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Note: the contents of this page as well as those which precede and follow, must be read as a continuation and/or overlap in order that the continuity about a relationship to/with the dichotomous arrangement of the idea that one could possibly talk seriously about peace from a different perspective as well as the typical dichotomous assignment of Artificial Intelligence (such as the usage of zeros and ones used in computer programming) ... will not be lost (such as war being frequently used to describe an absence of peace and vice-versa). However, if your mind is prone to being distracted by timed or untimed commercialization (such as that seen in various types of American-based television, radio, news media and magazine publishing... not to mention the average classroom which carries over into the everyday workplace), you may be unable to sustain prolonged exposures to divergent ideas about a singular topic without becoming confused, unless the information is provided in a very simplistic manner.
Let's face it, humanity has a lousy definition, accompanying practice, and analysis of peace.
In conveying the idea that the definition of "Peace" is being subjected to an underlying constraint ("conservation of effect") that is evident in human anatomy and cognition... and even though we have been supplying an abundant of examples with a "three" pattern; let us for the moment look at a patterns-of-two by first providing an example taken from the "Uses of Enchantment" (1976) by Bruno Bettelheim denoted by referencing contrasts (even though in a personal correspondence years ago, he tried to impress upon us the [rather humorous idea that the] influence of the "three" came from having two testicles and one penis):
By Bruno Betteleheim Before and well into the Oedipal period (roughly ages three to six or seven), the child's experience of the world is chaotic, but only as seen from an adult point of view, because chaos implies an awareness of this state of affairs. If this "chaotic" fashion of experiencing the world is all one knows, then it is accepted as the way the world is. In the language of the Bible, which expresses the deepest feelings and insights of man, in the beginning the world was "without form." The way to overcome chaos is also told in the Bible: "God divided the light from darkness." During and because of the Oedipal struggles, the outside world comes to hold more meaning for the child and he begins to try to make sense of it. He no longer takes for granted that the confused way he sees the world is the only possible and appropriate one. The manner in which the child can bring some order into his world view is by dividing everything into opposites. In the later Oedipal and post-Oedipal ages, this splitting extends to the child himself. The child, like all of us, is at any moment in a welter of contradictory feelings. But while adults have learned to integrate these, the child is overwhelmed by these ambivalences within himself. He experiences the mixture of love and hate, desire and fear within himself as an incomprehensible chaos. He cannot manage feeling at one and the same moment both good and obedient, yet bad and rebellious, although he is. Since he cannot comprehend intermediate stages of degree and intensity, things are either all light or all darkness. One is either all courage or all fear; the happiest or the most miserable; the most beautiful or the ugliest; the smartest or the dumbest; one either loves or hates, never anything in between. This is also how the fairy tale depicts the world: figures are ferocity incarnate or unselfish benevolence. An animal is either all-devouring or all-helpful. Every figure is essentially one-dimensional, enabling the child to comprehend its actions and reactions easily. Through simple and direct images the fairy story helps the child sort out his complex and ambivalent feelings, so that these begin to fall each one into a separate place, rather than being all one big muddle. As he listens to the fairy tale, the child gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos which is his inner life. The fairy tale suggests not only isolating and separating the disparate and confusing aspects of the child's experience into opposites, but projecting these onto different figures. Even Freud found no better way to help make sense out of the incredible mixture of contradictions which coexist in our mind and inner life than by creating symbols for isolated aspects of the personality. He named these id, ego and superego. If we, as adults, must take recourse to the creation of separate entities to bring some sensible order into the chaos of our inner experiences, haw much greater is the child's need for this! Today adults use such concepts as id, ego, superego and ego-ideal to separate out internal experiences and get a better grasp on what they are all about. Unfortunately, in doing so we have lost something which is inherent in the fairy tale: the realization that these externalizations are fictions, useful only for sorting out and comprehending menial processes. Giving the inner processes separate names-id, ego, superego--made them entities, each with its own propensities. When we consider the emotional connotations these abstract terms of psychoanalysis have for most people using them, then we begin to see that these abstractions are not all that different from the personifications of the fairy tale. When we speak of the asocial and unreasonable id pushing the weak ego around or the ego doing the superego's bidding, these scientific similes are not much different from the allegories of the fairy tale. In the latter, the poor and weak child is confronted by the powerful witch that knows only its own desires and acts on them, without regard to any consequences. When the meek tailor in the Brothers Grimm's "The Valiant Little Tailor" manages to subdue two huge giants by making them fight each other, is he not acting as the weak ego does when it plays id against superego and, by neutralizing their opposite energies, gains rational control over these irrational forces? Many errors in understanding how our minds work could be avoided if modern man would at all times remain aware that these abstract concepts are nothing but convenient handles for manipulating ideas which, without such externalization, would be too difficult to comprehend. There is in actuality, of course, no separation between them, just as there is no real separation between mind and body. When the hero of a fairy tale is the youngest child, or is specifically called "the dummy" or "Simpleton" at the start of the story, this is the fairy tale's rendering of the original debilitated state of the ego as it begins its struggle to cope with the inner world of drives and with the difficult problems which the outer world presents. The id, not unlike how psychoanalysis views it, is frequently depicted in the form of some animal, standing for our animal nature. Fairy tale animals come in two forms... Note: The above comments about Fairy Tales are from pages 74 - 75 of "The Uses of Enchantment: The meaning and importance of Fairy Tales" ©1975 ISBN 0-394-72265-5. |
| ALL-OR-NOTHING
THINKING To "see both sides" of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.— Idries Shad, from his Reflections |
If we emotionally "see" (or respond to) the world in/with contrasts while in childhood and then later call such emotive characteristics by the names of dichotomies, dualities, or opposites; it's not that we can make a large listing of twos to go along with a list of threes, but that there are no examples with which to build lengthy lists of larger quantities. Hence, we are paying witness to a conservation effect seen in our anatomy and ideologies, suggesting an environmental imposition.
