Is binary thinking inevitable? Discuss

Binary thinking is the notion that thought is based upon a relation of oppositions. That is to say, that thinking is seen in relation to two separate absolutes. For example, the notion of black is seen in opposition to white; male is seen in opposition to female and right is seen in opposition to wrong in terms of meaning; in essence, they are inseparable (Saussure, 1910-11). This means that they are seen in a series of absolutes that configure as the governing factors in our thinking signified in our language, thoughts and ideas. This has a basis in cognitive psychology in the notion of categories, which many have deemed the necessary code of information used to deliberate upon what is and isn’t accepted as knowledge. This is given greater rational in the notion of structuralism, which states that we think in relation to a symbolic order that determines the way in which we conceptualise the world. One other indication of the idea that binary thinking is inevitable is in the concept of artificial intelligence and the code that is used to define the way a computer thinks and operates. Essentially, artificial intelligence is binary and so a comparison between artificial intelligence and human intelligence may reveal to us the degree to which we may accept the notion that binary thinking is inevitable or not. It is with both structuralism and artificial intelligence that we will assess the notion of binary thinking as an inevitable form.
Concerned with the concept of artificial versus human intelligence, mathematical theorist Turing suggested that it was through a process of mimicry that computer intelligence would one day match and eventually take over from human or culturally based forms of intelligence (Turing, 1950). In essence, he surmised that binary thinking was a form of intelligence learned according to a set of coded mathematic equations. These were then used to mimic human behaviour through a stimuli response mechanism. If we are to follow Turing’s definition of intelligence applied to human thinking then it would stand that a human observer would not be able to tell the difference between the emotional consciousness of a human and the formulated response of a robot, due to the thoughts of both systems being displayed externally (Turing, 1950). Essentially, we find a very superficial version of human interactivity and exchange of thoughts. We could possibly conclude from Turing’s concept that the role of subjective experience and subjectivity is completely lost as it is given over to an acceptance rejection stimulus based upon the image of something external. However, it could also be said that due to the recognition of emotional response and the objective portrayal of mimicry that this intelligence turns from that of a mimicking robot to that of an inquisitive and introspective being capable of contemplating the often paradoxical and highly subjective nature of identity.
However, if we were to accept this definition of intelligence as a recognition of one’s own superficial identity from which all external things become attached, there is still the question of whether or not binary thinking can be applied to humanity. This can be seen in relation to the notion put forward by Searle’s Chinese Room. In this idea, Searle indicated that even though an artificial intelligence could recognise, incorporate and subsequently mimic the external behaviours required in binary thinking, it could not indicate the manifestation of an awareness for what this behaviour meant or symbolised to other humans. In essence, it did not understand the meaning of its world as it had no subjective identity or placement within the social world. He used the example of an English speaking human inside the mechanical mind of a robot indicated by the use of certain symbols as coded ‘representations’ of the instruction of an unknown language, in this case Chinese (Searle, 1980). He suggested that although the human had access to the forms of code used by the mechanical brain so as to illicit and articulate the correct response in the language of Chinese, it had no awareness and so ability to engage in the meaning or significance of what it was doing. Essentially, it was regarded by Searle to be simply a mechanical response according to a pre-programmed code based upon binary opposition that aroused no emotional or introspective query as a speaker within a certain cultural reality would. This means that to accept the notion of binary thinking as inevitable, we would have to eliminate subjectivity and emotional response to such thinking.
From either perspective, we can see that the primary role of binary thinking in its application of emotional intelligence is agreed in terms of superficial mimicry relating to an external and objective reality. However, we can also see that there is much ambiguity in terms of consciousness and awareness and its relation to the objective world. Essentially, Turing suggests that human consciousness is no different to artificial intelligence as both are learned through mimicry. Contrastingly, Searle suggests that a robot with artificial intelligence cannot have any consciousness because it simply exhibits mimicry through a coded logic that is devoid of emotion or understanding and it cannot identify or subjectively engage in the meaning of the objects that appear before it.
Informed, in part, by the role of intelligence as it applies to experience and the role of subjectivity as it relates to the objective world, post modern philosopher Jean Baudrillard began an enquiry into humanity and its symbolic relationship to the world through language and thinking. Focusing on the condition of the emphasis that the media of the free world had placed upon the commercialisation, imagery and art of its culture, Baudrillard spoke of the new emphasis on the philosophy of self fulfilment suggesting that,

