Reciprocals

Gray Scale

Anytime someone asks a person if that person believes in absolutes, he or she is referring to maxims. Maxims are constants that never change no matter their application, and are absolute by that definition.

There is a simple allegory in philosophy that illustrates what a maxim is. It starts by presenting every size of rock as either the smallest rock, the largest rock or anything in between. The absolutes smallest and largest appear to be maximum possibilities since they are the extremes, but consider the largest rock possible, then consider a rock larger than that. Because of the limits imposed by being an extreme, the definitive largest and smallest can always be trumped by an even larger or smaller, thereby not being absolute.

What IS an absolute is the comparison of two sizes, such as ‘smaller’ or ‘larger.’ No matter how large a rock you can imagine, there is always a larger one than that. The same can be said for the smallest rock imaginable being trumped by a smaller rock. So the real maxims in the rock allegory are ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ since they remain constant and absolute.

The maxims ‘smaller’ and ‘larger’ don’t only work for expanding the possibilities of sizes. This maxim applies across the entire spectrum between ‘smallest’ and ‘largest.’ From the point’s perspective, there are an infinite amount of rocks that are SMALLER than it and an infinite amount of rocks that are LARGER than it. The maxims now abstractly represent what the spectrum looks like to the point. Vice versa, the maxims now abstractly represent where the point is on the spectrum.

Maxims can be used to show a system, in this case the spectrum of every size rock, which is objective, or they can be used to show a perspective, in this case the position of the point on the spectrum, which is subjective.

Maxims may be the building blocks of both subjectivity (perspective) and objectivity (system).

Smallest<- - ———====>|Point|<- - ———====>Largest

A well-rounded argument

A well-rounded argument is comprised of three forms of argument:

Ethos- the argument of ethics.

Logos- the argument of logic.

Pathos- the argument of passion.

When using the ethos form of arguing, the arguer an provides expert opinion because this form of argument requires facts and technical knowledge to defend why his or her side is ethical. What the argument is.

When using the logos form of arguing, the arguer provides a reasoning that outlines the proposition, opposition and how they differ in order to defend why his or her side is logical. What the argument means.

When using the pathos form of arguing, the arguer facilitates empathy in support of his or her argument in order to defend why his or her side is important. What the argument means to you.

Each of these arguing styles can be self justified while contradicting the other two styles. This means that an argument in which one side is arguing with one method while the other is arguing with a different method might never come to a resolution because there may not be any common ground. This makes for a failed argument.

In order for an argument to be successful, or resolved, both sides of the argument must be fully formed. To fully form an argument, an arguer must use all three forms of argument. The arguer would have to prepare in advance by doing research or providing an expert witness, deduce all the possible arguments for and against each side, and finally apply all the knowledge obtained through preparation towards a passionate and relevant conclusion.

If all three argument forms are utilized properly, you’ll have credible evidence supporting sound reasoning of how the argument topic relates to the audience.

Simple observations

Jealousy

Jealousy is a form of paranoia that incorporates envy. As a person who is jealous, by playing into jealousy and acting on it, one might alleviate the paranoia but only at the cost of a more desperate and vague paranoia through jealousy. Ultimately by acting on jealousy, one only feeds it. In order to eliminate jealousy, one must consider the validity of it’s narrative.

Here is a simple example of a graduation from modest jealousy to extreme jealousy:

“They are making love.”

• Present tense
• Claiming the tangible

“They were making love.”

• Past tense
• Claiming the abstract

“They will make love.”

• Future tense
• Claiming the hypothetical

Compassion and Calculation

There are two types of people: compassionate and calculative.

Compassionate people might know there are rules but don’t really care about following them, making those people more spontaneous. Calculative people observe the rules and expect everyone else to do the same, making those people more consistent.

Compassionate people are influenced more by their emotions than their reason and always want emotional satisfaction. Calculative people are more influenced by the patterns displayed in situations and always want to better understand them and define them.

Compassionate people are more relationship oriented, enjoying the affection from close bonds. Calculative people are more enlightenment oriented, whether that be social constructs, philosophy, or other doctrines.

Compassionate people usually gain happiness through pleasing others. Calculative people usually gain happiness through pleasing his or her self.

A compassionate person would not be able to earnestly read this whole post. A calculative person would write it.

Some One-liners

-Every dimension is a different argument, metaphorically and literally.

