There are three types of thing: physical, logical, and emotional.
There are three types of stuff: power, truth, and reasons.
There are three rule-sets: differentiation, interaction, and sequence.
There are three essences: What, How, and Why.
Nothing else can even be imagined by humans. Everything is constructed from these three.
I've always been fascinated with logic. I still remember reading about Boolean logic in a childrens' science encyclopedia, and thinking it was the most sublime thing ever. In high school, learning Pascal, and then C++, allowed me to interact with logic on a far deeper level than ever before. It was the perfect thing, the gorgeous and spiritual thing, the unsullied thing. I wanted everything to be as perfect as logic. But the people around me were illogical, and it turned out even I was illogical, ending up writing stories on my computer until all hours instead of doing my college classwork. It was as if my decisions had already been made for me, despite me wanting to do what was right. I fell out of college and landed a job as a dishwasher.
I applied my skills of logic to my own emotions, observing where they came from and what they made me do. I found interesting patterns, and found some solutions to my negative emotions. But one realization in late 2000 or early 2001 changed my life: logic and emotion are two entirely different types of things, in the same way the physical is completely different from logic. You can't freeze an equation into a plasma, or melt anger into a solid. They are made of different "stuff", to use a physical metaphor. And I couldn't think of any concept which didn't refer to something made of one of these three things: power, truth, or reasons.
I started applying this "three-thing" to everything I could think of, and found it was a key to understanding anything.
I applied the "three-thing" to the famous six questions of journalism, and they collapsed down to three categories:
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"What happened?" Answered by a physical event, such as a wedding, or a car wreck.
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"How did it happen?" This asks for the process, the logical interactions which led to the event.
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"Why did it happen?" This asks for an emotional cause: "What was the motivation?" If it was an unmotivated event, in which something happened without someone deciding to do it, this is answered by the "how" above.
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"When did it happen?" This is a specific place, which is a physical attribute.
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"Where did it happen?" This is a specific time, which is also a physical attribute.
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"Who was involved?" This asks for which person, answered by the physical fact of a specific person
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"Who would do such a thing?" This is a completely different question which asks for an emotional answer, a variant of "Why?"
I could now logically determine what kind of answer is requested by any question.
I applied the "three-thing" to the cultural dichotomy of Man, and found a trichotomy instead:
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Men are from Mars: men instinctively think in terms of concrete actions and choices, and see other people as physical beings. For men, the physical reality is the basic foundation of all.
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Women are from Venus: women think in terms of changing impressions and reactions, and see other people as emotional beings. For women, the emotional reality is foundational, and the physical is an expression of that.
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Aspies are from Vulcan: People on the autism spectrum, like me, instinctively reach for logic when we don't understand something or want to solve a problem. I yearned to meet more people like me, people focused on logic and thought, and I found them on the Internet. (Oh, how the times have changed...) For me, logic and truth are the foundation.
I now had a basic map for dealing with people.
I applied the "three-thing" to ontology, the study of what types of things exist.
I asked myself what the difference was between being "right" in the sense of having the correct answer and being "right" as in choosing morally. I realized I already had a built-in map in my mind of the opposites of things: right/wrong, correct/incorrect, and so on, but I had simply not sought to articulate or formalize it before:
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Moral: right/wrong
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Logical: true/false
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Philosophical: wise/foolish
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Physical: changing/static
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Scientific: accurate/inaccurate
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Emotional: good/bad
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Psychological: thriving/perishing
I have since applied this to other philosophies, to value systems and economics, to psychology and the editing of the subconscious, to physics, to political tribalism and the Libertarian view of taxation, to Trinitarian theology, to music theory, and even (after watching Pixar's Ratatouille) to food theory. In each case, I've found answers readily available through Triessential analysis. I've seen rhetorical triads in anything about which people speak rhetorically, and they're usually Triessential. I have come to believe that this three-way categorization is how the human brain recognizes and categorizes the world, subconsciously or consciously.
I've seen books written with Triessential underpinnings, such as Arnold Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics" focusing on their differences and reconciliation, and Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" focusing on the sequential nature of motivation. I've seen how Triessentialism is the answer to Objectivism's missteps, and accounts for postmodernism's criticisms of modernism in meaningful ways. I've even seen it explain the rise of drag queen story hour at libraries.
