BINARY or NOT?

Abstraction of everything into a binary

Is it the right way to interpret the world?

Do you remember the KISS principle - Keep IT Simple, Stupid! The summary of principles such as these is to keep things simple. We humans like simpler things - they are easy to consume. Thus, it is always beneficial to simplify things, when it comes to communications. If we get a picture of a hundred data points, it is amazing if we can summarize it to let’s say 3 key points. When we present, that idea dominates as well - simplified information will communicate better, and thus will travel further. Thus, we get into the habit of simplifying everything… at least we pretend to try. That is because, simplifying is not easy, but once done properly, it has great value in communications, which also includes our personal understanding.

The simplest of the simple form of existence is binary - one data point, two states. If anything needs to have a variable state, there is nothing simpler than binary. Thus, be it for communications of for our personal understanding, binary appears to be a form that we really attract towards - a person is either a hero or a villain, something is either there, or not there, it is either bright or dark, either the process worked or it didn’t work. To be honest, the in-between states do exist, but we find it complex to deal with them. And when the number of potential intermediary states increase, we (the average people) find it very difficult to deal with it.

Binary tends to win because it is not only easy to communicate, but also to process - it is easy from a human perspective to receive binary and make decisions based on the data received. Binary is also easy for machines to process - it fits into the “if-then-else” model very well. And not only of higher-level programming, binary is the foundation of modern digital technology. All this being said, this binary is very different as compared to the binary I mentioned above - the KISS binary is abstraction, the digital binary is deconstruction (& subsequent reconstruction). The first gets to the simpler form by merging details, the second breaks details and processes details in smaller levels of binary decisions.

All that being said, the universe is not binary - it may be possible to deconstruct it into a sequence of binaries, but it cannot be abstracted into a binary. There always is a bit of light even on the darkest of days, glass is very rarely half empty or half full, and people are not always absolute hero or absolute villain. If we ignore this fact we would end up over-simplifying our interpretation of the universe, the world and its workings. That would lead us to have an incorrect model of the world, resulting in wrong decisions and missed opportunities.

Reality will always be a shade of gray - for our simplistic minds we may simplify that to binary - but beware of what we lose in that process