You can’t argue quality with a statement on quantity because then you will still have not addressed quality.

-Direction is merely an expression of perspective.

Left, right, up and down are expressions of where we are, the same way yelling, laughing and crying are expressions of how we are. Directions are NOT objective tools of navigation.

A utilitarian boasts of success. A deontologist boasts of integrity.

-Utilitarianism is the focus of obtaining an end result by ignoring standard practices up to the end result. Deontology is the focus of standard practices up to the end result by ignoring the obtainment of the end result.

In theory, it’s best to be idealistic. In practice, it’s best to be pragmatic.

-Theoretical hypotheticals rely on the absence of temporal limitations, allowing the goal of theory to be obtaining idealism. Practical hypotheticals are bound by temporal limitations, forcing the goal of practice to be obtaining pragmatism.

In order for a person or society to truly change for the better, they must either face a desperation to survive or a desperation to thrive.

-Desperation is used in this case to mean the realization of a need. When desperation is applied to survival, it implies realizing the need to live. When desperation is applied to thriving, it implies realizing the need to advance.

Ethi-nomics

To begin, excuse me for my use of certain words in this post. I will always attempt to use the most proper vocabulary available, but occasionally I am deprived of a word that expresses my meaning. In these cases I use words meant to strike the most appropriate conceptual cord in order to convey the message as completely as possible. “Identity” in this post refers to what I feel is the constant in each individual. Some indirect references to it would be ‘personality’ and ‘soul.’ It incorporates the perspective of the individual and his or her expression from that perspective, both-in relation to all of time and space.

-I will make an introductory post in the future that will more comprehensively explain the above notion of ‘identity.’ For now, read my post Cube People.

Imagine you are walking down the sidewalk at night on a deserted street and a stranger whose features you can’t make out approaches you. Your natural reaction might heighten your senses and your heart might beat faster.

The stranger attacks you, forces you to the ground and holds a weapon to your face.

The stranger says, “Give me your money or I’ll kill you.”

This is where you have two choices: you give the stranger your money or you deny the stranger your money.

There are two defined outcomes based on the choices: you will die or you will live.

You don’t really know what the stranger will do to you if you don’t give up your money, and you don’t need the money yourself for any specific purpose.

You also don’t want to give the money you earned to a stranger who at that moment deserves it less than anyone else.

So, you could either live by giving up your money, thereby submitting yourself to the stranger’s existence and discarding your own existence temporarily; or, you could die by denying the stranger your money, thereby enforcing your own existence through confronting the stranger’s.

This hypothetical situation is ignoring the other two possibilities: the stranger could have no intention of killing you if you deny the stranger your money, or the stranger may intend on killing you even if you give the stranger your money.

In this situation, it is pragmatic to give up the money so that you can live your life beyond the robbery, so assume you make this choice. In doing so, you momentarily kill your own identity for the sake of surviving. By surviving, I mean the organs that make up your body do not expire. You as the person you are dies; everything that makes up your identity- your personality, your perspective on reality, all of it dies when you become subservient to the stranger. Your new identity becomes associated to the stranger instead of yourself, even if for the brief amount of time the two of you interact.

Because of your choice to give up your money you invariably are the one who kills you, not the stranger. Subjectively speaking, this circumstance is the most unfortunate one because what happens is the stranger is only guilty for triggering you to kill yourself and you end up being the one who is guilty for consciously killing yourself.

Under your new identity as the hostage, your main purpose is to appease the stranger’s wish to have your money. The stranger doesn’t kill you, body or identity. And the stranger’s act of taking the money is consensual under your new identity under the stranger’s existence.

After the stranger leaves and you reflect on the experience, you have to reassemble the identity you just killed in the face of death. This is an act of reanimation though, not revival, so your final identity, which you believe to be your original one, is a disfigured version of your original identity.

The idealistic choice to deny the stranger your money leaves you exposed to the reality that you will be killed by the stranger as a result. You will have kept your identity alive, albeit at the death of your body.

When your body dies, all metaphysics aside, your identity will die with it. This means that, like in the other example, your identity will die by the end of the hypothetical.

The difference between this choice and the other choice is that you are not at fault for the cessation of your identity. In this situation you will have done everything you could to be you, to manifest YOUR existence, and as a result when the stranger kills you with the weapon, the stranger will actually be guilty of killing you, body and identity.

