Here’s a portion of my response in a recent conversation with a student of Dramatica:
Well, let’s be clear about the different between iterations and flips and rotates. Flips and rotates are justification. Iterations is the process of the mind expanding to the size of mind constant wherein, you can look at something larger that the top of the tower, but you’d lose the bottom level, or vice versa. With four dimensions to look at self – KTAD – and four to look at the material world – MEST – we must make the rounds, mentally, to check the value of each of those eight compared to the other seven. But, in the process of looking at our relationship to the material world, moving from one measurement to the next takes time. So, in a spatial sense, by the time you’ve gotten through all eight measurements, one of the earlier ones might have changed due to inner or outer circumstances, so the mind goes back and does it all again. But in a temporal sense, doing it all again in the same order always favors the last point, so one must go back and do them all again, but in a different order. Of course, this could go on and on, but that’s what iterations are all about – the process of examining all of these different perspectives over again to see if something has changed and in a series of progressively different sequences. Naturally, this reduces inaccuracy, but it cannot eliminate it, no matter how many iterations you build into the system. But that never comes up because of the size of mind constant that can only hold four items across (horizontally) and four levels down (vertically) before you run out of available dimensions and iterations and run into that problem of losing detail to see a bigger picture or losing the overview to see more detail. All you can know about a single point on the helix is expressed by the table of story elements. Any more than that, you are moving up and down the helix.
Now, justification isn’t breaking bonds, it is breaking position (space) or sequence (time) in going through the iterations as listed above. And this is driven by an incompatibility between the mind and the material world, as outlined earlier. So, iterations are non-justified and flips and rotates are the process of justification upon the non-justified mind. PRCP tells you to what degree your spatial assessment is out of whack. 1234 tells you the degree to which your sequential assessment is out of whack. Between the two you can determine if you should go with your spatial or temporal view because it is more accurate. And that is seen in having two justification wind-ups – one that will be labeled with 1234 or PRCP and then wound up again when the other of 1234 or PRCP will be applied. The second one applied is the one doubly out of whack and in a narrative, that is the one that must be changed in order to resolve the inequity, or at least to put the problem where the inequity is.
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