Excellent article, very good points. I hope the advice here is taken on board by many.
However permit me to suggest that a proper Buddhist should not, per the Vinaya and long-established custom, be making *any* claims of ESP powers. If he has them, he should be silently using them to help beings, and if he does not, he should not speak of them.
However I would be interested if you could point to passages which warn all Buddhists, as opposed to bhikkhus, to never say anything about their spiritual attainments. As I understand it the Vinaya prohibits false claims of attainments for bhikkhus. I'd be interested if that was expanded to all claims.
I know that the Buddha discouraged people from displays of magic in some passages, but then again I can point to passages where the Buddha ostentatiously uses his magical powers - I'm thinking particularly of Uruvelapāṭihāriyakathā (Vin 1.24)
I agree with all this, and I think it's important. Quantum rhetoric is one of the ways monist ideas have been mixed into Buddhism, and I find that mixture problematic.
My experience has been that saying "you know, that's not actually how quantum mechanics works" doesn't persuade many. More generally, pointing out to people gripped by monism that specific truth-claims are false doesn't seem to be effective. You can explain why holistic chakra rebalancing is nonsense, and it's water off a duck's back.
In the monist stance, specifics are irrelevant, because what matters is the Absolute. Also, empirical evidence is irrelevant, because the physical world is contaminated and unreal. What matters is the magical world of "pure consciousness". Moreover, intuition trumps reason, because one's True Self (accessed through intuition) is magically connected to the Absolute. The supposed role of consciousness in quantum collapse is invoked to validate this fallacy.
My suspicion is that, to dispel quantum codswallop, one has to go after its metaphysical promise of magical unity, rather than addressing real-world specifics, which monists simply don't care about.
Yes. That is very interesting and explains a good deal of frustration over many years! Particularly the lack of concern for specifics. There's a lot of this about!
Someone explained it to me in terms of Myers-Briggs types once, but all I can remember is that I'm an NT, and I care about specifics.
Have you made any attempts at explaining or undermining the magical unity? I'd be very interested in going more into this!
If all is One, then specifics are illusory; everything is "ultimately" the same perfect, undifferentiated Unity.
(In *some* sense, that's true. Even in classical field theory, there's only one entity, the field, and it is "the same" everywhere in the sense that the differential equations are invariant in time and space. But variations in field strength make for the differences between chalk and cheese.)
This monist assertion of unity seems to be appealing for three reasons. First, many people feel alienated from the world. They rightly intuit that they are not separate from it, that there is no isolated self; but are unable to access that experientially. Declaring by fiat that all separation and difference is irrelevant is an attempt to effortlessly break through that wall once and for all. (Buddhist meditation seems instead to dissolve the barrier gradually, with a lot of hard work, some of it unpleasant. Who wants to bother with that?)
Second, many people find the details of their circumstances unacceptable. ("So this must be the 'suffering' of which the Buddha spoke!") Asserting that specifics are illusory is an attempt to wish away their significance.
Third, there is the wee problemette of death. If all is One, then I am part of the Eternal Cosmic Consciousness, and death is an illusion, not to be feared. It is merely the recognition by the part of the whole, and the falling away of the illusory specifics of my separate body.
My teacher, Ngak'chang Rinpoche, was once asked about this. "I think death is just like a drop of rain slipping into the ocean," said someone at a talk he gave.
"Ah," said Rinpoche. "What does that mean?"
"Well, I am not exactly sure," said his interlocutor. "But isn't it beautiful?"
"Mmm," said Rinpoche. "Could we rephrase that as 'a glob of phlegm slipping into the Cosmic Spittoon'? Wouldn't that mean the same thing?"
His audience was shocked. "Why would you put it like that?" someone asked.
Rinpoche tried to explain that kitschy, reassuring verbiage is not a guarantee of accurate metaphysics; but this did not seem to penetrate.
I haven't yet seriously tried out my monist-deprogramming rap. I've been working it out only for a year, since first reading David McMahan's _The Making of Buddhist Modernism_, which alerted me to the alarming spread of monist ideas. I'll be presenting it on the Meaningness web site soon. I'll deploy it whenever someone tries to persuade me that quantum means that their getting an unexplained headache around the time their long-lost friend from elementary school had a serious car crash proves that Everything Is Connected; and we'll see how it goes.
BTW, for fascinating background on monism and Buddhist intellectual history, I recommend McEvilley's _Shape of Ancient Thought_.
The intro to QM and the cat issue was superbly done. Thank you. I assume your audience was Buddhist -- and for them it is an excellent corrective.
A few trivial comments:
"Buddhism is originally the product of Iron Age India, and has adapted to many different cultural environments and world-views because, in my opinion, it is not so concerned with the realm of physics, it is concerned with the realm of the mind. "
Substitute any cradle of civilization for a location and that area's religion and this sentence is true for them all. They are not describing physics, but the mind and behavior. Thus I am trying to anticipate a special place for Buddhism, which I am sure committed followers of Buddhism would not question.
