• afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    One day aliens are going to meet us and wonder what happened in our evolution that made us biased towards seeing every noun in groups of two, except for rules of nouns which are in groups of three.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Male-female, darkness-light, plant-animal, ying-yang, mind-body, earth-heaven, spiritual-physical, prime-composite, even-odd

        3 laws of motion, thermo, robotics, of dielect, and Trinity assignment.

        Something strange about us that it is easier to think of opposites but following 3 rules.

        • techMayhem@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Most of these groups are simply “A” and “Everything not A”. Either a number is odd or it is even. Either a place is lit up or it is dark.

          That being said there are also some cases in there where there is more than just two categories (like male-female or plant-animal) but we, for the most part, only think about the most important / biggest ones.

          All of this probably comes down to the fact that in order to make sense of the world or brain constantly tries to put things into categories to quickly assess what something is or isn’t. And it makes sense that the easiest way to categorize things is by just going “Is this A or B”?

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            Sure it makes a degree of sense. It is just easier to look at things that way, less cognitive load. It just didn’t have to be that way. We could have liked putting categories in groups of three.

          • droans@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            That’s every binary, though. False are everything that’s not true. Ones are everything that’s not zero.

        • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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          6 months ago

          That’s a fun thing to point out. The rules of 3 especially so, but it’s also using specific examples and lacking to see the complexity of of our ability to communicate and all the other words we have.

          Androgynous, tomboy, femboy / twilight, murky, dim / fungus / Ying -Yang is cheating / spirit, form, will / limbo, underworld, cosmos, time / etc…

          And even in rules, in Buddhism you have the 8 fold path, the 10 commandments, heck the 613 laws of God in Judaism.

          Just don’t be going all “The Number 23” on us just cause it’s easy to find solution confirming biases in common numbers.