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 -
Thank you for taking the time to make a huge post questioning the parts and points. This is exactly the kind of discussion I hoped people would spark.
"Who cares" is other people, like younger me, who are still trying to make sense of the world, and weren't provided with an equivalently satisfying ontology by their culture or their intuition.
Well, thank you! I really only explored the top level here; it's a fractal ontology, with the essences seen at every level of reality: the what, how, and why of the physical, logical, and emotional realms.
My purpose in philosophizing is to find the topmost, complete, and most accurate philosophical system which accounts for everything: literally every thing.
Visible color as a phenomenon is a physical property of the waves of light in each color gamut (eyeballs' RGB cones, backlit RGB monitors, frontlit CYMK printing, true multicolor painting on a painter's palette, natural rainbow spectra through rainwater or off the back of an optical disc). Color as a concept has all sorts of logic, such as primary, secondary, complimentary, and opposite colors, which can be derived in each gamut. Emotional reactions to color, and the use of color to signal the viewer to feel certain emotions, is a whole field of aesthetics, art, and other fields such as workplace safety or hunting safety.
Art encodes emotions the artist wants the audience to experience into a logical plan of the final physical output, and then through engineered processes (logic interacting with the physical), embodying the art in a given final output physical medium, which includes color... unless it's non-visual art, such as a rock album digitally downloaded.
However, though everything physical has a visible color (including the black-grey-white spectrum line as the absence of color), logical and emotional things do not; they're not even transparent or weightless! My system contains the system of sorting by color, and by shape, and sorting art by type of emotion encoded by the artist, and so on. I can even say that because art is constructed in all three realms, it is in the moral realm, the center of the Venn, only produced by sentient beings, and then sort things into the categories of "produced by sentience/produced by nonsentience".
I believe I have found "the biggest box." As The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy puts it, it contains the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash.
The name is deliberately patterned after the "quintessential" and "quintessence" of the Greeks.
Arnold Kling's book, "The Three Languages of Politics", is the result of his personal Triessentialist epiphany: that each political tribe has a parallel focus on reducing a particular harm to the populace, with parallel behavior and parallel blind spots. Reading that book in earnest is pretty much guaranteed to reduce one's unreasoning hate toward one's political opponents, and to make one a more thoughtful political participant. (I need to send a copy to each of my federal and state legislators, and also my mayor and city councilor.) That's one example of Triessentialism perfectly put to a purpose.
You don't? Then you have more philosophical intuition about people than autistic me at age 22. Metaphorically, you don't need to borrow my screwdriver, you already have one. But what I was offering to let you borrow is actually the screwdriver blade of a Swiss Army Knife.
These are analytic insights I've discovered by thinking about things with "the three-thing" on my mind. I may not have needed it to understand a given field or thing which I could have studied in any other way, but it gives me a base schema for recognizing and categorizing things quickly, and quickly apply the rules I know from other such things in vastly different fields to them without in-depth study or a need to rely on other people's conceptual structures.
Part of the value of a map is as a tool for discovery: it also shows where there are no roads, allowing explorers to narrow down their search for interesting or important things before it begins. Triessentialism is fractal, self-similar, all the way down. That tells us that a physical discovery probably has applicable parallels in the logical and emotional, or has implications for the logical and emotional. It gives us ideas of where to look for additional fruitful insight.
I'll answer each of these as separate replies, as I have time, throughout the coming days. I plan to not reply to any replies you make to any of my replies until I've replied to every part of this first reply.
Well I will await your answers to my questions in order to determine if I find them satisfying or not. But I can't resist responding now to a few points you've already newly made:
This is a good example for my question about qualia in fact. I am interested in seeing how you justify the basic qualia of seeing a color, perhaps a very emotionally neutrally one, as not having a component that is non-physical, non-logical, and unemotional.
I am looking at a beigeish object right now. The subjective visual experience of seeing the beige is definitely something, but it is neither purely physical (as I explained in my earlier post), purely logical (certainly color is often embedded in a system of aesthetic logic and reasoning as you mentioned, and yet this is not required by the fundamental experience of seeing one), purely emotional (color can invoke emotion but it doesn't always given that we don't all walk around constantly emotional from the mere act of seeing, and this beige is indeed not emotion-invoking), nor a pure mix of either of the three. There is a definitely a component of it outside of those 3 categories.
But is the biggest box actually useful if you can't find anything in it?
The biggest box is the biggest building. But is the biggest building automatically the most interesting, useful, or worthwhile (or any of those things at all) if it has so simplistic and little of a floorplan that you can't reliably get to anywhere you want to go, no nice elevators, stairs, signs, hallways, room numbers, or other navigation markers and aids to get you where you need to go?
You'd like to get the room (or rooms) finally explaining how that pesky gravity really comprehensively works, and, sure, it's in the building, but good luck finding it. You're in the seventeenth room about the BTS member Jungkook, except an alternate reality version with an upside-down head, which confusingly has a corner about optimal mango farming techniques, and the next room seems to be about polka remixes of anime OPs and the Second Congo War (in space, 2289).
And think of how much you'll have to spend on electricity and heating. Perhaps a building can be too big for the amount of resources available to maintain it.
