that it seems obvious that a major hot button issue concerning terms like binary and spectrum relate to human sexuality and gender.
Is gender binary? Much like binary we encounter a major issue that gender has multiple meanings in English. Gender as a construct is something we define- gender roles and gender identity and gender traits. Gender as a reproductive sex is much simpler. There are across most of the animal kingdom and even into other kingdoms, a pattern where by one organism offers a small gamete for reproduction and one organism offers a large gamete. This is “nature” in humans- with some humans only theoretically able to produce a gamete and rarely humans who produce more than one. People often conflate gamete production and thus biological sex with gender as a concept of identity and that isn’t terribly sensical.
Simply changing the language can defuse so much of a debate or at least draw out the truth. If we classified certain things by the size of the gametes you produce or could theoretically produce based on anatomy indicated by genetics, we essentially get rid of most arguments concerning terms like “man” or “woman” or “gender.” We simply are left with a question of wether you make eggs or sperm- which is essentially what we are talking about when we discuss biological sex but it has become politicized and many are sensitive to the language and challenging concepts of language they hold. There isn’t a lot of room for misunderstanding when we discuss gametes.
Of course that tells us very little of practical use beyond who might be able to reproduce with whom. We can draw certain broad generalizations based off one’s genetic disposition to produce a given type of gamete- but those are broad generalizations for the most part.
Sexuality is less clear cut as is gender identity because those aren’t systems linked to any physical reality, they are imposed by our perceptions and assumptions. You can’t test someone’s DNA or observe their reproductive cells under a microscope and define what they enjoy in the bedroom or how they like to express themselves. It makes things very simple to describe this as a spectrum, and most often when I discuss sexuality or gender I use the term spectrum myself because it is convenient. It imparts the idea that there is nuance and different types of people that don’t neatly fit into one of two classifications OR, describes pretty well how there are too many possibilities
And variances between people within two classifications to make those classifications useful.
As said above, WE invent classification to aid in understanding and communicating about the world and ourselves. A classification system should therefore be useful. Dividing all things in earth into “things that explode and things that do not” is only perhaps barely and broadly useful. Plenty of things that do not explode will still kill you and plenty of things that do explode have such vast differences in the explosive power they release or the mechanisms they explode under and so forth that you can’t even use such a system to offer much or any real help in survival or figuring out what might be useful if you need an explosion.
That systems would require quite a few sub categories to make any use of it for most any purpose. We generally need to know more about a thing than wether it explodes or not, wether it can be eaten or not, so forth. Gamete production would be likely the root of one’s concern was mating. If you want to have a baby you require (in the current world) a source of the gamete you are missing (unless you fall into a VERY specific pocket case where the technology does exist for LIMITED persons to be able to theoretically reproduce using technology and only their own DNA.) there are additional concerns to reproduction than gametes, but before addressing those, one seeking to reproduce would logically be best served in most cases by ensuring that mating was possible based on genetics.
After that the things one might want or need to check explode exponentially. And of course, in most societies people don’t simply walk around looking to mate with anyone who first presents and has the proper gametes to do so. Generally people want to at least try to find a partner that has some genetic suitability or social advantages or other factors of suitability and compatibility. So the importance of gáñete size doesn’t come into play in a great deal of human sexual culture because only so many people are actively seeking a partner to produce offspring with. If one isn’t trying to produce offspring then gametes aren’t really a concern and other issues if compatibility would be a more prudent concern such as if you like them or find them attractive.
So we don’t really even need to get into a spectrum or binary because we can reduce things to base 1 or below. Things are what they are. We accept that as reality or we do not. I don’t care what the classification system is or says, if you can only classify things as plant or animal and you encounter something that defies either classification, you simply need to expand your classifications to system to include the new entity unless you are entrenched in ignorance and would rather try to force a classification by an arbitrary and now outdated standard. Think about it- the system of classification exists to allow you to quickly identify things by groups, stretching the limits of those groups to where you cannot know by classification fundamental constants across the group basically defeats the purpose of classification. At that point why have a system?
“Nature” doesn’t care what your classification is. Evolution cares very little. Life finds a way is the line from Jurassic park. You either like having sex with a specific entity or entities bearing certain similarities or you do not-
Unless you don’t know what you like.
You can have a mood to eat one hour and not the next. You can wan to have sex with men one day but the next feel like sex but not with men. There is- beyond a spectrum- a fluidity to nature. Nature flows. The concept of evolution implies flow, things change and adapt. They fill the holes in reality, forming into the shape of the hole or forming reality into a shape around them. Nature is a system of constant change but ful of patterns.
So I contend that there is a fluidity to nature. Binary or a spectrum is all perception and our choice of how we reconcile things and as said- in the end nature is ultimately in theory singular- there is what is as you know it and that which you don’t know of. If you are born with genes that will give you blue eyes through life then you do not have a spectrum of eye colors, your eyes are blue. It is singular. That is your reality. Of course, we have the means to effect a change in the color others perceive your eyes to be and it allows us to select colors and such that don’t exist “in nature” for human eyes. You can of course change the color later again too. So reality as it is is singular in theory- though modern advanced and theoretical sciences might call that into question too as reality may be completely subjective or not exist.