Through planned motivation we find ourselves in an era where advertising takes over the moral responsibility for all of society and replaces a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction, like a new state of nature at the heart of hyper civilisation’ (Baudrillard, 1968, p.3)

After prescribing the current social and moral reality that informed humanity in the post modern condition, Baudrillard then turned to the relationship between the subject and the object in relation to consciousness. In this consumer-able condition that pertained to post modern living, Baudrillard concluded that the relationship between the subject and object now formed the meaningful and post-structural living consciousness of an abstracted life. Essentially, meaning was given between what the subject identified with and what was signified in the actual relationship with a series of objects. However, meaning was produced in source from the original object, stating that,

We can see that what is consumed are not objects but the relation itself – signified and absent, included and excluded at the same time – it is the idea of the relation that is consumed in the series of objects which manifests it.’ (Baudrillard, 1968, p.11)

From this, we can see a broaching of the relationship absent from Turing and Searle’s exploration into human emotion versus binary language. However, what Baudrillard does is implement the idea of a simulated code that works by replacing older ideological and social frameworks that once informed the gap between subject and object, such as social exchange and communal ideology. By highlighting this, Baudrillard then shows how this simulated code informs a new humanity that does not live out a life according to the meaning supported by a communal language, but an imagined life that is understood and identified through its own existential relationship to the values absent and taken from the code. Essentially, this places thinking as a simulated relationship of the subject in relation to the external as a choice based upon a multi-faceted rather than binary system. Writing on the consequences of this new reality and the cultural change that goes from registering the external behaviour of a subject as an indication of a subjective response to the recognition of the other as an object image of simulated experience, Baudrillard suggested that,

A whole imagery based on contact, a sensory mimicry and a tactile mysticism, basically ecology in its entirety, comes to be grafted on to this universe of operational simulation, multi-stimulation and multi response. This incessant test of successful adaptation is naturalised by assimilating it to animal mimicry. , and even to the Indians with their innate sense of ecology tropisms, mimicry, and empathy: the ecological evangelism of open systems, with positive or negative feedback, will be engulfed in this breach, with an ideology of regulation with information that is only an avatar, in accordance o a more flexible patter.’ (Baudrillard, 1976, p.9)

It is in this observation that we turn to structuralism. It is with the support of structuralism that the emotional response and subjective cultural meanings in thinking can be seen as subject to binary oppositions. For example, it is through a series of signs relating to black and white in which emotional responses and meanings can then come to be defined and/or assimilated within the thinking of a subject. For example, if we were to look at the emotional response to a male depiction of something then the opposite would be true of the female as it accords to a series of objects related to the symbolic order (Saussure, 1910-11). Consequently, if an emotion is not deemed good then it must be deemed as bad. Such features as pain and pleasure apply to this form of physiological reality and so our thoughts are accordingly structured from our real environment. This then translates into our thinking through the language that we use to represent it. As we think in language as a symbolic representation of our experiences, then this comes to construct the way we think (Lacan, 1968). This structural onus placed upon language and thinking seems to compliment and so provide an unavoidable rationale for binary thinking. However, when we consider post structuralism and the way the conceptual mind depends upon the experience of objective referent points in terms of communicative meaning, we see a different possibility emerge.
Utilising the tools of post structuralism and aiming directly at the notion of binary opposition according to language, thinking and meaning, post colonial philosopher and cultural theorist Homi Bhabha indicated the culture defined the thinking. Highlighting the significance of the cultural origins of a learned linguistic system or vernacular and indicating that the thinking and language of binary oppositions was and is the premise of western culture and history, he states that,

