Ambiguity - Ambiguity, Probability, Uncertainty, And The Arrow Of Time, The Dynamics Of Ambiguity, Ambiguity As A Permanent Cultural Value
aristotle opposites substance simultaneously
By instinct humans yearn for reassurance and certainties and dream of an orderly universe where the reasoning process corresponds to external reality. This attitude is reflected by the assumption, authoritatively legitimized by Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), that no responsible statement can exhibit internal contradictions. In his Categories, Aristotle states that the essential character of a substance seems to be its ability to host opposites. At any instant, however, one can assign either a quality or its opposite to a substance: According to Aristotle, "Nobody can be simultaneously sick and healthy. Similarly, nothing is at the same time white and black. No object exists simultaneously hosting opposites." No alternatives exist besides these two; any third possibility is excluded: tertium non datur.
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According to Aristotle, the substitution of opposite qualities hosted by a substance during a transformation has a discontinuous character. His logic seems to imply a step-by-step flow of time and rules out the intervention of a critical situation where opposite qualities can smoothly cooperate and compete together in the same substance. This schematizes evolution as a quasi-static change of objec…
In the 1680s Isaac Newton's concept of absolute, mathematical time depicted a uniform flow deprived of any psychological aspect, including a propensity to flow only toward the future. In the 1700s Pierre-Simon Laplace's rigid, deterministic viewpoint left no space to uncertainties and contradictions. Most likely the above breakthroughs in the Weltanschauung (worldview), relevant for …
Open systems, far removed from (thermodynamic) equilibrium by intense fluxes of resources—such as matter, energy, and information—exceeding certain critical thresholds, undergo dynamic instabilities resulting in the emergence of spatial, temporal, or functional order. These instabilities exhibit a critical region where the transformation has not yet occurred and yet, at the same time…
In conclusion, complex concepts of quantum physics and the structure of matter are intimately connected with optical illusions, paradoxes, and ambiguity, features usually attributed to the world of art rather than to science. Both art and science are produced, emotionally and rationally, by our thinking. And our thinking proceeds chaotically, on the jagged watershed of a permanent cultural value: …
Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Caglioti, Giuseppe. The Dynamics of Ambiguity. Berlin: Springer, 1992. ——. "Perception of Ambiguous Figures: A Qualitative Model Based on Synergetics and Quantum Mechanics." In Ambiguity in Mind and Nature: Multistable Cognitive Phenomena, edited by Peter Kruse and Michael Stadler. Berlin:…
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