Dissonance Painting 2: Dual States

"Dissonance painting 2: Dual States ", 60/43cm, oil on canvas, 2015

From the work of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl G. Jung has resulted a philosophical approach, called by Harald Atmanspacher the Pauli-Jung conjecture, of dual-aspect monism which has a very specific further feature, namely that different aspects may show a complementarity in a quantum physical sense. That is, the Pauli-Jung conjecture implies that with regard to mental and physical states there may be incompatible descriptions of different parts that emerge from the whole. This stands in close analogy to quantum physics, where complementary properties cannot be determined jointly with accuracy.




Atmanspacher further refers to Paul Bernays' views on complementarity in physics and in philosophy when he states that "two complementary description mutually exclude each other although both together are needed to describe the situation exhaustively.




In physics, complementarity is a both a theoretical and experimental result of quantum mechanics, also referred as principle of complementarity, closely associated with the Copenhagen interpretation. It holds that objects have complementary properties which cannot be measured accurately at the same time. The more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the complementary property is measured, according to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Further, a full description of a particular type of phenomenon can only be achieved through measurements made in each of the various possible bases — which are thus complementary. The complementarity principle was formulated by Niels Bohr, a leading founder of quantum mechanics.