Can Opposites Be True at the Same Time? The Hidden Truth About Contradictions

[@alexplorer]

I'm not attacking the premise, but the example of light having contradictory natures isn't a contradiction. Robert Anton Wilson used to use this as an example against thinking only in terms of "is." You can't say light "is" a particle or "is" a wave so much as you can say light "appears to be" one or the other, and that depends on the instrumentation you use or the context by which light presents one of those properties. Even then, it's more that we're applying analogies selectively (e.g., thinking of photons as rubber balls; thinking of light waves as waves on the surface of a plane of water in the presence of Earth's gravity). In fact, you can think of gravity in more than one way such as attraction that causes a pull or as warped spacetime such that movement through time results in movement through space if space is warped. (Look up Edward Current's channel. He has a device that warps an elastic sheet with a graph representing one dimension of space and one of time, and you can see gravity emerge as a "force" just from the non-linear path resulting from this "warping" mass does to the "fabric" both literally and by analogy.) If you apply two different analogies, they're just maps of the territory representing different attributes, so they are not the fundamental properties themselves. It's like someone reading Aesop's fable about the stag and saying, "Vanity cannot be a stag's obsession with his own antlers! I'm sure it must be Narcissus' obsession with his own reflection! Narcissus is not a deer!" There's no contradiction in a case like that, just different teaching tools for understanding and predicting the properties.

[@victoralfonssteuck]

Thank you so much for your contribution, it was incredibly insightful! What you said makes a lot of sense - it might be what I would call a "false contradiction," as it stops being contradictory once the terms are clarified. That said, I also think this doesn’t invalidate the existence of real contradictions and dialetheas. As I mentioned in the text, there’s a method to discern which contradictions are genuine and which are not, and your explanation aligns perfectly with that idea. It also reminded me a lot of Brouwer’s intuitionistic logic, but idky. Thinking further, this cases don’t meet the criteria for being real contradictios - they are not self-referential, among other disqualifying factors. So, I really appreciate you pointing this out, as well as the recommendations! I’ll definitely look into all the names you mentioned when I have some time. Thanks again for taking the time to share this! PS: Your contribution was so good that I’ll have to revise my text as well. Honestly, it’s inspired me to write a completely new one because now, thanks to you, I’ve found another great example of an apparent contradictions - one even better than the Ship of Theseus. Really amazing, so thank you!

[@gluetubeserver]

Why are you replying using chatGPT?

[@victoralfonssteuck]

Apologies for the background music in the audio! It was unintentional, and I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Thanks for your understanding!

[@hush22performance1]

Thank you for sharing.

[@VilcxjoVakero]

Coming at it from a perspective of, let's say, theology and church history - I definitely have thoughts re: Trinitarianism. You're exactly right to think of it as an axiomatic paradox as it is usually taught - I've heard a lot of Christians, maybe especially preachers, talk about it in terms of paradox, and as 'the deepest and most essential mystery of Christianity'; I've also heard secular commentators suggest that religions love paradox because it is basically a way to signal commitment to your correligionists. I do also slightly wonder if part of the reason is that for the last 1500y Christianity has regularly had to define itself in opposition to Islam, for which the oneness of God is traditionally much, much more emphasized. The challenge for thinking about Trinitarianism as paradox, for me anyway, is that when the doctrine emerged historically it was intended to _clarify_ and _reify_ a set of axiomatic beliefs that were sometimes contradictory but mostly taken at face value, _e.g._ the most persuasive arguments around it came down to definitions of 'son' and 'one' that their proponents articulated with reference to everyday sons and unities. Augustine and some of my beloved Neo-Platonists were particularly interested in explaining this by making paradoxes out of everyday things, e.g. the old lover-loved-love trope, but that might just have been them doing what they liked to do anyway, since pagan Neo-Platonists were doing stuff like this, including something we might well consider trinitarianism, all the time anyway. Which is to say, I guess, that Trinitarianism has gotten more contradictory/enigmatic over time, and at the same time more central for many theologians, and we can sort of see it happening in real time in terms of real things. Well, and besides that, to give my Neo-Platonists one more boost, Pseudo-DIonysius' on the Divine Names is a pretty good example of contradictory/paradoxical but not explicitly trinitarian thinking in Christianity at around the same time.

[@victoralfonssteuck]

Thank you so much for your insightful comment! Honestly, I had no idea about all these parallel discussions - like the connections with Pseudo-Dionysius, or how Trinitarianism evolved in contrast to Islam. It’s fascinating, and I really appreciate you sharing this context. Just to clarify, I’m not formally educated in any of this - I’m just a curious enthusiast who loves reading and thinking about these topics. Your comment has given me so much to think about and explore further. Thanks again for taking the time to share such a thoughtful perspective! 😊

[@stanzajrclips3733]

Great food for thought! I could see a scenario maybe where contradictions exist in there own sort of closed system so not to break down axiomatic laws which depend on logic. I also think that as humans we categorise things into binary too much when many elements of life exist as a spectrum. For a simple example take Socrates standing or sitting. Is Socrates standing or sitting if he is squatting? Is he both or neither? Squatting is like an intermediate stage between the two ends of the spectrum (standing and sitting). And you can move along this spectrum infinitesimally in either direction. I believe that human definitions and concepts discretely categorise many things because we truly cannot grapple with infinities in day to day communication. This discrete categorisation indeed does form paradoxes for humans and our understanding - someone who is squatting technically is both standing and sitting in a sense. However are they TRULY a paradox in the universes existence, or just a paradox in our feeble understanding of the universe and how we define things? Or maybe those two scenarios mean the same thing for our concerns! Maybe we will never know :)

[@victoralfonssteuck]

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. I absolutely loved the squatting metaphor - it's beautiful. What if Socrates was squatting? It's not just profound; it's also very silly and hilarious.😂😂😂 I loved it! Thank you for sharing and commenting!

[@stuffy.design]

I can't hear shi w tha music😭

[@victoralfonssteuck]

@@stuffy.design I'm so sorry. 😭 I don’t know what happened, but I swear it only lasted a few seconds. If you can’t understand what was said during those seconds, you can turn on the subtitles; they should help. I’m sorry again, it won’t happen again.

[@stuffy.design]

@victoralfonssteuck yippie

[@StrangeTardigrade]

Yesn't

[@VilcxjoVakero]

They're real and not real

[@victoralfonssteuck]

That's a good point hahahaha

[@HusseinHafez]

Describing the wave particular duality of matter as a contradiction is being loose with terms Contradiction is not being two things at once but being two things that are mutually exclusive.

[@victoralfonssteuck]

Thank you for your insightful comment! You’re absolutely right that describing wave-particle duality as a contradiction is imprecise, and for that, I apologize. A true contradiction would involve, as you smartly pointed out, mutually exclusive properties, whereas wave-particle duality reflects complementary aspects of the same phenomenon, depending on the measurement context. Your point ties in well with another interaction I recently had here in the comments with user alexplorer, who highlighted the difference between "is" and "appears to be." Once the terms are clarified and the context is understood, this apparent contradiction dissolves. Thanks again for your contribution-it really helps refine the discussion! 😊 PS: While it’s not a contradiction, logically, something cannot truly be two things at the same time in the same way, so maybe that's where I was coming from. But even then you are right, wave-particle duality shows us that the quantum realm often challenges our classical intuitions, making such phenomena feel counterintuitive but not logically inconsistent. It is not a real contradiction and I was being loose with terms. So thank you again.