Now I want to start producing content based on Triessentialism. I want to write a book, start a podcast, generate a wiki, do something to get this worldview out there and being talked about. I also want to talk about these concepts in a place I can refer back to, and analyze new things I haven't yet applied it to. So I finally made this post, partly to organize my own thoughts and brainstorm, but also to get reactions from smart and interesting people.
Ask me to elaborate on anything, or to analyze anything. Ask me to react to something. I'll do my best to apply Triessentialism so you can see how it functions.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's fine, but I'm definitely still in the "Who cares?" camp. It's transparently and quite simply a valid ontology for the most part (though perhaps not universally, as I will probe below), but to my intuition in such a simple fashion that it's also meaningless. Perhaps it's more fundamental and thus more accurate, but I'm just not seeing the actual benefits of applying it as a framework over categorizing things by shape, color, or any other obvious characteristic.
What you need to answer is this: What extra can an individual, a group, or society actually achieve by applying Triessentialism (kind of annoyed it's not just "Trissentialism" btw, much catchier, t. coiner of term "pedofascism") to any given matter? What gains can we achieve in the realms of personal fulfillment, social organization, public policy, etc.?
I don't need Triessentialism to know that men are more physically oriented than women, that women are more emotional than men, that autists like to imagine themselves as beings of pure logic, that "true and "false" are the fundamental values of classical logic (after all, that's kind of just automatically baked into the concept), or any other "insight" your post provides.
You're basically doing a variation of affirming the consequent: highlighting obvious and well-understood but fundamental knowledge, showing that this knowledge does not contradict a Triessentialist framework (or can even be explained using it), and then consequently retroactively assigning the insight of that fundamental knowledge to Triessentialism even though it was never actually needed to understand it in the first place.
So again: What can I find out with Triessentialism that I don't already know or can't already figure out (or at least can't figure out nearly as easily) with anything else? Philosophies and ontologies are maps attempting to describe and categorize the territory of all conceivable configurations of all that is or could be. But you don't need a map to point out that a huge mountain in the distance exists, which is all you've done so far. What about this territory can Triessentialism's map tell me that other maps and/or basic observation can't?
Other than that crucial question, I have a few more (and one about a subject I'm sure you never imagined you'd get asked, making it a good test of your philosophy's flexibility):
1. How is the emotional not, as at least the explanation with the most empirical grounding would suggest, contained by the physical and the logical as opposed to constituting its own independent pole? The neurology that produces emotions (as far as we can observe) is physical. The operation of that neurology is (again as far as we can tell) essentially logical (mostly chemical and electrical "computation"). (If you subscribe to certain philosophical leanings (and I am undecided about the question myself to be clear), you of course entirely reject the notion that subjective sensations, qualia, are fully reducible to their physical/logical substrates, but that just leads into my next question.)
2. Where do (particularly emotionally neutral) qualia fit into this ontology? Let's imagine, for example, the purely subjective, qualic sensation of me rubbing the pants I'm wearing right now. Though my hands, the pants, the nerves feeling them, and the brain interpreting them are all physical, the subjective sensation of my doing so is not (or is at least not provably so, again undecided), as it is not (at least as far as we know for now, see: hard problem of consciousness) properly defined or specified by even the most detailed (again, as far as we know for now) accounting of these interactions.
Further, it's not logical, because it has no algorithmic structure or antecedent or truth value, even a fuzzy one (though some fuzziness is involved), and it's not emotional, because it's an essentially entirely neutral sensation with no real emotional valence. (It's not some nice velvety fabric that's enjoyable to stroke, nor a prickly one, just there doing its job of keeping my balls contained. And if that's still not a neutral enough qualia for you, then we can just focus on the background qualia of existing itself, which I think is valence-neutral for most people for the vast majority of their life.) Changing "emotional" to "subjective" in your triad would pretty much entirely address this criticism however.
3. In Triessentialism, what is a purely informational (in the sense of "non-physical" (as technically that which is purely random isn't informational at all), which your ontology implicitly allows for by having categories wholly outside of it) and purely random (not even just pseudorandom) and unalgorithmic interaction/event/value classified as? It can't be physical, because it's purely informational (which we defined as non-physical, which is again allowable by having "physical" be only pole of a tripole), it can't be logical (in that it is again unalgorithmic and, as a purely random output, has no truth value, not even a fuzzy one, nor any informational/descriptive value, because it is again fully random, with each bit of it necessarily not containing nor contributing any statistical implication or logical imputation whatsoever), and emotion seems to have no relevance to it. (The practical plausibility of such a thing actually existing/happening in the real world can be debated, but you said it yourself: "Nothing else [outside of Triessentialism] can even be imagined by humans." I'm pretty sure I just did.)