Here are a few other two-patterned examples taken from an advanced psychology class that denotes an inclination to organize perceptions into contrasts:
HISTORY AND SYSTEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY,
DR. WARREN R. STREET
- Conscious Mentalism - Unconscious mentalism: Emphasis on awareness of mental structure or activity vs. unawareness; coincides with rationalism - irrationalism dichotomy.
- Behaviorism - Mentalism: Proper study of psychological focuses on objective content or on subjective content.
- Determinism - Indeterminism - Nondeterminism: Human events completely determined by antecedents and explicable vs. determined but incompletely explicable vs. not determined.
- Empiricism - Rationalism: Major, if not exclusive source of knowledge is experience vs. reason.
- Functionalism - Structuralism: Psychology should describe adaptive activities vs. elemental classes and contents.
- Mechanism - Vitalism: Activities of living beings completely explicable by physiochemical constituents vs. not so explicable.
- Molecularism - Molarism Small versus Large units of behavior.
- Monism - Dualism: Fundamental principle or entity in universe is of one kind vs. two kinds, mind and matter.
- Nativism - Empiricism: Thought and behavior emerges from innate structures vs. emerges from experiences.
- Subjectivism - Objectivism: Introspective accounts of experience do, or do not, constitute valid data.
- Universalism - Relativism: Is the world an objective entity, the same for everyone, or is it relative to the perceiver?
Let us add one "two" example to the list: Nature - Nurture.
The foregoing is a marvelous list but there are other examples in the outline. The outline even provides some patterns-of-three examples and may well introduce you to the "Third Force" topic. However, it doesn't provide a reference to the Monism (one) - Dualism (two) - Pluralism (three) pattern of overall thinking, which is succinctly described as the one - two - many pattern. And in particular, it does not provide you with a similar list of trichotomies... since "threes" are very much a part of our historical thinking. The students taking the professor's class are being deprived of a very real thinking pattern, particularly when it is quite pervasive and documented by cultural anthropologists. The students should be up in arms and protest against such a discrepancy in their education. It's time for a Revolution!
Granted that many readers may want to suggest that a third, middle ground be added as a viable consideration, it is necessary to note that not only is there a persistence of dichotomies, but a persistence in the usage thereof. Why isn't there a persistence in the usage of a three-patterned array though many of us recognize the existence thereof? Is it that the brains of students, as a new generation, have a brain developing towards a greater usage of three-patterned observations but instructors, as an older generation have an "old" brain which is most comfortable teaching old brain information... like a stagecoach maker who would (assumedly) be more comfortable making stage-coaches than working on an assembly line putting a Cadillac together? Perhaps the field of Psychology (and other subject areas) needs to be made in another image... such as a trichotomous one which can encapsulate dichotomies because a focus on dichotomies has difficulty in doing so. The two-patterned attributes of the right hemisphere changes the existing three-patterned structures of the left hemisphere attributes into patterns-of-two, while the three-patterned attributes of the left hemisphere more easily appreciate the two-patterned structure of the right hemisphere attributes without needing to impose its "three"-value on them.
In order to better appreciate what is being presented here, there is a need for reciting a correlation between the human brain's development from the Reptilian Brain, to the Old (right hemisphere) Mammalian Brain, to the (left Hemisphere) Neo-Mammalian Brain. In order to bring to light the "2" (dichotomization) and "3" (trichotomization) references, it is necessary to list some of the attributes of these different brain structures:
Note: Much of the brain illustration shown above was adapted from page 106 of Dean Falk's book entitled "Brain Dance," 1992.
