Part 01: Everyday Practical & Engineering Dialectics Series. Amber Traffic Lights.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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:

 

www.dialectics.info

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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