Instead of a blend of retroactive ethical economics as in the first available choice, the second available choice expresses proactive ethical economics of the two different identities confronting each other and manifesting themselves to the greatest of their abilities.

There is Up, then there is Up

When you drop a ball in front of a mirror, its reflection moves up, not down.

I say this under the same pretext as when we say that in our reflection left is right and right is left.

If you were to stand in front of a mirror and hold out your left hand, it would look like your reflection is holding out its right hand. This is because the orientation of reflections in a mirror are exactly the same as the orientation of their original counterparts except that everything is reversed along the z-axis.

Huh?

If a mirror were a reflective piece of graph paper with the x-axis running across the bottom (horizontal axis) and the y-axis running up the side (vertical axis), then the z-axis would stick directly out of the mirror. When everything is reversed along the z-axis, it means that the z values are reversed from positive to negative while the x and y values remain the same.

Assuming the distance from the mirror would be a positive amount, the perceived distance from the mirror in the reflection would be a negative amount. So you can only be a positive distance from the mirror and your reflection can only be a negative perceived distance from it.

Now, imagine that the mirror is still a reflective piece of graph paper, except instead of having the zero point of the x and y axis at the bottom corner of the mirror, it will be right between your eyes. This way, everything to your left will be represented by negative x values along the x-axis, and everything to your right will be represented by positive x values along the x-axis. Also, everything downwards will be represented by negative y values along the y-axis, and everything upwards will be represented by positive y values.

Hopefully I haven’t confused you in describing the placement of the graph. The graph is still the mirror, so the z-axis still extends out from it, and the mirror surface still represents point 0 on the z-axis (no distance away from the mirror, and no perceived distance within the reflection). The only thing that has changed is that no matter where you are, down is considered negative and up is considered positive, left is considered negative and right is considered positive. So the left side of your body is in the negative half the the x-axis, vice versa for your right side, and only your forehead and the top of your head are in the positive portion of the y-axis while the rest of your body is in the negative portion of the y-axis (unless you’re so excited about this discussion that you’ve flung your arms above your head).

Why is it so important to use graph terms to explain why a falling ball’s reflection moves up, not down? Assuming you know the basics of how a graph works then it will help you understand my argument by simply reading this post.

Back to introducing you to your reflection-

Your left appears to be your reflection’s right just as your reflection’s left appears to be your right. This would mean that since your reflection’s right hand is to the left of you, your reflection’s right hand has a negative x value (remember, to you everything to your left is considered negative). This reversal of value between you and your reflection is a direct result of reversing the orientation of everything along the z-axis into negative values (reflect= reverse z value from + to -).

Your perspective is associated to the positive z value and your reflection is associated to the negative z value.

In this regard, yourt left (positive) is the same as your reflection’s right (negative) and vice versa for your right. So positive left = -right and +right = -left.

Since it’s now understood how the orientation on the z-axis determines our understanding of the two directions on the x-axis (left and right), what about our understanding of the two directions on the y-axis?

Normally we would associate up as one direction on the y-axis and down as the other, the same way that left and right oppose each other on the x-axis.

Since left is the negative right and right the negative left, isn’t it safe to say that up is the negative down, and down the negative up? No?

Maybe because we grew up surrounded by gravity our entire lives we consider up to always point the same way.

As planet dwellers, we associate the upward/downward directions to gravitational force. Whichever direction points to the gravitational pull is considered down. The direction pointing directly away from the gravitational pull is considered up.

These two rules are applied at every angle across the globe, exemplifying the subjection of the definitions of the words up and down. A person on the north pole would describe up as the opposite direction as a person on the south pole would, even though both would be using the same tool to come to their conclusions, gravity.

Since the current definition of up, the direction pointing away from the gravitational pull, is inconsistent, let’s consider a new definition of up.

Up can be defined as the direction in which y-values increase.

By this definition, up is no longer dependent on the location of the observer.

But how do we know in-which direction y-values increase? I might say y-values increase in parallel to the direction from the south pole to the north pole whereas you might say y-values increase the higher one goes, as in elevation.

And yet another argument is that there is no such thing as up since the universe is adirectional, as in, it is without direction. Based on this argument, there may not be a universal up, and ‘up’ may be nothing more than an expression defined by the observer, like forward.

So the y-axis would have to be defined in order to determine which direction is up, and the use of that y-axis would only apply within the argument. With each context, up is considered only an expression, making it consistent through all applications.

