Wednesday, 15 February 2012

2, or 1?

I am fasicnated by the number 2. It fascinates me because everythign I see in the world is based on two seemingly (The "seemingly" will be explained soon) opposing forces. Good and bad, Nice and Mean, Hard and Soft, Black and White, etc...
I always thought it was fascinating because we could also have been born into a world where 3 is the most important number. A world which we are incapable of imagining.
But with deeper thought, it can be seen that The number 2 is actually not so random. Because the forces mentioned above, Hard and soft, black and white, etc. are only examples of one force. Very hard, and very not hard. very hard= hard very not hard =soft. So in essence we are just considering one factor, hardness and quantifying it. In the same way, the is no such thing as bad, no such thing as black or white. Black and white depends ont he context. With light, darkness is the absence of light. With paint, White is the absence of colour, and black is the combination of all colours.
So, in this sense, The number 1, is more important than 2. If 1 is more important, then I think it is more natural since it means we need nto imagine a world of different possibilities.
This is important because then when we rationalize we can imagine a world where there is one good thing which is where we should be headed rather than everything being an equilibrium where we somehow have to draw a line on the equilibrium. For example, justice and Personal happiness can make an equilibrium. By striving to make oursleves happy in all circumstances we are not being just, and are therefore on one end of our imaginary equilibrium. On the other hand, by being just and fair to everyone we are not satisfying oursleves to our full extent. This is all similar with individual and collective justice. Rather than thinking about everythign as an equilibrium, what if we think of 1 as the most important number.
What complicates things further is that Rather than just having one equation, we can add other equations in and create relations.Everything we have can be both good and bad depending on the circumstances in which they are placed. Art can be good if it is used in a beneficial way, to benefit society, but if it is used in obscene ways, then there is no use to it. In the same sense, Passion is both good and bad. Passion is good if we direct it towards a good cause, such as passionate to obtain knowledge, but being passionate for vain or idle imaginings is useless again. In this way it is possible to relate one rleation with another.

I woudl actually find it extremely interesting if we could somehow find eveyrthing in the world and relate it to everythign else. I think humans are only capable of doing the most simple mathematical processes in their head such as addition and subtraction. Or comparison. We make lists to compare pros and cons of certain things to  see which is better, but it would be extremely interesting if we could find similar processes for logic and be able to construct ideas based on logic. Tautology  and construction of logically valid formulae. If we could construct logic, then we would be able to find new ways of identifying more complex ideas and eventually find similarities. I think learning is based on two main concepts, obtaining a lot of "dots" and then eventually connecting the "dots", when we connect the dots we find so many new things. And by reviewing everything we do we connect the dots in different ways, if you are good at connecting dots in different ways, you can be called an artist.

2 comments:

  1. I believe in dualism.

    When you said: 'what if we think of 1 as the most important number.', do you mean to think of a win-win solution? That's potentially possible because the world has so many different people that many people can compliment one another and be of a win-win partnership. However, it's not realistic because we can't always just deal with people who compliment us. Sometimes, we have to deal with people who have similar wants to us and only one of us can get it.

    Have you been reading up on philosophy recently?

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  2. I mean in a more basic sense, everything in the world being comprised of either one or two things.
    I have been reading it. You have too eh?

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