Philosophy Now Forum

MacFarlane writes about the evolution of functionality , the functionality of an agent, the ability of an agent to be or become functional through complementarity. He writes that the individual agent on its own does not have the complexity to handle all contingencies it encounters. Thus it seeks out...

The violinist who smashes the violin ends a complementary relationship which was one-sided from the beginning. I doubt that a complementary relationship between a conscious being and an inanimate object is at all possible. The violin simply does not care. Only the violinist does care, very much. Ne...

Nietzsche´s Zarathustra would be of a different opinion and prefer the solitude of a hermit than the debilitating company of blinking over-civilized humanity. That got me thinking about the meaning of hermit and how it might apply to the discussion. Probably there is a connection between hermit and...

How about a solo artist having a complementary relationship with her/his instrument where one day the artist turns on said instrument and smashes it to pieces, turning it into a un-complementary relationship. Or a person who has a stroke and loses the influence of part of its brain, making for a men...

A violinist or a singer can theoretically refuse to cooperate and start performing a solo part.

There will be a complementarity in some other way.

I think complementarity can come in threes and more, like in a polyphony fashion, like an orchestra or a choir.

Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist, referred to complementarity as psychophysical parallelism . As I understand it, he was taking about human consciousness, with its source being the complementary mind/body relationship. I find the idea of parallelism helpful in understanding complementarity....

Kant wrote, "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View". I am substituting 'Cosmopolitan' with 'Complementarity', for Kant did also speak of it. And when you think about it, a cosmopolitan state is a state of complementarity. In this text Kant writes about the compleme...

I understand metaphysics to be big physics: " the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space ." The shadows you talk about are the product of opposites. They are litera...

Opposites I would say are complementary in that they help define the other.

I guess there are degrees and variables to complementaries. Nothing is always black and white.

In art and music one can sense the shades and subtle contrasts of complementarity best.

It looks more like a part of it. That's how the yin yang people also see things. Yet in many ways the two can be mutually exclusive. But, on the other hand, each needs the other in order to survive and continue. It's like the two poles of electricity. They both seem inseparable but they are separab...

Some people do have an innate knowledge of what is a complementary aspect. Other complementary aspects take time to evaluate. It is like common sense or rationality. What constitutes them. Sometimes we know right away and sometimes it takes time to discover them. A lot of it is like theory. If it ho...

The one interesting thing I read in it is that David Hume changed his name from 'Home' because he was tired of his school chums rhyming it with comb. Also, that Rousseau wrote an opera, and that Kant referred to the ideas of both men.

As Allister MacFarlane points out in his article Complementarity & Reality (issue 80) metaphysics is made up of complementaries. But for a complementarity to be realistic it has to make sense. For instance, MacFarlane, at the beginning of his article, points out the complementary attributes of a...

I am reading Quantum by Manjit Kumar from which I discovered the Complementarity Principle which was fathered by Niels Bohr. Imagine the jolt I received when I read Allister MacFarlane's article in PN issue 80 about complementarity and reality.