QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

The view-point of complementarity allows us to avoid any futile discussion about an
ultimate determinism or indeterminism of physical events, by offering a straightforward
generalisation of the very ideal of causality, which can aim only at the synthesis of
phenomena describable in terms of a behavior of objects independent of the means of
observation. 655
Victor von Weisskopf tells that Bohr illustrated complementarity by referring to a Cubist
painting displayed in his house, which depicted people in many apparently inconsistent ways.
The whole represented many different aspects of a person at one and the same time and all the
different perspectives were necessary if the object being portrayed was to be ”come at” in a
many-sided way. According to Weisskopf, Bohr wanted to say that there were many different
apparently contradictory ways of classifying human experience. A sunset could be examined
from a physical point of view by thinking about the passage of light and why the sun appears to
be red, or the combination of colours could be marvelled at from an aesthetic point of view. In
the same way, a Beethoven sonata could be examined as a vibration in the air or as a
spontaneous musical and emotional state. All the complementary methods of handling
experience increased the significance of a phenomenon, while the other methods, when studied
from the viewpoint of a single isolated approach, could be considered to be weak and badlydefined.
Poetic statements are not reasonable in scientific description, and psychological
arguments are not reasonable in a neurophysiological context. 656
Quite clearly, whenever we are describing phenomena from which our own influence or
interpretation cannot be isolated, the same situation can quite reasonably be outlined using
different complementary frames of reference. When, for example, the portrayal of a specific
person by a wife, a foreman and an adversary appear to be contradictory, all the honestly
expressed descriptions should in the spirit of complementarity be taken as true representations of
the separate viewpoints which complement each other. Nevertheless, even all such descriptions
taken together are hardly likely to exhaust the countless possibilities that are linked to possible
manifestations of the target in different situations. Consequently, the portrayal that for whatever
reason appears as truth to some must be seen as a product of historical and context-bound
circumstance. Fundamentally, the formation of descriptions and comparisons between them can
be seen as a personal and ethical challenge faced by each human individual.
655 Bohr 1939, 25.
656 Weisskopf 1990, 66, 325-328.
240