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0428 - Symmetry and calibration. - 2025.12.15 |
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Comment: Those of you who watch my weekly streams (you know I stream every Monday on Picarto, right?) know that one of my regular puzzles is Metazooa, a game where you have to guess the day's animal by exploring the tree of life. One thing you have to know about playing Metazooa is that the first bifurcation of the tree is bilateral symmetry, the thing that separates jellyfish and sponges from praying mantises and us. Reflection is an important way in which humans understand reality, one thing being both similar to and opposite of another allows us to analyze their essential natures. Up and down, left and right, light and dark, kiki and bouba... the world is full of dichotomies, and they almost always fall into one of two categories. The first category is a presence or absence of a thing. Hot and cold is a good example: you have more or less molecular agitation, to gain one is to lose the other. Any dichotomy of this sort always has extreme ends and middle stages, you cannot have "hot" and "cold" without "really really hot" and "lukewarm". The second category is two unrelated things that we tend to think of as being related: cat and dog, salt and pepper, chocolate and vanilla. These dichotomies also always have options beyond the binary, either "both" or "neither" or "secret third thing" (lizard, paprika, strawberry). What dichotomies exist in your reality, and which type of dichotomy are they? Male or female, masculine or feminine, right-wing or left-wing, rich or poor, peace or conflict... each of them is either "presence or absence of a thing" (therefore allowing for extremes and middles), or "two things thought of as opposites" (therefore allowing for boths, neithers, and secret thirds). Determining which type of dichotomy a dichotomy is always helps us see options we might not have known we had, it's a valuable cognitive exercise. Fortunately for Lee and for the robot they're piloting, they've only got two hands to work with, and the principle of reflection is allowing them to calibrate their perceptions, which, in turn, will allow them to see a whole world of objects around them that are not symmetrical. It's a good step one. I wonder what step two is going to be. |
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