Thread: Why?

Hello,

This is my first post here, so i will take a look around after i post this.

I was wondering the other day, why in life there is generally 2 sides in life? for example

Electricity has positive & negative charges for it to work correctly

We have North and south poles

Even down to binary we only have 2 outcomes 1 and 0

People who believe in god there is heaven and hell

It's like a balance, which can go one way or the other

There is many more things when you look at them they only have really 2 out comes, and i was wondering if any clever people could enlighten me why they think this is?

Thanks i look forward to reading your posts.

It's partly just a linguistic issue: we're used to the idea that if there's "x", there must also be "-x" (like 'light', 'not light'=dark). But we could also call them two different unrelated things. For example darkness exists, but does 'lightness' exist as an equal? No, that only exists in our perception. Or positive and negative charges: we percieve them as two sides of the same coin, the one as the equal and opposite of the other. But we could also see positive charge and negative charge as two different things.

Ok that's kinda abstract, but my point is that we often ascribe qualities to nature which are really our inventions and don't exist apart from in our perception.

This might sound stupid, but even two different charges repell eachother within their kind. It's not like one is good. they behave in the exact same way, and if that is good and evil, then I'm not "in". They are not opposites, they are 2 sides of a coin with 2 tails. Either you go backwards or forwards, neither is recommended with reason, for a person with 2 heads.

i believe the reason that there is usually 2 sides is, people need to have choices. If there were only 1 side then people wouldn't have any choices to make. I believe the common number is 2 not 3 or 4 because alot of things in human culture is based upon the belief that there is a right and a wrong.

Thanks for your replys, i have found something which pretty much seems to sum up my question....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

most thigns are divided into 2 sides one side of the thing and the other. If you add more sides you can have 4 different things and so on but as they say its a rather linguistic thing and its hard for our brains to udnerstanding dividing it into 3 catogories that isnt between 2 of them and all desrive different sides of the same thing

Maybe it's a binary world...

I believe that the thinking in dualisms comes from evolutionary history. There were life-supporting and life-threatening factors for life.
Hence, we have "good" and "evil", and everything else is probaböy derived by this.

However, there are other things like the charge of matter particles. But they are at least threefold: "positive", "negative" and "neutral".

Often when things are simplified to such a point, all greys become trivial and we only see black and white.

Then, hopefully, we realize, "Screw this, show me the colors."

Originally Posted by jamie_crichton

Hello,

This is my first post here, so i will take a look around after i post this.

I was wondering the other day, why in life there is generally 2 sides in life? for example

Electricity has positive & negative charges for it to work correctly

We have North and south poles

Even down to binary we only have 2 outcomes 1 and 0

People who believe in god there is heaven and hell

It's like a balance, which can go one way or the other

There is many more things when you look at them they only have really 2 out comes, and i was wondering if any clever people could enlighten me why they think this is?

Thanks i look forward to reading your posts.

I am asumming you have heard of yin and yang also.

Anyways, we require contrast to makes sense of and understand things. If there was no dark how could there be light? If there was no posoitive how could there be negetive? I think the questions here is: are these contrasts existant on their own or do we make them?

I think I'd say the same as has been said a few times above. In other words:
There can be no characteristic without a conceivable opposite characteristic. That applies to everything, real and imaginary.
The original question was 'Why?' I can't think of any reason, except to state the obvious, i.e., that's just the way our universe happens to be.
It's very interesting that physicists have discovered new particles as a result of their conviction that symmetry should prevail.

So, on the mental side or linguistic side of this subject. Our words or understandings ususally have an opposite so that we may understand the meaning of the 'non-opposite'? It would be like DNA sequencing, that we must compare code to code in order to understand what sections of it code for.

I think...

We define opposites through our language. We call something 'positive' only because we know that there's an alternative, 'negative', case. We consider the quality of luminosity, and give names to the conditions of its presence or absence, e.g., in English, light and dark. We have, in our language, a catalogue of such distinctions. Language helps us to make some sense of the world, but only to the extent that we know what the reality actually is.

Yes, I think your right, Nanobrain. Understanding what something is requires understanding at least something about what it isn't.

duality only takes into account opposition. it doesnt take into account the degree of opposition.
-1 and 1 are opposite.
-10 and 10 are bigger opposites.
etc.

Originally Posted by coolaak

i believe the reason that there is usually 2 sides is, people need to have choices. If there were only 1 side then people wouldn't have any choices to make. I believe the common number is 2 not 3 or 4 because alot of things in human culture is based upon the belief that there is a right and a wrong.

True. But that is largely recent in western culture.The good vs evil, black and white etc. is largely a philosophy that arose 'as mainstream' shortly before Christianity and Christianity picked up the ball and ran with it. In many religions, culture and so on there was not such a dichotomy. Norse gods, those of the Greeks, Romans, etc. don't expound such simplicity.

In science the 'description' of phenomenon is often '2 sided' but, as stated above, that is more human perception and not necessarily the reality...we can't perceive the reality at the subatomic level. We overlay the physical experience we perceive in the macro level. We can't 'see' the effects of the quantum or think in 8, 10 or 12 dimensions.

Originally Posted by crichton01

Hello,

This is my first post here, so i will take a look around after i post this.

I was wondering the other day, why in life there is generally 2 sides in life? for example

Electricity has positive & negative charges for it to work correctly

We have North and south poles

Even down to binary we only have 2 outcomes 1 and 0

People who believe in god there is heaven and hell

It's like a balance, which can go one way or the other

There is many more things when you look at them they only have really 2 out comes, and i was wondering if any clever people could enlighten me why they think this is?

Thanks i look forward to reading your posts.

I take it you're not including the THREE colour charges of quarks then

or the three consituents of an atom,
and he 3 atoms which the most important molecule on earth consists of(water)

Yes, but when it comes to matter (such as the particles that make up atoms), don't scientist believe there is also anti-matter? I'm not sure what they know about this, but I know it's something they're trying to find. This would give matter a second side to the coin.

lots of good answers here, and mine is pretty much just another way of saying what has already been said:

it helps to draw the boundaries for what something isnt.

i guess ive always looked at life like that as well...

i always figured that our universe was just built around the idea of balance. for every good there is an evil. for all the light, there is just as much shade. so why couldnt that be? is it all just in our minds? do we all just see the universe in such contrast? that black and white? i think its plauseable, but we dont seem to notice teh degrees. we just assume that there is a balance for every extreme out there. thats what ive learned to believe at least.