This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of state; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than ‘the subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. ‘(Bhabha, 1994, p.25)

In this extract, we see that such language systems and their accompanied thinking are a reflection of the values maintained by a culture’s central premise. In essence, those that do not live within the confines of such a perspective hold different strains of that perspective. Consequently, the meaning of the structure that maintains the linguistic values of binary oppositions within a language becomes lost to a location in which the language is spoken and the thinking emerges. This then renders the fixed meaning of values, such as black against white, as fluid and free of any given static referential opposition. This can also be seen reflected in much contemporary cross cultural conceptual theory and analysis. For example, the cross cultural theorist Geert Hofstede states that values are differentiated, even if we were all to adopt the same language system, stating that,

The western concern with the truth is supported by an axiom in western logic that a statement excludes its opposite: If A is true non A, which is the opposite of A, must be false. Eastern logic does not have such an axiom. If A is true, non A may also be true, and together they create a wisdom that is superior to A or non-A. This is sometimes called the complimentary of Ying and Yang, using two Chinese characters that express the male and female elements present in all aspects of reality. Human truth in this philosophical approach is always partial’ (Hofstede, 2001, p.363)

Further to this, Bhabha suggests a different possibility for the future of human civilisation in a global sense. Rather than accepting a system of binary oppositions to align our thinking, he states that it is within a ‘third space’ found between the values of binary oppositions that we are more likely to find the course of future thinking (Bhabha, 1994). He highlights this in his text that,

If one is aware of this heterogeneous emergence (not origin) of radical critique, then – and this is my second point – function of theory within the political process becomes double edged. It makes us aware that our political references and priorities – the people, the community, class struggle, anti-racism, gender difference the assertion of an anti-imperialist, black or third perspective – are not there in some primordial, naturalistic sense.’ (Bhabha, 1994, p.25)

This reflects the premise upon which Baudrillard indicated that the role of binary oppositions would become compromised. Essentially, as the symbolic order that is meant to signify the language meaning has gone from an existential sphere to an objective media sphere it has failed in aligning our realities to the language. Essentially, through Bhabha’s locality into which we exist, and through the dominant languages inability to accord a definitive value to its associated object the notion of binary oppositions become lost to the identity of the particular person thinking and observing the language. For example, such values as black and white create particular meaning in relation to one’s own experiences. Black may be given by the language as a solid value. However, the meaning of black can become lost to what is meant to signify. For instance, if someone has experienced a black car of value in their life then they may identify with blackness in an existential way so that it becomes their identity and source of meaning in the world. Therefore, white is no longer an observable opposite within the symbolic order. However, one may then suggest that the notion of white then becomes the identity’s fundamental other through structural default. However, this is rendered obsolete with the notion that one’s identity does not pertain to an opposite. This can be seen in Bhabha’s notion of ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha, 1994). In this notion Bhabha suggests that we hold two sets of cultural reality into which our identities are plunged. For example, the notion of someone living in China, but coming from America will reduce such a notion of thinking so as to see China as opposite to America. In essence, they will have a hybrid identity, meaning that two truths are maintained, as Hofstede indicates, and that the notions of perspectives become essential to their reality and way of thinking.
‘Essentially, it would appear that binary thinking is not inevitable. Rather, when we look at the many uses of languages and ideas prevalent within culture it would appear more likely that binary thinking is becoming removed. It would also seem that values and meaning are now given and devised by the locality of our emergence into the world and that language systems can no longer be supported by a rigid structure. Furthermore, it would seem that it is through our identity to the language and reality of the world that we define meaning in a multi-faceted way. This leaves little scope for binary thinking in any sense other than through a rigid language and fixed reality; neither of which seem to be apparent or indicative of the future.