Monism, Dualism … Trialism?

I’m not really talking about making choices here – binary or otherwise – between schools of thought. No, I jest, since the point of any tuple  representation – pair or triple – is about their integration, not their separation. Ultimately any ontology is an arbitrary choice of which “objects” to represent your world view, with everything hanging on what you want to say about their relationships.

Interested to see today

The image being from Penrose “Road to Reality” (and a good thread discussing earlier origins).

A couple of years ago I posted this triad:
summarising how I read Foucault (1970):

[My most developed version of this idea here.]

I see Jessica Flack‘s take mapping cleanly onto this version. That is raw “Data” is the objectively physical world out there,”Natural Language” is the subjectively human expression of our experience of it and “Mathematical Representations” are the formal symbolic representations of concepts. The latter is traditionally “Platonic” but – take note – human constructed nevertheless.

I like it, though as I say, everything hangs on what we intend to say about the relationships and how “useful” the result is in answering questions. And with all “network” diagrams, there is an equivalence in switching node (object) and edge (relation) representations anyway.

Also, shout out to the EES project again, which has some great minds clustered around proper understanding of the evolution of life, the universe and everything.

8 thoughts on “Monism, Dualism … Trialism?”

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