"though monotheism more obviously runs foul of science" In Buddhist, as you mention, there are claims of mind reading, seeing the past, levitation and much more. The scriptures have miraculous birth stories of the founder, miraculous physical events around the birth. Believers make all sorts of miraculous claims all over the world (your first commenter alluded to claims of ESP for instance). So I don't understand how you can be so qualitatively confident with "more" or "obviously more" unless I remember that you are talking to believers. I recently read the auto-biography of a great Chan Chinese teacher from New York. It is packed with his claims of the supernatural and miracles.
"in the domain of the mind, and especially the problem of suffering, that Buddhism is far superior descriptively and practically." Buddhism does offer meditation "technology" which I think is excellent. But in many areas of psychology, science is uncovering many insights and technologies that Buddhism does not address at all. I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism does not own psychology or cures to suffering.
I get your theme though and largely support it. I am glad for those that are trying to rein in the iron age miraculous, over-blown metaphors. Many Buddhist complain deeply when the same insight and corrections are applied to them. But I see your site as to check Buddhism and call her to be realistic, focused and practical -- An excellent task.
@ David (Meaningness) Wow, couldn't agree more with your comments. Well said! Buddhist love the "wave returning to the ocean" metaphor -- as do Hindus. It has always seemed to me to be no more simple mental candy as Heaven is to theists. I get the desire for candy -- it is Halloween this weekend in the USA and my kids love it (especially as candy does not normally live in our house). I did a little post on eschatology Mental Candy of my kids here. And there I express sympathy for such a though due to their stages of development. Good luck curing the headache-entaglement-causality thinking in your adult friends, though. ;-)
On a somewhat related note, you might like to read a recent blog post on the movieWhat the Bleep Do We Know? that's critical of how the movie mangles QM to advance its own half-baked ideas about consciousness.
I couldn't keep watching WTBDWK - people in my community were raving about it, but I thought it was the worst kind of nonsense (i.e. the plausible kind). Thanks for the link though.
Wow, never heard of that movie, I just added it to my netflix. And thanx for the math link, Vishal. Always good to hear how people falsely comfort themselves -- theists or Buddhists.
I entirely disagree that my comments on the mind being the focus of Buddhism being applicable to any other cradle of civilization.
I think you're going to have to get used to me saying "Buddhism" and meaning the Buddhism that I know and practice; with all the contradictions that brings.
"Buddhism does offer meditation "technology" which I think is excellent."
What does this mean? What technology? Excellent in what sense?
"But in many areas of psychology, science is uncovering many insights and technologies that Buddhism does not address at all."
Such as? Choose your best single example, and we'll take a look at it.
"I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism does not own psychology or cures to suffering."
Your sentence doesn't make sense. Did you intend the double negative? Who do you mean by "we"?
I never set out to be an apologist for all Buddhists throughout history; nor for all the manifestations of Buddhism. Why do you keep expecting me to take that role?
"I get your theme though and largely support it. "
I'm not so sure that you do get it actually. You get what you want to get, and some of the things I write reinforce what you already believe; which could be a disaster if I'm wrong, which is more than likely.
"But I see your site as to check Buddhism and call her to be realistic, focused and practical"
God, I sound pompous and boring as hell! Realistic sounds awful and I doubt anyone could be a Buddhist and be realistic because that imposes limits on the imaginable and Buddhism lives in the imagination, in our ability to imagine being a better person in a better world. To be an effective Buddhist one must be completely unrealistic and impractical!
Personally, I don't get the sense that you and I think very much alike at all.
(1) I think you are right. To facilitate any productive dialogue on this blog I should assume that when you say "Buddhism", you mean "MY Buddhism" -- or, as you said, "Buddhism that I know and practice". That is fine, I will try to stick to asking questions instead of challenging.
(2) Concerning "technology" of Buddhism, I thought that would be uncontroversial and by your tone, I think discussion on that front may not be productive either. So I will drop that too.
(3) I have seen treatments for seizures and the mental changes caused by chronic seizures prove very helpful and are due to the science of psychology and neuroscience. Such things were once thought to be demons, evil spirits, angry ancestors or bad karma. There are other examples like this, of course.
(4) Yes, my sentence made no sense -- it had a typo. It should have said, "I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism owns all valuable/meaningful psychology and cures to suffering." My bad.
(5) You are right, we are very different -- sorry to imply otherwise.
"(3) I have seen treatments for seizures and the mental changes caused by chronic seizures prove very helpful and are due to the science of psychology and neuroscience."
We were talking about the mind. Seizures are a physical problem, though of course there are mental effects. But the real problem with your assertion is what comes next:
"Such things were once thought to be demons, evil spirits, angry ancestors or bad karma. There are other examples like this, of course."
Once thought by whom? In fact you just don't know how Buddhists (of any period) have treated seizures or mental disturbances. You are guessing from a rather biased view of traditional societies. I do know how Buddhist texts talk about mental disturbances and have blogged on the subject, as well as writing several mostly unpublished essays on the subject. I fact it was a particular interest of mine and one of my published article is on the subject of suicide as it is portrayed in the Pali texts.
The early texts alone are far more sophisticated that you suggest. They make fine distinctions between the causes of various mental disturbances, and illnesses and the vinaya encodes a humane way of dealing with madness and diminished responsibility. What's more contemporary Buddhist approaches to mental disturbance can be very successful. Compare Sally Clay's The Wounded Prophet essay.