An overall 3-patterned formula to brain hemisphere attributes can be recognized:
When we look at the assigned culturally recognized attributes of the brain, we can see a distinct (over-lapping) 1-patterned, or 2-patterned, or 3-patterned arrangement. (Reminder: when a person gets a stroke in the left hemisphere of the brain it affects the right side of the body, and vice-versa. Thus, the "2" and "3" patterns will appear to be reversed. )
| Left
Hemisphere (Predominantly 3-patterned) Math: Associative~ Commutative~ Distributive A2 + B2 = C2 ~ Sine- Cosine- Tangent 1st# (+ - X /) 2nd# = 3rd# Logic: Thesis ~ Antithesis ~ Synthesis Indulgence ~ "Middle Way" ~ Asceticism Major Premise ~ Minor Premise ~ Conclusion Time Sequencing: Seconds~ Minutes~ Hours Past ~ Present ~ Future Day~ Week~ Month Language - Speech - Grammar: Subject~ Object~ Verb Consonants ~ Vowels ~ Supra-segmentals Period ~ Question Mark ~ Exclamation point Right Body Side: Tri-cuspid heart valve Three-lobed lung |
Right
Hemisphere (Predominantly 2-patterned) Holistic: Macro versus Micro Whole versus Part Inner versus Outer Music: Major Scale vs Minor Scale Loud versus Soft (Quiet) Consonance vs Dissonance Visuospatial: (Art) Background vs Foreground Light vs Dark (Contrasts) 1 Dimension vs 2 Dimensions Emotions: Pain versus Pleasure Positive vs Negative Love versus Hate Left Body Side: Bi-cuspid heart valve Two-lobed lung |
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(Reptilian) (Predominantly 1-Patterned) (Self)-Preservation~ (Self)-Procreation~ (Self)-Preeminence | |
 The correlations of two and three being made on this page are not typical considerations. However, I did come across a single reference concerning the tricuspid valve: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/855255174.An.r.html | |
 In recognizing that the left lung is smaller than the right lung (which provides room for the heart), let us conjecture that this is due to some past earlier developmental sequence just as we find the 1-layer, 2-layer, 3-layer sequential development of the 3 primordial germ layers (Ectoderm- Mesoderm- Endoderm) in primitive to more complex organisms. Hence, difference in size (dimorphism) as well as a two/ or three/ prominence may provide another link towards understanding developmental processes. Does this mean that the recurring smallness of the female to the male in many species indicates that females came before the male in terms of species-specific evolutionary development during particular environmental circumstances? | |
Some additional two-patterned references found in music:
- Tension and Release
- Staccato and Legato
- Slow and Fast
- Ascending and Descending
Source: Threesological page 6
As already mentioned, there are instances where an overlapping structure can occur, thus obscuring a singular reference to either a "2" or a "3" expression. Hence, some researchers/thinkers like Marx may rely on both or either forms of structuring to represent their ideas. However, the point to be made is that there is a recognizable, numerically identifiable difference being exhibited not only by Marx, but numerous others. While some may not use itemized specifics or centralize their thinking on a particular pattern recurrence, those that do use the same patterns. This does not mean that other patterns can not be referenced, it's just that the "2" and "3" formulas are predominant... and suggest an underlying brain/cognitive preference for such structures. In other words, neither Marx nor Hegel developed ideas revolving around a pattern such as "17", or "5", or "123", etc. The recurrence of using dichotomies and trichotomies, even though examples may be culled from history indicating alternative perspectives such as the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile", four directions concept (North-South-East-West), etc...; a short list of three-patterned ideas may be of value in helping to recognized just how prevalent a "three" orientation has been, even if such is unrecognized, dismissed as a coincidence, or ignored because the usage of a numerical label inclines one to think in terms of numerology.
And yes, we are well aware of such "twos" as binary star groups and the binary code of computers based on the on/of switching mechanism related to electrical circuitry. The point is, the conservation effect remains... and may well be undergoing an alteration due to the ongoing decay of planetary processes; making a discussion concerning Peace and the type of government we should have, important topics.
