also called ‘squiggles’ and abbreviated by CP. Complementary pairs are what the squiggle sense senses…
Yin~yang, mind~body, self~other, organism~environment, nature~nurture and cooperation~competition are all examples of complementary pairs. Generally speaking, any of an as yet unknown number of pairs of aspects that are coexistent, mutual, inextricable in their coordination dynamics. As you can see already, we use the form ca1~ca2 to denote two complementary aspects, whose dynamics, its coordination dynamics, even better its multistable~metastable coordination dynamics with the symbol ‘~’. We call this symbol a squiggle. Many call the symbol a tilde as part of the letter ñ as in the spanish word mañana. But it has other names and other meanings. In mathematics, ~ can stand for approximately, like ~10 meaning approximately 10. Actually, you already get a feeling for what we use the symbol for by the hand motion many of use for approximately: Take your dominant hand, stick it straight out in the air away from your chest, palm down, fingers spread. Then wiggle your thumb below~above the plane your hand describes a horizontal waving. (Kinda sort of… Just about but not quite…. Right around but not exactly, etc.) Think about that, having a sort of hand waving, a hand dancing, that means that same thing as this ‘~’, when ‘~’ means approximately.
Now, we might say that within~between the boundary~domain of The Four Aspects of The Complementary Nature, the ‘~’ symbol, that some people call tilde but others don’t, there is a different hand wave that bears the same relationship to the meaning we attribute this symbol, one of dynamical complementarity, you use two pointing fingers or the whole hand as if they were a paintbrush and the the squiggle shape ~ is drawn in the air. Instead of approximately, ‘~’ stands for the yin~yanginess of the the yin~yang, the engine in nature that drives that dynamic mutuality, these squiggles… these complementary pairs.
Integration~segregation, local~global, part~whole, individual~collective, competition~cooperation, dwell~escape, creation~annihilation, convergence~divergence, states~tendencies, symmetry~dynamics, form~function and so forth are some of the complementary pairs that constitute the base set of complementary pairs of coordination dynamics.
Note the squiggle is not a bridge: it doesn’t stand for glue holding complementary aspects together or mediating between them. It is a way to write and think about complementary aspects in a way that emphasizes their relational and dynamic character. The squiggle exposes a basic truth: both complementary aspects and their dynamics are required for an exhaustive account of phenomena.
