Sherlock Holmes might as well have said, “It’s binary, my dear Watson,” instead of “It’s elementary.” We are immersed in a world of dichotomies comprising binary categories, such as true or false, real or fake, night or day, open or closed, win or lose, in or out, up or down, and the list goes on and on. Even digital technologies run on binary combinations of 0s and 1s. This includes AI chatbots, which harness the intellectual capital of seemingly countless strings of 0s and 1s.

Binary processing is not limited to machines. The human brain functions at its most basic level as a binary system. To sense and interact with the world, the brain relies on decoding the firings of individual neurons. The firing of any individual neuron is an “all or nothing” event, a binary process in which the cell either fires or doesn’t fire. At a more complex level, our thinking entails binary processing whenever we classify objects using dichotomous categories such as alive or dead, animate or inanimate, moving or still, etc.

Our lived experience is a blend of binary and analog processing, comprising globs of dichotomies and gradients. Analog thinking allows us to think dimensionally in terms of gradations along a continuum, not just polar opposites. We perceive gradients of lightness and darkness, of stimulus intensity (light, sound, etc.), of pain severity, and of depth of emotion or feeling. The human brain weaves a more nuanced understanding of the world from binary pulses as well as gradients of information scaled along various dimensions. We can like someone a little or a lot along a dimension of liking, but we apply binary categories to matters like life and death, as we reckon we can’t be........

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