Vlad Goga

“The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.”
― Neil Theise, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being

“Don't hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen: this is the path to peace.”
― Epictetus, Discourses and Selected Writings

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“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