Yin and Yang

You certainly know Yin and Yang, “the opposing forces of change in the universe”, but do you know that the cave painters developed the predecessor of the numerology holding the “2” in very high esteem?

While the 3 as time and the 4 as space is somewhat easy to understand, i had a hard time to comprehend the value of the Two. Oh yes, sure, i had pondered about the omnipresent 4, you cannot find only in the ancient cultures – did you ever realize, how often 4 basic types occur? Even Star Trek’s success may depend on the simple fact, that Kirk (the manager), Spock (the scientist), the Doc (the careful) and Scotty (the engineer) fit exactly into such a pattern: four basic complementary types, describing the whole set of human psyches, especially when they are used in combination (main type, second type) to map the variety of different persons. Actually, if you find descriptions using 3 or 5 or 6 “basic” types ask yourself, if those types really are complementary – and how to prove that.

(Main type, second type) = (x,y) – the description of a 2-dimensional space can be done by a coordinate plane, where you can accurately describe a single point of the infinity of mathematical points by its projections onto the coordinate axes. So the axes, a cross, gives you control over that set, with the “origin” as a well-defined position, from where you can build relations and maps, where you can create a “geometry”. And an axis can be described by its extremities - two “poles”, two opposing extremes tied together: Yin and Yang.

Now add to the static axis the permanent movement of life, the universe and the quantum noise – then you may understand why the “2” was sign of the gods in ancient Egypt, because you can see the “2” as symbol for the drive of the universe, the power behind time and space, creating waves rolling between the two poles, tending towards an equilibrium, behaving like a human body monitoring and controlling the variety of cyclic processes (->information) to stabilize the state “health”.

Information: repeatable, identifiable process, standing waves, describable by two states – inital state and end state, but despite the static nature of states mainly dynamic, mainly wave, mainly change, a fact, which is so hard to understand by modern scientists and so natural to the ancient philosophers: Yin and Yang, states in permanent interdependent change: “Each of these opposites produce the other”.

I guess, the ancient philosophers would also easily understand information and quantum physics, because they didn’t do the mistake to see the world as static.

Seems as if not every “progress” tends toward future.

Except maybe...

if the successors of the ancient cultures, the Asian people, move on doing the development for the information technology – because if they combine both, the IT and Yin and Yang – they will have no problems to define information like the western minds have, firmly cemented in the ancient Greek Philosophy of a stable Determinism, believing in static constancy instead of the driving force “information”.