Presumably we exhibit these two modes because we are both hunters and hunted. Foraging requires a narrow concentration on a precise piece of ground with not only optical focus but also the neurological machinery to act on the discovery of prey or food. This focus is tiny in scale compared with the surrounding environment, whether that be savannah or forest. At precisely the same moment, if we lose awareness of the larger environment, we may fail to notice a predator that is devoting the same amount of focus in stalking us. In successful stalking we must conquer our fear; in evading our own predator we require successful amounts of vigilance and fear. It is a question of scale: by dominating our prey (which might be a speck of seed or a large mammal) we have to assume a larger virtual size; we are smaller than our predator by virtue of being in their sights.
This parallelism gives us larger brains than either our prey or our predator. It gives us our capacity for examining what is or seems to be, and simultaneously our capacity for contemplating what might otherwise be the case, perhaps one of the origins of imagination.
Individuals may develop tendencies in one direction or the other—engineers and priests, but also surgeons and doctors—but most of us contain capacities within us for trends that over time are opposite or at least asymmetric. The collective sense also depends upon a constructed world on the one hand—the built environment and the ordering of social routines—but quite as much a conceptual world upon the other—religious, philosophical and moral dimensions which transcend the empiric and the pragmatic.
Binaries: the garden with forking paths
X or Y? I am not drawing attention to the dual possibility of the sex chromosome but to the notion that each moment in time could be said to be either replete or oblivious to choice. How long is a moment, when do moments amount to an event? These are variable and subjective measures that arise from our situation and may be novel or patterned, intermittent or continuous. Although choice, when welcome, may increase our sense of agency, it nevertheless imposes a load upon capacitance. When there is a clear choice, the fork is binary for which the letter Y might serve as diagram, whether the choice be important or trivial.
When there are more than two choices or when the best course is imponderable, whether the outcome be unimportant or (to pun slightly) crucial, the letter X may signify better.
The human trajectory is a series of moments where choice is automatised, determined by the imaginary track that we follow or are led or driven along, so to speak. But when we pause our automatisation, we seem to stop on the track effortlessly and quickly come across an X or a Y, from where we trudge or stride or venture along what we thought was, and what might turn out to be, a new lane, until a binary Y turns up that may conceal an X. Binary patterns in the world help us recognise ordinary transitions the better to negotiate the Garden with Forking Paths (in homage to Jorge Luis Borges) and thereby give us the time and energy to recognise our arrival at a cross in the road.
Circadian binaries and transition zones
| Early | Late |
| Morning | Afternoon |
| Day | Night |
| Up | Down |
| To | From |
| Dawn | Dusk |
| Embryo | Foetus |
| Womb | World |
| Infant | Child |
| Child | Adolescent |
| Adolescent | Adult |
| Spring | Autumn |
This list of binaries may seem obvious and banal but they emphasise the link between the binary nature of mindedness and the cyclical and tidal structures in which we and all the elements of the biosphere are embedded. Of course multiple choices may present themselves at any presenting juncture or pause, but they represent the elaboration of an underlying branching structure with a binary root, an afferent and efferent pathway.
Monophyletic pathways adopted by plant taxonomy (Section 23) insist upon a Y and exclude anything more prolific than a single fork. I will develop this theme in Multiple Choice in Section 14 and elsewhere.
Symmetry
The mindedness hypothesis is based upon fundamental asymmetries (food and danger)38 against a background which is patterned, which is to say similarly asymmetric (day and night, summer and winter) where even these patterns are variable enough to compromise prediction. Even so, resource availability is inherently unpredictable while circadian rhythms can be quite well known, so the symmetry of opposites is not broken. Developmental binaries in the list above move in one direction and so can never be symmetrical except in the weak sense that old age and childhood share elements of dependence. Even in the long term, there is a clearly distributed pattern of energy and capacitance over the years which at the scale of a long lifetime peaks at the centre either side of the twin slopes of growing and declining capacity.
Symmetry between the two arms of the autonomic nervous system—between the storage of energy and its discharge—provides a critical index of health. The amount of symmetry may be inversely proportional to creativity as defined by the search for new and interesting patterns.
Energy is the key to Poise: storing it and spending it to the extent that circumstances permit and demand. If that is true it shows the inherent absurdity of separating mental and social demands from biological ones. “Circumstances” range over the entirety of human experience. I will pick up this point again from a clinical perspective in the note called Equilibrium in Part Two. In this Part One, Section 4 follows in several segments and elaborates on the model developed in Sections 1–3; the overall model continues in Section 5.
Energy and Matter are interconverted in the ratio that Einstein famously demonstrated. Matter in biological systems organises itself into Informational circuits. These, according to Shannon's Theories of Information, are subject to many of the constraints faced by any thermodynamic system. Energy, Matter and Information are interconversions that stand behind all the operations that are manifest and behind those we select to treat.
It may be that Physics will inevitably rest upon Metaphysical assumption just as the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection so rests in Biology, even if most of us believe that no more convincing rival assumption can explain the elaboration of the natural world. I propose one such metaphysic that holds binary symmetry to be intrinsic, and states: being cannot exist without non–being. This answers the question “Why is there something and not nothing?” with the reply “There can only be both”. Being goes on necessarily to bifurcate, maintaining binary opposition, symmetrical at first. If it could be explained how and why this should be the case, it would move from metaphysics to physics, if the boundary is really as clear as physicists would have us believe.
Gaia's sister: the biosphere—separations and divisions
Things and events
Where do we draw the line and with what do we draw it?
An arresting anecdote was related by a beekeeper during his talk to a group of herbalists, which I attended. It concerned his school days at an establishment run on strict vegetarian lines where they were told that if they ate cabbage which had inadvertently included a cabbage–white caterpillar, they had not transgressed, for what was a cabbage–white caterpillar other than a concentrated extract of cabbage, the animal's only food, after all. As an omnivore I might have stressed the extra intake of animal protein but a different point of view was being expressed on ideological grounds that inadvertently included another (and