I can easily think of an ontology that's simpler than Triessentialism and provably, automatically more comprehensive: Monoessentialism, the understanding that all things are defined by existence (whether in the real or conceptual/imaginary sense), that everything exists in some sense (or it wouldn't be in the set of "everything"), that existence is, however tautologically, the fundamental property, substance, form, and characteristic of... well, existence (along with again everything, to make it somewhat less tautological).
This is, definitionally, the absolute biggest box, the absolute biggest building (perhaps some other box/building can be as big, but none can be bigger). And it is completely devoid of any quality of life improvements, not even having so much as a single fire alarm or "wet floor" sign in it, meaning it's completely worthless. You could walk around it for millennia and find barely anything useful (and good luck finding how to get back out), much less anything specific that you might be looking for. It is a book solely defined by its cover. If you've seen the sign out front, then you've seen all there is to see. (That is, it's not necessarily an insult, but it's also not necessarily a compliment either for me to say that Triessentialism is simple and (mostly) valid. 2 = 2 is entirely simple and valid but it's still not exactly great philosophy or insight. It's also worth noting that even this box/building stuff is a flawed/leaky analogy; in the real world, knowing the definition of the box/building doesn't actually grant us the ability to walk around in it, meaning you can't even say "Well a somewhat unorganized collection of everything is still kind of valuable.")
Perhaps Triessentialism really is comprehensive enough to be as big of a box as Monoessentialism. And if it is, then it's certainly not quite as navigationally useless as Monoessentialism. At the very least, it's split into 3 sections, with intersections between them too, so you've got something to go on. But still, is there enough organization of its contents to be worthwhile, or is it just a slightly more specific Borges library (which is also a reasonable claimant of the "automatically biggest box" title, and you can even actually walk around in it directly)? Even if you can analyze any object and say where it would go in the building, that's not the same as the building providing you much utility in finding objects that you didn't already know were in it.
You picked an interesting time in history to advance this argument (unless you will accept AI prompting by a sentient being as an act of sentient production).
Well, I haven't read the book, but I am very skeptical of all "We're speaking different languages politically and we'd all be able to get along if we understood each other more." claims (especially since he doesn't seem to ascribe a language to right-wing as opposed to left-wing progressives at all (along with multiple other political orientations that arguably aren't easily classified as conservative, progressive, libertarian, or some mix of them), where us fascists mostly fall on the spectrum, but then again that would make it quadressentialism or even more). (I tend to lean towards the belief that these "different languages" reflect actually different underlying values, often partially genetic/biological in origin, which are the actual sources of conflict.)
If growing knowledge of the three languages of politics spreads and really does calm political enmity then maybe I'll give Triessentialism credit but "Some guy wrote a book." isn't really a great example of a practical victory for it. A lot of similar books have been written about every subject and mostly accomplish nothing.
(And to be honest, reading a bit about the book it mostly does seem like generic pablum. There have been 10,000 similar explanations of the fundamental values of differing political orientations, and it never makes any difference (and as I again believe likely can't make any difference) in regards to reconciling those disparate values. I can explain in great detail the difference between Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometry and how they're really just looking at essentially the same thing through a different lens... but that's still not going to make them agree about the parallel postulate. And if these geometries were people or political ideologies, and if the nature of parallel lines were a matter affecting health, wealth, families, relationships, sexuality, liberty, prosperity, happiness, and lives in general, would they ever stop fighting over it? I doubt it.)
I still believe my option would prove superior then. "Quint" ends in a consonantal sound. "Tri" ends in a vowel sound. "Trissentialism" preserves the character of the original more IMO in that it doesn't have consecutive vowel sounds at the beginning. Of course this is nitpicking but "Trissentialism" sure just glides off the tongue much more easily to me.
Well this sounds interesting and I will await your further explanation/justification of this.
Sorry if I'm spamming with you too much. I am a "compelled to respond" type (a bad habit I occasionally try to restrain). Hopefully I'm at least giving you a decent amount to think about.
You indeed are giving me a lot to think about, clarify, and explain; I’ve copied your first reply’s four points into Notepad++ so I can pursue them at length without fear of the site edit box’s whimsy.
The new point you made here about Kling’s Three Languages not having a spot on its triangular spectrum for self-labeling fascist people is easy. The three languages’ egregores are fighting for a majority of American minds and hearts, and the majority of “nonpolitical” or “undecided” Americans think of themselves as moderates who want peace, not radicals who’ll deliberately champion oppression, coercion, or barbarism. Triessentialism would categorize it as a matter of preserving esteem (one of the “four stores of value”) in the eyes of those they wish to build a relationship with.
(The four stores of value are esteem, utility, experiences, and agency. It’s the latest big addition to Triessentialism, and there are four instead of three because agency is at the center of the Venn: choice.)
I assure you sir that we champion no such thing (well, maybe coercion to some degree, but that's literally every government system ever except varieties of full anarchy or panarchy). We believe (as all ideologies admittedly do) that we are in fact the ones opposed to the oppressors and barbarians. And as for esteem, there is no greater esteem than that possessed by the fully realized fascist man of action (nor greater utility nor agency for that matter, and I imagine that the loli harems will provide good experiences as well).
In any case, I thought we were going for the biggest box here? What does it matter what your average American thinks?
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