Bivalent Computing
= "the binary number system is < NOT > a neutral engineering convention. Instead, it demonstrates that binary computation imposes a rigid bivalent metaphysics that inherently struggles with relational meaning, productive contradiction, and irreducible complexity." [1]
Source
* The Trine — An Investigation into Applied Cosmotheandrism. Federico Becker.
URL = https://philarchive.org/archive/BECTTC-5#11#13#11
"The following treatise presents a philosophical, mathematical, and physical framework for a three-poled computational paradigm termed The Trine. Emerging from a synthesis of contemplation, Raimon Panikkar’s cosmotheandric philosophy, quantum mechanics, and information theory, this work challenges the prevailing assumption that the binary number system is a neutral engineering convention. Instead, it demonstrates that binary computation imposes a rigid bivalent metaphysics that inherently struggles with relational meaning, productive contradiction, and irreducible complexity.
By demonstrating that a three-poled computational primitive is mathematically rigorous, physically implementable, and philosophically coherent, The Trine offers an intercultural infrastructure capable of computing the relational and ambiguous truths of reality that bivalent logic has long obscured.
I. Philosophical & Historical Critique
● The Metaphysics of Bivalence: Contemporary digital computation crystallizes two millennia of Western Aristotelian logic (tertium non datur — the law of excluded middle) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theological arithmetic, which framed the digits 0 and 1 as an imago creationis (creation out of nothing by the One).
● The Intercultural Misreading: The treatise revisits Leibniz’s 1703 encounter with the I Ching. It shows that Leibniz mistakenly mapped static binary strings onto dynamic yin/yang hexagrams using Shao Yong's 11th-century arrangement, thereby overlooking the authentic triadic cosmology of the trigram (bagua) and its three-fold structure of Heaven, Humanity, and Earth (sancai).
● Cognitive and AI Limitations: Prolonged immersion in bivalent computation has shaped human cognitive horizons and fundamentally constrained artificial intelligence. Forced by discrete, bivalent substrates to optimize loss functions and resolve ambiguities into binary classifications, modern AI systems treat genuine contradiction as statistical noise, leading to fragility, hallucination, and an inability to navigate complex ethical tensions."
(https://philarchive.org/archive/BECTTC-5)