Now add a swinging pendulum behind the square. When the pendulum is behind the red half of the square, it appears red. When the pendulum is behind the blue half of the square it appears blue.
The pendulum (when powered by a perpetual larger energy source) is a temporal, rhythmic, cyclical agent. When we extend this analogy to real life, we find that our semantic system and our personal and scientific system of epistemology is biased in favor of mapping things in the dialectic of red or blue, instead of as a dynamic system. The underlying system is often hidden and unknown, ignored or under stressed.
But what kind of systems? Pretty much all systems which self regulate, which are all repeating currently functioning systems. This includes somatic self-regulation of chemicals, non-organic systems such as the motion of planets , and human systems such as traffic and business schedules.
I am going to use a human system to demonstrate this abstract idea. Human systems are generally concentric (in the sense that they correspond fundamentally) with nature and organic self-regulating systems, despite the visual disconnect of an innocent looking sycamore tree planted in front on a concrete, graffitied wall. This is because what we create comes from the same organic processes mandated by our genes, and genes underly the rest of the organic world. Essentially a building or a highway is as much of a phenotype as eye color.
This specific example I am going to use is based on the analogy of the pendulum, but it takes the analogy further and has implications for sciences, especially for those which rely heavily on statistical methods.
Imagine a normal city block with lamp posts lining the avenue. Now imagine the sun rising and falling each day. The lighting of the lamps is set to compensate (or regulate) the amount of light on the avenue. Thus, at night the lights go on. At dawn, the lights go off.
The timing of the lamps, however, is not perfect. This is essentially because the rising and setting of the sun is part of a greater system, one which not only includes the spinning of the Earth, but also the mechanisms which operate seasons. Therefore, the subsystem of the coping light mechanism is almost always slightly awry.
Since a compensatory system is dualistic, the two opposites should also match each other's form, while each system may have components which have their own properties:
TURN the stove ON
Turn THE STOVE on
While the message is the same, the sizes of the different letters differ such that there is a slightly incongruence in length.
I call this slight and almost constant disunity the Transparent Dystemporal Effect. This arrhythmia is like the sliver revealed of an opaque circle which sits behind another circle, and reveals information about both circles.
So what is the significance of this? The revealed sliver is not something that goes unnoticed in scientific research as it is very prominent. Instead it is constantly misconstrued and misused in our analytical processes.
Here is an example: to our sense, there are two binary times of great darkness: after dusk when the city lights have not come on soon enough, and before dawn when the city lights turn off too early. In this situation, where the systems are quite obvious, people would generally not make the mistake of creating a No Light time which occurs at regular intervals. They would also not make the mistake of thinking that this process occurs only in a single situation; it is clear it occurs once when the sun goes down and once when it goes up.
However, if the system is hidden then the opposite occurs. Colloquially, extreme dark and extreme light might become opposites. The concept of the binary system is unfolded (meaning there is only one system where there should be two), bent or muddied.
Scientifically, too often these salient features guide our understanding in the wrong way. The binary system is replaced with a single, twisted system, and the continuum behind the earth's movement around the sun is ignored.
This should wreak havoc on a science which relies on statistics. One should not attempt to correlate these false prominent traits with other traits, or delve into their distribution within a population. Since two very similar traits are more likely to be one and the same, the statistical victory of high correlation may actually lead astray. Attempting to understand a group of hidden systems, such as in psychology, using a method which is completely blind to distinguishing the systems which it is attempting to understand is a bad idea.
While binary opposites which occur at temporally predictable intervals can be misused, when perceived and applied correctly this Transparent Dystemporal Effect has great potential. It is from these unbalanced double binary opposites (noon and midnight and before dusk and before dawn), which upon inspection, both scientifically and semantically, inherently cause contradiction and blurred precision of meaning, that we realize that two overlapping, self-regulating systems exist. It is through the poor focus of our lens which occurs when we ignore a dimension of a dual system, that makes the meaning of a single world blur and self-destruct. But it is through this contradiction or blurring that we become aware of our broken lens and the possibility of an extra dimensional system.
But how precisely can we spot this effect and use it productively?
One way is that we can see this contradiction because there is a blot on a system which should function on a continuum.
In our example, ignoring interfering subsystems such as weather or city light pollution, the amount of light in the sky should work like a pendulum: It should get brightest at the center point of the day, gradually get darker, get darkest at the center point of night, and then gradually get lighter. This is an important distinction: the validity of mechanisms we perceive on a gradual continuum (such as heat and cold, which are then defined by dynamic processes such as the movement of molecules), versus the questionable validity of those which we still look at dichotomously or which reveal dialectic contradictions and are adjectival phenomena, generally lacking in a dynamic explanation. (An example of the latter is the contradiction of light waves versus light particles, and although I know nothing about physics, it seems like these clues pointing to double systems could transcend temporal dimensions and measurement.) These levels of understanding are embedded not only in our science but in linguistics. Simply through our categorization of grammar, the status of a theory, be it adjectival-dichotomous, adjectival-continuum, or verb-dynamic, we are able to get a sense of the depth of our scientific understanding.
To conclude:
When a bi-polar blot appears, as when it gets darkest immediately before the sun rises and after the sun sets(as a function of the slightly dysfunctional self-regulating system), but there is only a single brightest time of day, nature provides a crucial alert signal to scientists.
Our natural language structure catches these instances equally well. When a word becomes blurs or clashes with its own meaning, a two-part self-regulating system may well be present.
By using calculus (instead of statistics) to capture the temporal rhythm and variation between factors this effect also generously gives us much more potential information about the properties of the two compensating systems, the dynamics thereof, and a clue to the third mechanism, which is necessary to activate the dueling systems.
Perhaps by tracing a single self-regulating system, which must have inherent and predictable parameters, one can then move on to the mystery third activator which is part of another system, and then move on from there like a zipper on a chain. The inter-dependence of multiple self-regulating systems may be a key in the unravelling and distillation of the ingredients therein.