Where is the real comparison here? You know one side of the equation but not the other. You have no idea if what you've seen in terms of dealing with mental disturbances is more effective than anything Buddhism has to offer. You appear to be a long way out of your area of competence on this subject.
"Wounded Prophet" looks fascinating. I will give it a read.
My comment is largely from my gut and very uninformed, as you point out. It comes from images and superficial experiences of my 9 years in Buddhist parts of Asia where I saw Buddhists acting just as superstitiously as the rest of us. I worked in hospitals in Japan, for example. But I was not studying Buddhism in anyway at that time though I was surrounded by it in very personal ways.
But of course, these experiences were only with common folks and I never separated serious practitioners thus that is to be expected. Superstition is a human trait, not the privilege of any religious group.
I am personally convinced that Buddhist practice can offer a huge array of psychological benefits and did not mean to imply otherwise.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Mike said...
Again- thanks for pointing this article out- I am extremely appreciative of the effort to write it and the knowledge/intelligence contained- I enjoyed reading it and will fowrard it to others!
That said, without meaning to be contrary, but rather just simply wondering what your response would be, something arose when I read the following "The behaviour of any one particle, or even any million or billion particles, is not going to change the average properties of the cat. "
I thought, yes millions of particle changes might not change the physical properties of the cat, where, in a collective and very reasonable sense we could all point and say, "there is, and continues to be, a cat," however, would it is less certain these same changes would not change the THOUGHT of the cat, its perceptions at a given moment, looking left or right, having impulse or not, for example? In this way I see the territory that QM could be involved in, in our daily lives, how this receptivity to the interconnectedness inherent in the archetecture of reality COULD (just maybe) change something about us- what we see at a given moment (versus what we overlook), and how we could respond to that (even slightly) higher perception of interconnectivity.
In the same way as the cat quote from above, you later on apply that to people: "QM issues have to be taken into account in designing new micro-processors which pack millions of transistors into square millimetres; and in nascent nano-technology. But in terms of our daily lives none of the observations of sub-atomic particles apply. None. "
In this territory of thought- seemingly so bound up with QM, the double slit-experiment, etc., is what seems to be, at least to some degree, a helpful crossover between Buddhism (being a path towards a full and unhindered perception of existence) and QM (the continuation of the most advanced inquiry into the nature of existance ever undertaken).
I think this is the trouble with this kind of discussion. I don't think you've understood Quantum mechanics. I know I haven't.
You've made a great leap into interconnectedness without ever establishing why you believe in it. How could a change in the atoms of a cat change the thought of 'cat' in your mind? This is not science or ever science fiction. It's just fiction. It's find as far as it goes, very entertaining and all that, but we're not having the same discussion. I'm talking about science. I struggle to see middle ground.
By the way there is no interconnectedness in early Buddhism - conditionality yes, interconnectedness, no. At that time the people who believed in interconnectedness were the Brahmins. And ultimately this is where we trace the idea in Indian thought. Buddhism works perfectly well without it. Better in a way.
The greatest implication of this experiment has to do with human consciousness being the determining factor in the cat's existence. At least that's how Michio Kaku explains it. According to Wigner, "Consciousness determines existence...If I make an observation, what determines which state I am in? This means someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function. This is sometimes called "Wigner's Friend." But it also means that someone has to observe Wigner's friend, and Wigner's friend , and so on. Is there a cosmic consciousness that determines the entire sequence of friends by observing the entire universe?" This reasoning is the source, I think, of how QM got into eastern religious apologetics. I would also add that those who bat this argument back and forth, the swamis and cosmologists, ignore existential phenomenology, which has a far greater grasp on the meaning of consciousness than do physics, Buddhism, Hiduism, and psychology. I refer especially to the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is not farfetched to say that "unseen dimensions" and "parallel worlds" stem from the phenomenological concepts of "margin" and "transcendental reduction."
No. You have this completely backwards. The cat's existence is irrelevant - we assume it exists. Whether the cat is alive or dead, however, determines the experience we have when we open the box. Not the other way around! No physicist in their right mind turns this fact on it's head!
And let us not forget the lesson I laboured over in my post: this only applies on the level of subatomic particles.
Untold septillions (real number) of sub-atomic interactions are going on all around us, entirely unobserved. You do not even observe all of the 100 billion neurons that make up your brain, let alone the molecules that make up the neurons, or the atoms and particles that actually conform to the principle of entanglement.
It is entirely far-fetched to impute cosmic consciousness or parallel worlds from any of this. Just wrong. And it just goes to show that people really don't understand Quantum Mechanics. But they are not willing to believe that they cannot understand the most fiendishly complex and counter-intuitive scientific theory ever devised. Which shows the cosmic scale of their folly. Mystics seem to explain everything, but understand nothing. I've no time for them.
@Canto34 : I have read all the phenomenologists you mention. Their work is interestingly parallel to Buddhist philosophy in some ways, and there may be productive syntheses possible.
However, phenomenology has absolutely nothing to do with quantum physics. It is utterly farfetched to say that '"unseen dimensions" and "parallel worlds" stem from the phenomenological concepts of "margin" and "transcendental reduction."'
