Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn delivers a Brexit speech at the National Transport Design Centre, Coventry University Technology Park, in Coventry. February 26, 2018. Aaron Chown/Press Association. All rights reserved.Light can be treated as both a wave and a particle depending on the experiment we, as observers, use to examine its behaviour. This apparent paradox was described for many years as the ‘wave–particle dualism’, implying that they were incompatible and irreconcilable phenomena.
Dualism describes antagonistic or negating opposites: mind/matter, objective/subjective, Brexit/Remain. Two concepts form a dualism when they belong to the same logical level and at that level are perceived as opposites. The logic behind this dialectic is negation. Negation takes a proposition p to another proposition not-p. Not-p is interpreted intuitively as being true when p is false, and false when p is true. This fuels pugilistic media interviews and adversarial politics. Modern duels are fought with dualisms. This fuels pugilistic media interviews and adversarial politics. Modern duels are fought with dualisms.
Such dualistic thinking is a product of the prevailing objectivist Cartesian world view, with its orthodox logic, under which we are still brought up. In science, it was not until it was recognized that phenomena we observe in ‘nature’ are not independent of our acts of observing them, that this wave/particle paradox was resolved by appreciating that their behaviours are in fact complementary and constitute a duality rather than a dualism. Taken together they do not negate each other but create a unity or a coherent whole.
