Is this a fair analogy?

Question

The human being is both an individual and all of humanity (ie; shared gene pool, shared environment, shared energy) in the same way that light is both particle and a wave? Please help me to further my understanding.

Answer 1

I think it's a fair question, although it is based more on philosophy than on science. We can certainly speak of a human being as an individual or as a species with very different properties. Human behavior can even be predicted by statistics, chaos theory, etc, which also works for "God playing dice with the universe." But the analogy really breaks down when we consider the world of the quantum, which is completely alien to all familiar objects at a macro level. Even when we treat an electron as a particle, (by looking at the distribution of the two slit experiment on an electron-by-electron basis), we see that it forms an interference pattern like a wave. And when we think of it as a wave, it often turns around and behaves (via Planck's constant) like a particle. So the wave is not the perception of the collection of particles, as is the case with the individual vs the species. Nor, of course, is the particle the perception of a group of waves. At the quantum level, both sets of properties co-exist in a way that I venture to say is not fully understood.

Comparisons between sentient organisms and subatomic particles are interesting for party discussions, but probably have no technical merit. Interesting question, though.

Answer 2

Absolutely not. Light is both a particle and a wave because it behaves partially like one and partially like the other, and if we set up an experiment designed to prove that light is a particle we will detect it as a particle, whereas if we set up an experiment designed to prove that light is a wave, we will detect it as a wave. Saying that a human being is both an individual and all of humanity is not in any way related to this.

Answer 3

No, not fair analogy. The first part is a hierarchical statement. The second statement is not hierarchical.

Answer 4

Life is continuous ,'I' or 'you' came from our father and mother who came from.................Thus 'I' and 'you' existed in the bodies of our parents ,grand parents...............

We did not come or appear from nothingness or from vacuum,

We materialized from some thing that existed before

'I' and 'you' are millions of years old

And life is discrete and quantized. You and me are discrete, separate from our parents, grand parents.
Each of us is one unit of human being

Life is particle as well as wave

Life is continuous as well as discrete

LIFE IS AN ILLUSION AS WELL AS A REALITY THAT EXISTS AS LONG AS YOU EXIST

Answer 5

there's no analogy at all