That represents a dire misunderstanding of quantum, or phenomenology, or probably both.
Do you know what a Hamiltonian is? Can you compute one? May I suggest, if not, you have no knowledge of actual quantum physics whatsoever. Supposed explanations of quantum in English (not math) are inevitably misleading gibberish.
By the way, please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it so that the assertion "X is both A and B until I observe it, at which point I find it to be either A or B" either a trivial tautology or logically incoherent? It seems useless to talk about the state of things that are by definition outside of my knowledge. By saying this, I do not mean to imply that, if the best mathematical description of physics implies the above, it must be wrong. No, I trust the math, but I don't trust the ability of English to express what the math means. If the plain language description of this problem is completely useless, then it matters not at all if the conclusion sounds ridiculous or not. I hope that is not the method Schrödinger was trying to use with his thought experiment of the cat, because if so it sounds entirely quixotic.
Based on my extremely limited knowledge, one thing I find interesting about the particle-wave duality is that, I seem to recall, there are ways the experimenter can cause a photon to behave as a wave or as a particle that seem counter-intuitive. If Schrödinger's thought experiment involved causing the cat to be alive or dead in some surprising way, then it would be a more interesting thought experiment. In that case, perhaps one could devise a version not involving so much animal cruelty and then actually carry out the experiment in real life with interesting results.
Schrödinger's whole point was to highlight the logical incoherency with the Copenhagen interpretation and to try to discredit it. He was wrong and now his criticism is co-opted to explain the thing he thought was wrong. Now that is irony.
Turns out that at the nano-scale it is not illogical for a particle to be in all possible states simultaneously until it physically interacts in such a way as information about it is transferred (eg. if we bounce a photon off a particle and measure the photon's frequency, momentum etc). This is why Schrödinger was wrong. After interacting, the wave function collapses and the particle takes on a definite position, momentum, spin etc, at that time. Although the Heisenberg proviso applies. The product of certain pared quantities (position and momentum for example) is a constant. So the more accurately you know one of the pair, the less accurately you know the other.
But you are right in the sense that the best physicists tend to say that such a world is unimaginable. Some people can do the maths. But no one can visualise the world the maths describes.
The wave-particle duality is, to my knowledge, dependent on how one looks for the thing. If one looks for waves, by for example setting up an experiment that will produce an interference pattern, one sees wave-like phenomena. If one looks for particles, by measuring the momentum changes of a collision, one sees particles. But beneath all this are the quantum fields. I don't understand much about Quantum Field Theory (it didn't exist when I studied quantum mechanics at university) but it seems that understanding everything in terms fields and interactions of fields resolves or explains the duality.
I think the thing about so-called animal cruelty is that in the midst of a very complex idea, the implications of which are almost incomprehensible, all some people can grasp is that it involves a pussy cat in jeopardy. Since that is all they can understand they latch onto that and try to make it a thing. Or it is the source of weak jokes. Either way it's just a distraction to take the metaphor literally and miss the point. But then if the point was always going to be missed, it's all some people have left. But this is why I gave the essay the title I did.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015
[Image]
image: Erwin Schrödinger
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Richard Feynman. "What is Science?"
The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)
"I think I can safely say that
nobody understands quantum mechanics."
Richard Feynman. The Character of Physical Law (1965)
~~~~
SCHRÖDINGER'S CAT is one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of science. Erwin Schrödinger (left) used it to try to argue against adopting one approach Quantum Mechanics. Most people seem unaware that he was trying to highlight a problem with what was, in 1935, a controversial theory, but which has become the orthodoxy: namely the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics . These days when we say Quantum Mechanics we usually mean the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (hereafter QM). Many people who know next to nothing about science, or about Schrödinger, have tried to co-opt Schrödinger's cat to show how there is a relationship between physics and Buddhism. Let me say at the beginning that I don't believe that there is any significant cross-over between physics and Buddhism, and that I hope to explain why in the rest of this post. Granted my degree is in chemistry and it was a long time ago; but I also studied physics, and I'm an ordained Buddhist, so I feel at least not-overly-unqualified to comment.
To begin with we need to be clear on scale. An atom is between 32 picometres and 225 picometres in diameter. A picometer is 1×10−12 m, i.e. a trillionth of a metre, or 0.000000000001 m. By contrast a human hair is around 50 µm or 0.000005 m. So a single hair is about about 1.5 million helium atoms in diameter. Basically this scale is unimaginable, so let's put it another way: if the diameter an atom was the thickness of a single sheet of copier paper (0.08mm) then a human hair would be 120 metres in diameter. Amedeo Avogadro showed that 12g of carbon contains approximately 6 x 1023 atoms of carbon. That is 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (600 sextillion) atoms. If each carbon atom was 1 mm3 then the 12g of carbon would fill the Western Mediterranean Ocean (from Gibraltar to Sicily), with plenty to spare. In fact 12g of carbon (in the form of powdered soot) is about 2 teaspoons. In QM we're dealing with the subatomic world, with the protons, neutrons and elections, and the weirder particles which make up atoms. A proton is about 1/50th of the diameter of the smallest atom; while an electron is thought to be in the region of 10−22m, which is one 10-billionth the diameter of a proton. Don't be fooled by our ability to write these properties down in numbers: they are highly abstract, unimaginable, incomprehensible, and none of us can draw on experience to get a sense of them. If you are still confident that any of this is relevant to human existence then read on.
