Part 01:
Everyday Practical & Engineering Dialectics Series.
Amber Traffic Lights.
Dear Reader,
It
is my pleasure,
and my honor, as an elected member
of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.]
General Council, and
as a voting member of F.E.D., to share, with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, Foundation discourses on key elements of Seldonian Dialectical Theory.
The 1st text in
this new such
series is posted below
[Some E.D.
standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, by the editors
of the F.E.D. Special Council for the Encyclopedia,
to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s
discourse].
Seldon
–
“Many modern humans, blindly devoted to formal logic,
to “logical” two-valued-ness, to the ‘Boolean «mentalité»’
– which, I am so happy to be able to say, did not completely
possess George Boole himself – would have held, as their knee-jerk response,
that only a two-color color-code is needed for traffic control, red and green, red for “STOP”, and green for “GO”.”
“But experience showed, early
on, that just red
and green, just two
signals, two meanings, two alternative symbolic, color-coded instructions to
drivers was impractical – nay, disastrous, as it would have caused countless bloody collisions, maimings, and deaths.”
“A third instruction, a third alternative, a «tertium quid» – that of the amber-colored traffic signal lights – was
needed, to give a gap, a positive pause, between GO and STOP.”
“But
if this category of amber traffic signal lights is the ‘uni-category’, the ‘dialectical
synthesis category’, that resolves the practical hazards of the STOP/GO
opposition and radical diremption, what is the exact nature and character of
this third category? It appears to me to
be a “complex unity” [cf. Hegel] of the red lights category and the green
lights category, but one of a special species.
The amber lights category is a kind of compromise between the semantic characteristics of the red lights category and the semantic characteristics of the green
lights category.”
The
amber lights category is to signal drivers to slow with caution, to pause, even
to stop, if needed – in partial keeping with the red lights signals’ meaning,
but the amber lights category is also to signal to pass through the intersection
if it is still safe to do so, or too late to completely stop at the velocity
being traveled when the amber light first flashed on – in partial keeping with
the green lights signals’ meaning”
“Like
the quasi-Boolean value ½, half-way between the Boolean value 0
and the Boolean value 1 in the closed unit interval – and the solution
to the Boolean ‘contradiction equation’ t
= not-t, i.e., in Boolean algebra terms, the
equation t = (1 – t), which we
have discussed elsewhere, the amber light bulbs are literally “between” the red
and the green, and the semantics of the amber signal/symbol is also a [biased] ‘‘‘mean’’’
between the traffic signal semantics of red-ness and/versus green-ness.”
“Many
individual dialectics – but by no means all dialectics – exhibit this average-like
or mean-like, or median-like character; especially triadic dialectics, with no discerned
meaning for ontological categories beyond the first three.”
“This character is reminiscent of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, of his [implicitly dialectical] doctrine of the [biased] “golden” mean, the optimum between the extremes of human behavior. But other species of categorial dialectic include those with another kind of ‘uni-category’, a ‘‘‘transcendent’’’, or ‘‘‘transformational’’’ synthesis category, in which the hybrid «monads» of the ‘dialectical synthesis category’ open upward into a realm beyond the ken of the meanings of either one of the ‘dialectical antithesis’ categories-pair.”
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free
of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights – specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books
published by
the F.E.D. Press, see:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];
Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;
Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;
Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.
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