So I mean…. Things are right and they are wrong. That’s a binary statement but… if we as humans were to close soft right and wrong, for that system to be useful to us, the degrees of harm or offense caused by different things would be too vast to simply call anything either right or wrong and consider all rights equal to each other and all wrongs equal to each other… so we would need to sub classify wrongs and rights by perceived severity, and those perceptions would likely change over time making the truth also ultimately fluid in our eyes.
It is all a perception game. What you choose to see or what you refuse to.
Comments
So… binary is a bit troublesome to start because… definitions. So.. binary can mean that there are one of two things- a binary star is two stars, a binary epoxy uses two chemicals etc. but.. binary can also mean base 2. So most of us know a “base 10” counting system- numbers- each “digit place” holds up to 9 of the previous digit and then we must create a new digit. So .9+.1 does not equal .10, .10 would just be .1 and you generally can’t odd positive integers together and end up with LESS. .9+.1 becomes 1.0- 1. 9+1 equals 10 not 1.0, 90+10 is 100 and forth. We can’t go above 9. So base 2 gives us a system where no number can be written higher than 1. Giving is 0 and 1.
So when you count in case 10, you take the lowest digit and each time you add one or more of itself you increase that digit until you reach the maximum that digit place can hold- a 9. You then carry or overflow the extra to the left in a higher digit space.
So what if we have wanted to count 4 apples being added to our order?
In binary, one apple is… 1. So we have 1+3. So we add another apple and have 2+2- but binary can’t display a 2 so we reset the right most digit to 0, nothing, and we carry our 1 to the left. So 2 expressed in binary base 2 is…
10. So now we have 2+2 and we add one to get 3+1… which we can’t have a 3 in binary so it is.. 11. In binary what we see from 0 is:
0 (no apples) add 1 and we see 1. Add another 1 and we see 10. Add another one and the lowest digit place (the right most
5 is 101, 6 is 110, 7 is 111, 8 is 1000, 9 is 1001, 10 is 1010 and so on.
So the thing is that wether something is binary depends on which use of the word we mean. Base 2 binary can represent a theoretically infinite spectrum of information whereas the other definition of binary implies there are only 2 posible choices.
In other words, even if we argue that something is binary a some basic level- that something is it or isn’t, that something spins left or spins right, that something is purple or black- that isn’t relevant on any other level. It doesn’t tell us the relationship in the system. Light as we know can exist as a particle or a wave, that doesn’t tell us anything about the light or define the light. A flashlight and a laser are both light aren’t they? There is more to the state of light or how we might interact with it than simply that singular aspect expressed in binary.
There is a nuance beyond nuances.
Most things that start or involve “in nature” are by default self debunking- are we not part of nature? Does nature exist in vacuum from us? But let’s ignore that. Let’s call it semantics and unimportant and assume we know what “in nature” means and it isn’t to be taken at face value- enter the larger issue.
The larger point though is it isn’t really relevant in my view if things are binary or not because the classification of binary or non binary are arbitrary. They are a label of perception. By default that is a relative lens. The #3 matchbox car moves down the track… or not. Movement is relative to the observer. We can’t measure movement without having a frame of reference to measure against. You’re moving at hundreds of thousand of miles per hour right now, but relative to the system you are perceiving you are stationary or at most perhaps moving at 600 or so miles per hour most likely if you’re in one of the fastest vehicles you might be able to read this from. So down the track or up, red shift or blue shift, it’s relative to the observer.
Is gender binary? Much like binary we encounter a major issue that gender has multiple meanings in English. Gender as a construct is something we define- gender roles and gender identity and gender traits. Gender as a reproductive sex is much simpler. There are across most of the animal kingdom and even into other kingdoms, a pattern where by one organism offers a small gamete for reproduction and one organism offers a large gamete. This is “nature” in humans- with some humans only theoretically able to produce a gamete and rarely humans who produce more than one. People often conflate gamete production and thus biological sex with gender as a concept of identity and that isn’t terribly sensical.
Sexuality is less clear cut as is gender identity because those aren’t systems linked to any physical reality, they are imposed by our perceptions and assumptions. You can’t test someone’s DNA or observe their reproductive cells under a microscope and define what they enjoy in the bedroom or how they like to express themselves. It makes things very simple to describe this as a spectrum, and most often when I discuss sexuality or gender I use the term spectrum myself because it is convenient. It imparts the idea that there is nuance and different types of people that don’t neatly fit into one of two classifications OR, describes pretty well how there are too many possibilities
As said above, WE invent classification to aid in understanding and communicating about the world and ourselves. A classification system should therefore be useful. Dividing all things in earth into “things that explode and things that do not” is only perhaps barely and broadly useful. Plenty of things that do not explode will still kill you and plenty of things that do explode have such vast differences in the explosive power they release or the mechanisms they explode under and so forth that you can’t even use such a system to offer much or any real help in survival or figuring out what might be useful if you need an explosion.
Unless you don’t know what you like.
You can have a mood to eat one hour and not the next. You can wan to have sex with men one day but the next feel like sex but not with men. There is- beyond a spectrum- a fluidity to nature. Nature flows. The concept of evolution implies flow, things change and adapt. They fill the holes in reality, forming into the shape of the hole or forming reality into a shape around them. Nature is a system of constant change but ful of patterns.
It is all a perception game. What you choose to see or what you refuse to.