Those with an interest in this subject will know that QM conceives of subatomic particles as waves (which can behave like particles under some conditions) that are described not in terms of physical properties, but in mathematical formulas. QM is the first theory of science to not be based on observations of physical properties, but to emerge from abstract mathematical speculation. [ 1 ] Though of course QM makes testable predictions about the behaviour of matter on the picometer scale. This description of sub-atomic particles as waves has some interesting consequences. One is that the particle is not a point in space, but is smeared out over space. Another is that all we can know about the particles in atoms are the odds of the particle being in any one place in space at any given time. What's more, as Heisenberg showed, if we know precisely where a particle is, then we can't simultaneously know how fast it is going - this is called the Uncertainty Principle.
Schrödinger's thought experiment related to a curious prediction arising out of the mathematics of waves (subsequently experimentally confirmed). Under certain circumstances two wavy particles can become 'entangled' which means that their waves combine into a single system, though they retain their identities. (Don't worry if you don't quite understand how this works - Feynman was not being ironic when he said that no one understands QM.) Schrödinger's problem was that this meant that observing some of the properties of one of the particles, meant having certain knowledge about the other particle because the two must be in opposition. The main property we are concerned with is called 'spin' - which relates to the magnetic properties of charged particles.
The two entangled particles can be in one of two spin states, but cannot both occupy the same state. With regard to the spin state of any single particle we can only talk about the probability that they will be in a given state at any time until we observe it. However, observing the spin of one entangled particle, determines which state the other will be in with 100% certainty without observing it, no matter where it is in the universe. This appears to contradict the limit introduced by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905) that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light. But also, and even more weirdly, before an observation we can only think about spin states in terms of probabilities and the the maths tells us that the combined probabilities of the two particles being in any given state always equals one. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that this effectively means that the two entangled particles are both in both states simultaneously - the two states are superimposed as the jargon goes.
This is quite counter-intuitive, but it has been a boon for science-fiction because the spin states of the entangled particles are linked no matter how far apart they are - "spooky action at a distance" as Einstein facetiously referred to it - which if you aren't too fussy about details gives you an excellent medium for instantaneous communications across the vastness of space.
However, it begs the question: how can something be in two states at once until observed? It was in order to highlight these paradoxical aspects of QM that Schrödinger put his imaginary cat in the imaginary box. With it he placed a mechanism which would release cyanide gas, with a switch triggered by the decay of an atom of Uranium, the timing of which we cannot predict from theory. Close the lid of the box, prime the switch and think: is the cat alive at this moment, or is it dead? If the atom has not decayed the cat will be alive, and if it has decayed the cat will be dead. We can't know until we open the box and observe. Schrödinger invited us to think of the cat as a metaphor for the infinitesimal sub-atomic particle, whose wave was metaphorically entangled with the Uranium atom. If the cat truly was like a sub-atomic particle, then it was both alive and dead until the box was opened, and it was observed to be one or the other. He was trying to show that this is a ridiculous conclusion, and that therefore the Copenhagen Interpretation must be flawed. He lost that particular argument.
A lot of people jump from the picometre scale to the metre scale without any thought for the consequences of a trillion-fold change in scale - even though we know, for example, that our bath water doesn't really behave like an ocean! Or though we know that those pre-CGI movie special effects with models are totally unconvincing. The problem is that in a real cat there are several thousand sextillions of atoms, made up of many particles. Although each infinitesimal particle is a wave and subject to QM effects, these are averaged out over some tens or hundreds of thousands of sextillions of particles. The behaviour of any one particle, or even any million or billion particles, is not going to change the average properties of the cat. Unlike sub-atomic particles, cats simply do not wink in and out of existence; they are not smeared out over space (except perhaps when run over); and we can in fact know quite precisely (compared to the size of the cat) where a cat is and how fast it is moving at the same time. The Uncertainty Principle doesn't apply on the macro level. QM has almost no relevance to the macro world, to a world where objects are made up of septillions of atoms because of the averaging effect of so many particles - if weird stuff was happening we'd never know because a human hair is millions of atoms in diameter. And this is partly why Schrödinger was unable to undermine the Copenhagen Interpretation with this thought experiment, and why it has been co-opted by the targets of his critique, not to mention Buddhists! Actually sub-atomic particles are not alive and it is not ridiculous to argue that they can be in two superimposed states at once, even though it is ridiculous to argue it for a cat. In effect, Schrödinger's Cat proved nothing.
One of the unfinished tasks of modern physics is finding some way to marry QM with Relativity (E=mc2 yadda yadda again we don't really understand this). This has proved elusive, though work is going on at both the empirical and the theoretical ends of the problem. So far no one has unequivocal evidence for, say, quantum gravity; and no one has been able to make the maths add up. It may in fact turn out that the two theories are not adequate to the task and that both will be subsumed into some larger construct (some people claim that String Theory will do it, if anyone can ever solve the equations; Stephen Hawking barracks for M-Theory if anyone can both figure out what equations are and how to solve them). Certainly dark matter and dark energy are causing a scramble to rework the Standard Model of Cosmology to account for the observations that gave rise to those terms. Often theories don't survive being scaled up by a dozen orders of magnitude, and this is the case for QM (so far).