So, if you were to rub your finger across the surface of a mirror to the right, your reflection would be rubbing its finger across the mirror to its left, +right = -left. And if you rub your finger upwards across the mirror +up, then your reflection would be rubbing its finger -down, +up = -down, (+down = -up).

A person on the north pole will not contradict the person on the south pole in the argument of which way is up as long as they both agree on which direction y-values are increasing.

The old argument for up used a consistent tool, gravity, to express inconsistent observations. The new argument for up uses a consistent tool to express independent, non-overlapping observations.

We need to reconsider the meaning of up so that, as strange as it sounds, up is not so much a direction as it is an expression; and a falling ball’s reflection is moving up to the floor, instead of down to the floor.

The 3 Forms of Reciprocalism

There are at least three basic forms of reciprocalism.

1. Polar reciprocalism
2. Perpendicular reciprocalism
3. Inverse reciprocalism

Polar reciprocalism is the basis for perpendicular reciprocalism’s two dimensional definition. See the horizontal/vertical line scenario. (Polar potentials of combined vertical and horizontal expressions)

Polar reciprocalism is evident in many antonyms. Up and down, left and right, good and evil. Polar reciprocalism is the polarity of one trait (or dimension) in two subjects while all other relevant traits match.

Such antonyms as effective and ineffective do not represent polarity because of the quantitative nature of their discrepancy, having a trait or not having a trait. To be polar, the two antonyms would have to reside on opposing ends of a linear spectrum, as opposed to one subject existing on one end of the spectrum and the other subject existing in the middle (becoming neutral).

Note: this definition of polar reciprocalism asserts that coincidence and irony are antonyms.

Here is a graphic model of polar recriprocalism:

Polar reciprocalism          (<————>)

Perpendicular reciprocalism is evident in heirarchy. Quality and quanity, intensity and breadth. Perpendicular reciprocalism is the polarity between two traits instead of the polarity of one trait.

Effective has a defining trait, and ineffective is defined as being absent of that trait. Perpendicular reciprocalism expresses this discrepancy except perpendicular reciprocalism expresses two traits this way simultaneously and inversely. For a detailed example, see the horizontal/vertical line scenario.

Note: this definition of perpendicular reciprocalism asserts that white and black as absolutes, (off white isn’t white and off black isn’t black, both off-colors would be shades of grey), would be perpendicularly reciprocal with the presence of white and black being polar the way vertical and horizontal are.

             |\

             |   \

White |       \   Greys

            |_____\

           Black

There may be another form of reciprocalism in which supply and demand fall into. This reciprocalism would involve inverse relationships such as concave and convex, internal and external. The difference between this form of reciprocalism and polar rec. is with polar rec. two traits are pulling away from each other, and the center of the spectrum, and with inverse rec. two traits are pushing against each other from the edges of the spectrum.

Here is a graphic model of inverse reciprocalism

Inverse reciprocalism       ——>)(<——

The value of these three forms of reciprocalism in combination is shown when forming a comprehensive argument.

The perpendicular reciprocalism expresses the complete position of one side of the argument. The polar reciprocalism expresses the extent to which the position is valid. The inverse reciprocalism expresses the extent to which the opposing position is invalid.

An example of using the three forms of reciprocalism in combination to form a comprehensive argument is thus:  Argument- all even numbers can be divided evenly by 2.

Perpendicular reciprocalism would support this argument by illustrating- horizontally, every iteration (quantity of proof) of an even number can be divided by 2, resulting in a whole number; vertically, each iteration (quality of proof) of a hypothetical even number being divided by two will invariably produce a whole number.

Polar reciprocalism would support this argument by defining the two extremes within which the claim exists. One extreme would be the infinite positive integer possibilities, the other extreme would be the infinite negative integar possibilities.

Inverse reciprocalism would support this argument by defining the point at which the argument must not waver. One side of the point would be that as soon as a number is no longer an integer, and becomes a fraction, it cannot be an even number. The other side of the point would be that as soon as the number is no longer dividable by two it cannot be an even number.

By using the three forms of reciprocalism, one can make a complete argument, expressing to the greatest extent the proponent’s side, expressing to the greatest extent the opponent’s side and expressing how the argument is valid under both sides.

I feel this is a good example of the the philosophy of fractals and how they perpetuate vertically across their own existence.

Imagining The Tenth Dimension Part 2