Commitment to sound reasoning exists within a painful paradox. When reasoning attempts to be inclusive of others, logic is more challenging. When successful, outcomes improve. Yet there seems to be a limit. The more dedicated a reasoner (or organization) is to fairness or inclusiveness, the more cumbersome, convoluted, and eventually disorienting the reasoning processes tend to become. The premise of operating in a sane way is brought into question by one’s own (or an organization’s) equanimity.
That should (likely does) trouble you terribly. I call it the Sane Person Paradox. Given the above rather discouraging analysis, reasoning and fairness together and in the “real world” (outside of our imaginations) would seem to be at odds inherently. If reasonable humans are also irreconcilably close-minded, hope for creating a sane world might seem, at the end of the day, more than a touch insane.
So to mute the Sane Person Paradox, where remember, sane is actually odd, humans apply a timeless chant that sounds like: humans need hierarchies. The tune goes like this. Operating within a social order supports us in resolving the difficulty of reasoning together with others. While we and/or others are in effect “put in our place,” the upshot is we have solid ground on which to proclaim our own sanity.
On another level though, we also grasp deeply how sanity based on external approval ties us, for better or worse, to pressures to conform. That likely and ironically has us insanely clinging to the next “fix,” or worse yet treading morally murky water. Sanity experienced this way is constructed on an illusion of mental buttressing. What we end up facing, quite simply and also potentially falsely, is not reality but perceived social order projected onto collective (un)reasonableness.
Doing control-conform dances to reassure ourselves of our own sanity, we may notice that, for one person — sane and yet alone in such a claim — being reasonable is not necessarily grounded in truth. When we touch down at this more core truth, we no longer feel moved by the playful, true tune from which the necessary if also disorienting Sane Person Paradox issues personal truths.
When we are children developing capacity around continuous play, we use a simple but effective approach that works just as well as hierarchies in assuring both reasonableness and fairness. Rock-Paper-Scissors. (A game known the world over by a variety of names and symbol combos.) The logically-deducible winner of the random selection process chooses the next step. In employing this logic “game,” pairs or groups engaged in continuous play are able to effectively halt incessant reasoning. And fair play is the name of the game.
The approach resolves the Sane Person Paradox. It does so by disconnecting reasoning from social control-based narration (with it’s approval and in-my-place limitations). It does so by logic indisputable by all who participate. What naturally fills the incessant reasoning vacuum is the easeful reasonableness inherent in natural processes at play.
There’s a more technical and useful way to frame what is happening when we halt reasoning and resume the collective journey or play. What works better than ad nauseam reasoning, is reasonable, fair progress through bivalent narration control (BNC).
Stated differently, BNC modulates reasoning and fairness, grounding the experience of participation so paranoia about our own sanity does not rule. The assumption underlying such a conclusion is that reality “plays” (enacts) by logical, grounded constraints even as reality takes on very different, and potentially distorted, proportions than that.
To return to the example of Rock-Paper-Scissors, no kids have to bring themselves to the collective play process with an angel on one shoulder, devil on the other. They are able to reign in any impetus to reasonably fight it out, such that collective sanity wins out. Social hierarchy and conformational fixes are moot. Potentially distorted reasoning is halted; distorted senses of fairness, made moot. The hallmark of BNC is that participation can proceed sensibly, without fights over reasoning or fairness. A bonus since they take all the fun out of participating anyway!
Let me reiterate in one more way. It’s so important to grasp. Winning in Rock-Paper-Scissors is based on prevailing given a set of logical priors. The winner is deferred to, such that they choose the next where/what/when to go/be/have for the pair or entire group. In real effect, and valuable to understand and potentially apply more widely — using BNC grounds decision-making (often the point of sane reasoning) by deferring to logical priors that result in narration control. As such, the kids (or more generally, participants) enact, or play, by getting back on track with what was already happening! They’ve gotten “out of their heads.”
The incredibly valuable function of BNC is little understood within more extensive logic frameworks. In the context of The Science of Representational Reality:OKIC, I refer to as the insanity quick fix, or The Queens’ Resolve. The later is connected to the history of the game of chess, which I will tackle in another essay.
First let me explain the secret, and tricky, life of complex bivalence.
The sane person paradox has another layer. Thoughts about things that don’t matter, might one day matter. So how can that be? Communication as modulator of grounding is key.
During the fair and spontaneous resolution of reasoning via BNC, such as the Rock-Paper-Scissors game helps enact, what is supported communication-wise is an instance of effortless centering among participants toward true-sense anchoring. The later term is, without a doubt, new to you. Related conditions that you may already be familiar with are grounding and embodiment. True-sense anchoring is the meta-condition of communication between system and self, grounding and embodiment.
Last year, in a paper Might true-sense anchors repair the representational capacity of natural language? A multidisciplinary puzzle, I introduced a highly technical, interdisciplinary definition of true-sense anchoring framed broadly in terms of natural language and three-value logic. The more difficult-to-grasp layers are effectively compressed, and hopefully can be communicated in a more basic way that a broader audience will find useful, through the BNC analysis here, with it’s connection to the Sane Person Paradox.
With Rock-Paper-Scissors and quick resolution of the narrative toward collective action, we can recognize the same complex representational capacity as in true-sense anchoring but in more general, relatable terms.