I have no rigid evidence, only a hunch, that the world might be binary.
Examples of the binary/ pairwise nature can be found in many places.
Left or right, in or out, high or low, up or down, heaven or hell.
Empty or full, open or close, yin or yang, light or dark, the radiance or the void.
Love or hate, good or bad, right or wrong, win or lose.
Live or die, to be or not to be.
Coke or Pepsi, rich or poor, republicans or dems, friends or foes, us or them.
Robert Sapolsky mentioned multiple times in his lecture that we have this instinct of labeling/ dividing/ judging “them and us”, while Kevin Kelly once said “trust me, there is no THEM”.
I think the ultimate them, might be death, or the killing force going against all DNA/ RNA based living organisms. It’s all of us, all living things, against entropy.
If it seems odd to equivalent entropy to death, maybe consider the “information theory of aging” brought up by David Sinclair in his book Lifespan: why we age and why we don’t have to, in which he contributes aging to the loss of epigenetic information over noise - without the correct epigenetic information, cells start to lose their identity, a brain cell starts to act like partially skin cell, and that leads to all sorts of malfunctions and the body falling apart, and we call it aging.
In a way, the purpose of DNA seems to be to reduce entropy - to construct order from chaos, and construct more order by replicating itself (order) as much as it can.
The second law of thermodynamics observes the ever expanding power of entropy, of chaos and noise. Maybe the ever expanding structure and information against the ever expanding entropy is the ultimate them and us.
More examples.
Hot or cold, plus or minus, positive or negative, spin up or down.
The body’s symmetry. 2 seems to be a magic number.
Newton’s third law, taken metaphorically, describes the same symmetric nature, for every action/ force, there’s an counter action/ force against it.
Yes or no, on or off, 0 or 1, true or false.
There’s a saying that God created mankind in his own image. I think we might have also created the world according to our own image - like the 10-based decimal math system we created (look down at our hands), like the binary machines we built.
When I was thinking of examples, I hesitated to discuss the more controversial ones, like, man or woman.
But Grey, what about non-binary people?
What about 0.5? What about 0.4999999…
What about Schrödinger’s cat?
I think social concept like gender can be a spectrum, and some people don’t feel like they fit in either of the two extreme “buckets” at the ends. And we all have first hand experiences of “it’s not that simple, the world is not black and white”, it’s like fifty-thousand shades of gray.
That, I think, is because the world might also be fractal.
Fractal (in my college math level of understanding) means self-repeating patterns, it’s a plot where no matter how close you zoom in, the patterns/ shapes are the same - it’s scale free.
The world seems to have a self-organizing nature, it’s fractal, it’s exponential.
We used to think energy is a continuum, like a spectrum, then we realize it’s discrete, but when you have building blocks that are small enough, it looks like a spectrum.
Maybe for any spectrum, if we keep dividing, keep chopping it in half, we might find out it’s discrete, it’s fractal, and at every scale, it’s binary.
Actually, fractal means we can divide to infinity, and we’ll still have two ends, and I don’t know what discrete means when dividing to infinity.
Maybe instead of heaven and hell, most of us, most of the time, exist in the middle ground, the limbo that is earth.
P.S. I didn’t realize what a crazy person this blog might make me look like, until after I wrote the whole thing and read it myself.
But what’s done is done :) this is my instinct, it’s probably wrong, but no matter how crazy it sounds, it feels right to me.