Interestingly, when we move away from the "emotion-centered" orientation of psychology (though the word "psychology" means the study of the mind), and turn towards the "mind-centered" topic of philosophy (meaning love of wisdom), we find an increased frequency of three-patterned organizational references though the ideas of duality play a part within the context thereof:
| St. Augustine's Philosophy: | Memory ~ Understanding ~ Will |
| Comte's Philosophy: | Great Being ~ Great Medium ~ Great Fetish |
| Hegel's 3 Spirits: | Subjective Spirit ~ 0bjective Spirit ~ Absolute Spirit |
| Plotinu's Philosophy: | One ~ One Many ~ One and Many |
| Aristotle's 3 Unities: | Unity of Action ~ Unity of Time ~ Unity of Place |
| Sir F. Bacon's 3 Tables: | Presence ~ Absence ~ Degree |
| Thomas Hobbes's 3 Fields: | Physics ~ Moral Philosophy ~ Civil Philosophy |
| Immanuel Kant's 3 Critiques: | Pure Reason ~ Practical Reason ~ Judgment |
| Averroes's 3 Commentaries: | Little ~ Middle ~ Great |
| Karl Marx's 3 isms: | Communism ~ Socialism ~ Capitalism |
| Woodrow Wilson's 3 isms: | Colonialism ~ Racism ~ Anti-Communism |
| Hippocrates's Mind Disorders: | Mania ~ Melancholia ~ Phrenitis |
| Emile Durkeim's 3 Suicides: | Egoistic ~ Altruistic ~ Anomic |
| D. Liesman's 3 Social Characters: | Tradition-directed ~ Inner-directed ~ Other-directed |
| Erich Fromm's 3 Symbols: | The Conventional ~ The Accidental ~ The Universal |
| Pythagoras's "fusion" idea: | Monarchy ~ Oligarchy ~ Democracy (into harmonic whole) |
| M.L. King Jr.'s "Middle Road": | Acquiescence ~ Nonviolence ~ Violence |
| Kierkegaard's 3 Stages: | Aesthetic ~ Ethical ~ Religious |
| Husserl's 3 Reductions: | Phenomenological ~ Eidetic ~ Religious |
| St. Augustine's 3 Laws: | Divine Law ~ Natural Law ~ Temporal, or positive Law |
| Witness Stand "Laws": | Tell the Truth ~ The whole Truth ~ Nothing but the Truth |
| Titus Carus's 3 Ages: | Stone Age ~ Bronze Age ~ Iron Age |
| Feuerbach's 3 Thoughts: | God, 1st Thought ~ Reason, 2nd ~ Man, 3rd |
| Magnus's 3 Universals: | Ante Rem ~ In Rem ~ Post Rem |
| Max Weber's 3 Authorities: | Traditional ~ Charismatic ~ Legal-rational |
| F. de Sausure's 3 "Signs": | Sign ~ Signified ~ Signifier |
| Charles Pierces 3 "Signs": | Qualisign ~ Sinsign (token) ~ Legisign |
| John Keynes's 3 Eras: | Scarcity ~ Abundance ~ Stabilization |
| George Mead's 3 Distinctions: | Self ~ I ~ Me |
| Thrasher's 3-group Gangs: | Inner Circle ~ Rank & File ~ Fringers |
| Abe Lincoln's 3-For-All: | Of the People ~ By the People ~ For the People |
| Jesus Christ's 3 Praises: | In the name of the Father ~ Son ~ Holy Spirit |
| Samuel Clemmons' 3 lies: (Mark Twain) |
Lies ~ Damned Lies ~ Statistics |
| Sociology's 3 traditional Social Classes: | Lower- Middle- Upper |
| Georges Dumezil's Indo-European Socio-religious categories: | Priestly/Regal class Nobility/Warrior class Artisan/Craftsman/Agriculturist worker Class |
Table initially originated from: 3s Poster column 5
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Thesis ~ Antithesis ~ Synthesis Indulgence ~ "Middle Way" ~ Asceticism Major Premise ~ Minor Premise ~ Conclusion Contradiction ~ Excluded Middle ~ Identity Principal | ||
| "God-ology": Omnipresent Omnipotent Omniscient |
"Metaphysics-ology": What is real How change comes What is mind |
Marxian "Dialectology": Unity of opposites Quantity & quality Negation of negation |
| Epistemology: How we know What is truth What is mind |
Axiology: Nature of good Nature of beautiful Nature of religious |
Ontology: Quality (1st-ness) Relation (2nd-ness) Representation (3rd-ness) |
3 times the fool: You can fool some people some of the time - Some people all the time - But not all people all the time.
3 traditional syllogism forms: Categorical - Hypothetical - Disjunctive
3-patterned basic adult syllogism: All ravens are black - Jack is a raven - Therefore, Jack is black.
3-patterned basic child syllogism: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear - Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair - Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy was he?
Date of Origination: Thursday, 15-Dec-2016... 07:41 AM
Date of initial posting: Thursday, 15-Dec-2016... 08:49 AM
Updated posting: Saturday, 31-March-2018... 11:30 AM