It's pretty clear that QM, a mathematical abstraction, doesn't apply to our macro world. However it does have indirect consequences for us as QM issues have to be taken into account in designing new micro-processors which pack millions of transistors into square millimetres; and in nascent nano-technology. But in terms of our daily lives none of the observations of sub-atomic particles apply. None. The similarity of vocabulary is superficial and coincidental, just as the similarity of ethical jargon in various religions is largely superficial and coincidental! well, perhaps not entirely coincidental because like Schopenhauer, both Schrödinger and Niels Bohr were interested in so-called 'Eastern philosophy' and built some of it into the narrative.
Some weeks ago now, in the comments to my post on Rebirth and the Scientific Method Elisa and Krishna were asking: "why do Buddhists feel the need to justify their beliefs by appealing to science?" Part of my answer related to the way the scientific paradigm has dominated our lives for roughly 150 years. Science is incredibly successful in describing the physical world, and predicting new observations and properties of matter. Just look at the recent crop of Nobel Prizes to see the contribution that science makes. In a way it's obvious that we'd want to participate in that. It is a bit ironic that so few Buddhists are educated in the sciences, and tend to approach science with a mixture of abhorrence for perceived materialism, and credulous wonder at its success and authoritativeness.
I don't see much advantage in invoking the talisman of science in defence of religion, especially when on the whole we religieux are so ignorant of science (one of my teachers recently mentioned the way "larger bodies attract smaller ones" in a public talk. He's not an idiot, nor spiritually shallow, but he is clearly, painfully ignorant of science!). It so happens that Buddhists avoid some of the pitfalls of the modern world view (we don't have creation stories for instance), but though monotheism more obviously runs foul of science, I don't think we can sustain our traditional eschatologies, nor claims of ESP powers, nor to know the nature of 'reality', if we are working in a scientific paradigm. It's a minefield.
I don't think Buddhism on its own terms needs any scientific apologetic. Buddhism is originally the product of Iron Age India, and has adapted to many different cultural environments and world-views because, in my opinion, it is not so concerned with the realm of physics, it is concerned with the realm of the mind. Physics provides us with a far superior description of the physical world; but equally in the domain of the mind, and especially the problem of suffering, that Buddhism is far superior descriptively and practically (in terms of practices for working on the mind). This superiority in its own field is not a consequence of levels of technology or an understanding of physics. It's to do with observing our own minds. We don't need a Large Hadron Collider for this. We just need to sit quietly and observe our minds. It is a kind of empiricism, but we don't need to get caught up in making a 'science' out of it.
~~ oOo ~~
Notes This feature of QM not deriving from observations of physical properties was recently the subject of an article in the New Scientist: Webb, Richard. 'Reality Gap' 21 August 2010, p.32-6. NS apparently subscribes to another uncertainty principle as the article title is quite changeable:
on the cover - The Ultimate Quantum Paradox
contents page - The Ultimate Paradox
printed article - Reality Gap
online article - Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world? [login required]
ScienceDirect article database - Quantum Mechanics: The Reality Gap [login required].
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(Note: Though I gather that Schrödinger loved women and a good party, I confess I'm not really sure whether he owned a cat. Some people claim that Schrödinger was a cat lover, and some that he was a cat hater, but I thought my title was catchy and ran with it. I hope my readers will allow me some poetic licence.)
image: Erwin Schrödinger (internet endemic, i.e. copied so many times that there is no longer a discernible source).
If you want to learn about Quantum Theory from one of the men who helped to develop it, then I can recommend these three lectures by Hans Bethe: Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple. As the site says, the Prof is 93 years old and lecturing to the other residents at his retirement home.
Updates to this post
9 Dec 2010.
"[Quantum mechanics] works perfectly well, but no one knows exactly what it talks about, nor what kind of reality it describes! Science does not explain the world; it is no substitute for either philosophy or metaphysics."
Klein, Étienne and Lachièze-Rey, Marc. 1999. The Quest for Unity: The Adventure of Physics. [trans. Axel Reisinger] Oxford University Press, p.98. (Klein and Lachièze-Rey are scientists with the Atomic Energy Commission, Sacey, France.)
11 Jan 2011
Someone posted this conclusion from an education paper on another blog I read, and I thought it was so apposite that I want to post it here as well. Exchange the word 'biology' for any other science and I think the results would be similar.
Conclusions
Our research shows that some college students correctly apply scientific principles when reasoning about the processes of the carbon cycle, but the majority of students use a mix of principle-based and informal reasoning when asked to answer questions that require application or synthesis. We suggest that one reason students cannot trace matter and energy across processes and scales is that they lack a fundamental understanding of atoms and molecules (e.g., Benson et al. 1993). Another reason is that students often try to reason about large-scale or small-scale phenomena by inappropriately applying cultural models or their own embodied experiences, both of which are situated in the macroscopic world.
