Strangeness - and how to deal with it
Fitting the Strange and Unknown into Triplex Unity Theory
An inescapable aspect of Human nature is man's desire to understand his environment. This need to understand his surroundings gives him the illusion that he can thus control things in this environment. As we grow from child to adult, our world view expands and becomes more complex as we take in more and more information and process it. For the sake of our own sanity, our world view has to be coherent, consistent, and contiguous. The mental picture we make of reality is like fabric that we add to, thread by thread. The greater our piece of fabric, the more we know and understand, but also the more we think we are able to control things within our environment. All the elements within our worldview fit together in a some coherent, consistent and contiguous way like the threads of a fabric.
Our ability to plan, execute and control objects and events in our surroundings requires that we know all the elements within that environment. We construct plans that require certain known elements to take part in, or influence the outcome of our plans. Our plans also involve known processes that affect these known elements of our environment, and this is how we can predict outcomes from which we can derive benefit.
Therefore, when we encounter information that does not fit in our world view, or when there is information that we are not aware of but it is impinging upon our worldview, we tend to regard this information as "strange". Humans are scared and suspicious of the unknown, because it represents something outside our boundary of control. When things are outside our ability to control them, they have a tendency to upset our plans, life becomes less predictable, and therefore we begin to lose our grip over reality.
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It is in our best interests then, that we develop some form of system that can help understand, account for, and hopefully allow us to control this unknown. For example, let's say that we discover a piece of information that seems out of place within the system that we are analysing. In Diagram 1 at left, we see a hypothetical knowledge framework, where a Triplicity and its attendant sub-Triplicities have been identified. However, during our analysis, we uncover items of information that appear to be irrelevant to the subject we are examining. It seems that we cannot fit it to any of the three polarities that we know, nor can it connected to any of the others through processes that we are familiar with. This information then becomes a 4th entity that does not fit within the three-fold organisation of information that we have created, and therefore it appears to upset our Triplex view of the world. How do we deal with this piece of strange information? (see Diagram 2.) The answer is simple. We continue to apply Triplex Unity Theory to the problem. As this information represents a 4th polarity within our sub-Triplicity, we then need to create another Triplicity which includes all the items we are dealing with, in a logical, coherent way. Firstly, we establish the Triplicity of the subject area we are analysing as a polarity of its own. As we know, with any Subject Area, there is always knowledge or information that is not relevent to it, so next, we consider that as being the opposing polarity to the knowledge at hand within the Triplicity. In this case, we label this information "All other information". |
Diagram 3
The
result is that we are now left with a third polarity, that of the information
which originally appeared out of place (see diagram 3). This
occupies its own polarity, giving us now a new Triplicity. It has elements
of both the others...the out of place information is present in the
system we are analysing, as is the information that is relevant to our
system. It also should not be there, as is all the other information
not related to the system we are analysing. However it bridges the two
polar opposites by sharing elements of both.
As analysts, we can now deal with the strange, out of place information, by fitting in it proper context in relation to the system we are studying, and all other information not relevent to our system. By being able to isolate it, and define it, we now have a means to analyse the strange information, and discover what its true meaning is.
Without such a theoretical system with which we could examine these sorts of relationships between relevant and irrelevant information, we would not have any tools available to us to explain the presence of strange, out of place information.
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This an example of how we can use Triplex Unity Theory to reduce an apparently complicated concept into a more simple framework, and then gain an understanding of this system by relating it to other analogous systems whose frameworks we do understand.
- July 23, 2006