I think, at least terminologically speaking, you may have fallen into the trap of equating the informational (again in the sense of the non-physical and non-subjective, that is the purely mathematical or descriptive) with the logical, assuming that all that exists in such a category can be described logically, even though it has been known for quite some time that this isn't the case (see: non-computable functions, hypercomputation, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Chaitin's constant, etc.). (To fix this, I think I my last description of "informational" may have the best word to replace "logical" with along with the best explanation of what non-physical randomness is fundamentally: mathematical. The mathematical necessarily encompasses all that is logical, but, at least if academic categorization is considered valid, also seems to cover areas like non-computable functions and pure randomness which are illogical at their core (though you might retort that the manner in which they are reasoned about in mathematical discourse surrounds them with a logical scaffolding that belies this).)
And for my final question which I'm sure you never thought you'd be asked:
4. I am a dedicated pedofascist and absolute androsupremacist. I want the entire world to be united under pedofascism (though not necessarily the exact same polity implementing it, as I am a libertAryan as well), for pedofascism to be considered as obvious and universal of a political commandment as "murdering other members of society in good standing, fellow in-group members, should be illegal and highly taboo/considered inarguably wrong" (though absent that I will settle for converting as many as possible). What can a Triessentialist analysis of the subject do to enhance the probability of pedofascism achieving as productive, efficient, and victorious of an outcome as possible (or at least enhancing its understanding)? (Or if you really hate it, perhaps you might use Triessentialism to do the opposite. Maybe Triessentialism could even convince me to alter the fundamental tenets of pedofascism, reinterpret them in a different fashion, or even not be a pedofascist at all anymore! Point is, what can Triessentialism actually uniquely do or reveal in relation to pedofascism? Where's the beef?)
(Brief primer on pedofascism to help you answer: Under pedofascism, as per the "absolute androsupremacy" part, the feminine is entirely subservient to the masculine, which is what we believe is wholly natural and just, with females having a permanent social status that is somewhere between wards/children, pets, and chattel slaves. As the maximal expression of this principle and entire rejection of what we consider to be current gynocentric and gynosupremacist norms, there is of course no "age of consent" (for females at least) under this system, as the right of consent lies only with the female's masculine possessor.
With this artificial (so we declare, based on historical, biological, evolutionary, etc. evidence) limitation on masculine sexuality lifted, men inevitably (so we say) return to the full affirmation and appreciation of the beauty, sensuality, and sexuality of youth and neoteny (extending even to the prepubescent, as it's pedofascism, not just hebefascism), which we believe is also in their inherent nature. This is then combined with a fascist political lens, in which all classes unite through an organismic and homeostatic conception of social relations to maximize the strength, vitality, vigor, dominance, nobility, beauty, vivaciousness, etc. of society and the (Aryan, at least in my particular branch of pedofascism) individual. So what's Triessentialism got to help with or at least understand this?)
The emotional is both physiologically (pun intended) and philosophically contained in exactly that manner! Good job skipping ahead! I referred to Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" because it has this very tidy diagram which he monetizes for business consultation, but which perfectly encapsulates the sequential containment of the emotional by the logical and the logical by the physical.
In Triessentialist ontology, the physical brain contains the logical/emotional mind, and in Triessentialist psychology, emotions are generated by reaction to the logical. However, in many areas of Triessentialism, the three essences can be considered as qualitatively different, parallel, equal, independent poles holding up the tent of humans' gestalt reality.
The physical world includes physical brains, which are among the very rare types of things which can contain and process both the logical and the emotional. It turns out neurons communicate and process both digital and analog signals by empirical Bayes and hidden Markov models! And as we know from computer networking, carrying a payload inside nested containers is a great way to ensure they reach their destination with the original meaning intact.
Don't worry; as a Protestant Evangelical Full Gospel Pentecostal Christian, I try to consider the luminous matter/energy/spacetime world with all its quantum wierdness, the dark matter/energy/gravity world, and any spiritual super-physical reality which may exist, when considering the functioning of the mind within the brain. More to come!
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