Applying fundamental principles such as conservation of matter and energy seems so straightforward to most biologists that they are hardly aware they do it. Their accounts of biological processes are constrained by the conservation laws in ways analogous to the ways their writing and speech are constrained by the rules of English grammar—they follow the rules more or less automatically. Yet even on post tests, the majority of students, even biology majors taking advanced courses, did not follow the rules automatically. So, why is applying these simple principles so hard? We think the answers to this question lie in the deep-seated nature of informal reasoning and in the way we currently teach biology.
Laurel M. Hartley, Brook J. Wilke, Jonathon W. Schramm, Charlene D’Avanzo, and
Charles W. Anderson. (2001) "Principle-based and Informal Reasoning". BioScience 61: 65–75. Online: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1828618/education_decline.pdf
21 Feb 2011
Anyone who still thinks Quantum Mechanics is relevant to the macro world might be interested in this snippet from Stephen Hawkings' new book
"... physicists are still working to figure out the details of how Newton's laws emerge from the quantum domain."
- Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow. (2010) The Grand Design. p.68.
In other words even the experts can't figure out how to apply QM on the human scale, let alone the cosmic scale. The equations of QM do not naturally and easily cough up Newton's Laws (after about 100 years of trying). Interestingly Hawking has abandoned the idea of a single unified theory of everything in favour of a suite of overlapping theories which describe some domains and not others.
QM does seem to apply on the scale of a bucky-ball - a molecule of 60 carbon atoms - which can be used in the classic two slit experiment.
Regarding the uncertainty principle he says:
"...if you pin-point a macroscopic object such as a football, with a mass of 1/3 of a kg, to within 1 millimetre in any direction, we can still measure its velocity with a precision far greater than even a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a kilometer per hour." (p.71)
Again the scale factor means that QM is meaningless on our human scale - uncertainty is irrelevant except on the atomic or sub-atomic scale.
~~~
22 May 2011
Some further thoughts after reading Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children novels (which so frequently lapse into physics lessons that one images the novelist to be a frustrated physics teacher).
Imagine Schrödinger goes back to the cat in the box experiment, opens the box, observes the cat, knows it to be alive or dead, but then dies of a massive stroke before communicating the information. From our point of view is the cat alive or dead? Observation is not enough - the information must be communicated to us. We must personally observe everything, else, from our point of view it is in a state of all possible states in superposition.
Scientist A places the cat into the box, but in doing so becomes 'entangled with the cat'. Scientist B walks into the lad and sees scientist A. Has scientist A observed the cat or not? Until scientist B observes scientist A observing the cat, then scientist A has both observed and not observed the cat. Repeat observation no.1 for scientist B.
But now scientist B is entangled with both scientist A and the cat, and until they are observed by scientist C they both know and do not know that scientist A has observed the cat which is both alive and dead. Ad infinitum. By this logic someone must always be outside the system observing for anything at al to happen. Not even God is an escape from this, as God both exists and doesn't exist until being observed.
Simply put, the necessity for observation leads to infinite regress.
15 June 2011
Thinking more on this phenomenon of invoking Quantum Mechanics to 'prove' religion, I thought we needed a term for it. I suggest quantobabble, a portmanteau word on the model of psychobabble - a mixture of out of context jargon words and oversimplifications of complex abstract ideas, used to convey the notion that the speaker understands the subject, and suggesting that reality is easily summed up in simplistic terms. I was slightly disappointed to find the word has been used before - in an Amazon book review - but with more or less this same sense.
Anyone who does not understand this equation does not understand Quantum Mechanics.
[Image]
15 Nov 2011
"The fundamental laws of nature control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies."
- Paul Dirac. Principles of Quantum Mechanics. 4th Ed. 1958.
11 Jun 2012
There are those who still claim that observations about quantum mechanics can apply to the macro world. This idea is based on a fallacy. This fallacy is explored in a classic paper:
Anderson, P. W. (1972) 'More is Different.' Science. 177 (4047): 393-396. Online: http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf 25 July 2013
Another amendment. I recently discovered this very interesting (wonkish) paper by Sheldon Goldstein, Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University: Quantum Theory Without Observers.
The concept of `measurement' becomes so fuzzy on reflection that it is quite surprising to have it appearing in physical theory at the most fundamental level. ... [D]oes not any analysis of measurement require concepts more fundamental than measurement? And should not the fundamental theory be about these more fundamental concepts? (Bell 1981: page 117])
"Earlier, Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen concluded their famous EPR paper as follows: ``While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.''"
It turns out that Bohr and Heisenberg were Idealists - they did not believe in a reality beyond that described by the wave equation and the observer. Reality is only that which is perceived and does not exist independent of the perceiver. And it was an absurd consequence of this assumption that Schrödinger was trying to point out. And it seems he was right. The EPR paper shows that the wave function is can only be an incomplete description of physical reality.
"However, the Bohr-Einstein debate has already been resolved, and in favor of Einstein: What Einstein desired and Bohr deemed impossible--an observer-free formulation of quantum mechanics, in which the process of measurement can be analyzed in terms of more fundamental concepts--does, in fact, exist."
Thus the radical conclusion drawn from quantum theory by many Buddhists that the world only exists as we perceive it is simply wrong. There must be an observer independent reality.
