Vlad Goga

“Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we
imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The story of the young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem. This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes." What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here-I am here-I am life, eternal life.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”
― Carl Jung

“Complementarity. This duality might leave you feeling a bit unsettled. “At the end of the day,” you might ask, “which is it really, fundamentally?” Is your body a unitary entity or is it a phenomenon arising from its smaller parts, the interacting cells? The answer is, of course, both, equally and unequivocally. This kind of doubling of reality is a form of what quantum physicists call a complementarity. Perhaps the most famous example of complementarity is embedded in the now well-known, if perhaps not well-understood, notion that “light is both a wave and a particle.” Complementarity was originally framed in regard to the “double-slit” experiment,4 which showed that streams of light behave like beams of individual particles if observed in one way, but behave like continuous, undulating waves if observed in
a different way. This dependence on the experimental setup, on the method of observation, for whether light appeared as waves or particles was called wave-particle duality. It became clear that either description, on its own, was incomplete, insufficient to describe the nature of light in its totality. These
two partial descriptions—waves and particles—complemented each other. Only together could they capture the full nature of light, each view providing information the other excluded. Their relationship was recognized as a complementarity. Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, thought
the most deeply about this concept after he announced it in 1928. It had become clear that no single experiment could ever demonstrate both aspects of wave-particle duality at the same time. All agreed that, at the quantum level, the impossibility of capturing both states at once was a fundamental principle of the nature of existence. Bohr, however, went further, asserting that complementarity was
fundamental not just for describing existence at the incredibly minute scales of the quantum realm but for describing living beings at our normal everyday scale as well.1 Furthermore, Bohr saw complementarity as a fundamental property of existence at every scale. It was so central to his thinking that, when he was awarded Denmark’s highest honor, the Order of the Elephant, he designed a coat of arms for himself that featured a perfect symbol for complementarity, the yin-yang. Alas, perhaps due to the increasing subspecialization across all fields of science as the twentieth century rolled forward, these ideas about generalized complementarity were explored only in small corners of philosophy and science. Nonetheless, they remain very much alive. The coat of arms of Niels Bohr. “Contraria sunt complementa” means “Opposites are complementary.” Here is another way to envision complementarity, the classic black-and-white image of two profiles viewed in silhouette and the space between them looking like a vase. Which is it? Two faces? Or a vase? Of course, it is both, equally. Neither view describes the whole image, each one leaving out something essential. A complete
description requires both opposite views to be united in a single complementarity. In just the same way, whether a body is a singular entity in itself or a phenomenon arising from the nimble interactions of cells is a question easily answered. It is a complementarity as well. It is both, equally, though which of these it appears to be depends on your observational stance. Are you seeing it at the everyday scale or at the microscopic scale? At the everyday scale your body is a unitary whole. At the microscopic scale, that whole disappears into its parts—the ceaseless, dynamic cellular dance; cells in cooperation with other cells, in space and in time.”
― Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being