22 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formExcellent article, very good points. I hope the advice here is taken on board by many.
However permit me to suggest that a proper Buddhist should not, per the Vinaya and long-established custom, be making *any* claims of ESP powers. If he has them, he should be silently using them to help beings, and if he does not, he should not speak of them.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Hi Gruff
Thanks.
However I would be interested if you could point to passages which warn all Buddhists, as opposed to bhikkhus, to never say anything about their spiritual attainments. As I understand it the Vinaya prohibits false claims of attainments for bhikkhus. I'd be interested if that was expanded to all claims.
I know that the Buddha discouraged people from displays of magic in some passages, but then again I can point to passages where the Buddha ostentatiously uses his magical powers - I'm thinking particularly of Uruvelapāṭihāriyakathā
(Vin 1.24)
Looking forward to hearing more!
Jayarava
Friday, October 29, 2010
Hi Jayarava
I agree with all this, and I think it's important. Quantum rhetoric is one of the ways monist ideas have been mixed into Buddhism, and I find that mixture problematic.
My experience has been that saying "you know, that's not actually how quantum mechanics works" doesn't persuade many. More generally, pointing out to people gripped by monism that specific truth-claims are false doesn't seem to be effective. You can explain why holistic chakra rebalancing is nonsense, and it's water off a duck's back.
In the monist stance, specifics are irrelevant, because what matters is the Absolute. Also, empirical evidence is irrelevant, because the physical world is contaminated and unreal. What matters is the magical world of "pure consciousness". Moreover, intuition trumps reason, because one's True Self (accessed through intuition) is magically connected to the Absolute. The supposed role of consciousness in quantum collapse is invoked to validate this fallacy.
My suspicion is that, to dispel quantum codswallop, one has to go after its metaphysical promise of magical unity, rather than addressing real-world specifics, which monists simply don't care about.
Best wishes,
David
Friday, October 29, 2010
Hi David,
Yes. That is very interesting and explains a good deal of frustration over many years! Particularly the lack of concern for specifics. There's a lot of this about!
Someone explained it to me in terms of Myers-Briggs types once, but all I can remember is that I'm an NT, and I care about specifics.
Have you made any attempts at explaining or undermining the magical unity? I'd be very interested in going more into this!
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Friday, October 29, 2010
Hi Jayarava,
If all is One, then specifics are illusory; everything is "ultimately" the same perfect, undifferentiated Unity.
(In *some* sense, that's true. Even in classical field theory, there's only one entity, the field, and it is "the same" everywhere in the sense that the differential equations are invariant in time and space. But variations in field strength make for the differences between chalk and cheese.)
This monist assertion of unity seems to be appealing for three reasons. First, many people feel alienated from the world. They rightly intuit that they are not separate from it, that there is no isolated self; but are unable to access that experientially. Declaring by fiat that all separation and difference is irrelevant is an attempt to effortlessly break through that wall once and for all. (Buddhist meditation seems instead to dissolve the barrier gradually, with a lot of hard work, some of it unpleasant. Who wants to bother with that?)
Second, many people find the details of their circumstances unacceptable. ("So this must be the 'suffering' of which the Buddha spoke!") Asserting that specifics are illusory is an attempt to wish away their significance.
Third, there is the wee problemette of death. If all is One, then I am part of the Eternal Cosmic Consciousness, and death is an illusion, not to be feared. It is merely the recognition by the part of the whole, and the falling away of the illusory specifics of my separate body.
My teacher, Ngak'chang Rinpoche, was once asked about this. "I think death is just like a drop of rain slipping into the ocean," said someone at a talk he gave.
"Ah," said Rinpoche. "What does that mean?"
"Well, I am not exactly sure," said his interlocutor. "But isn't it beautiful?"
"Mmm," said Rinpoche. "Could we rephrase that as 'a glob of phlegm slipping into the Cosmic Spittoon'? Wouldn't that mean the same thing?"
His audience was shocked. "Why would you put it like that?" someone asked.
Rinpoche tried to explain that kitschy, reassuring verbiage is not a guarantee of accurate metaphysics; but this did not seem to penetrate.
I haven't yet seriously tried out my monist-deprogramming rap. I've been working it out only for a year, since first reading David McMahan's _The Making of Buddhist Modernism_, which alerted me to the alarming spread of monist ideas. I'll be presenting it on the Meaningness web site soon. I'll deploy it whenever someone tries to persuade me that quantum means that their getting an unexplained headache around the time their long-lost friend from elementary school had a serious car crash proves that Everything Is Connected; and we'll see how it goes.
BTW, for fascinating background on monism and Buddhist intellectual history, I recommend McEvilley's _Shape of Ancient Thought_.
Best wishes,
David (INTP :-)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The intro to QM and the cat issue was superbly done. Thank you. I assume your audience was Buddhist -- and for them it is an excellent corrective.
A few trivial comments:
"Buddhism is originally the product of Iron Age India, and has adapted to many different cultural environments and world-views because, in my opinion, it is not so concerned with the realm of physics, it is concerned with the realm of the mind. "
Substitute any cradle of civilization for a location and that area's religion and this sentence is true for them all. They are not describing physics, but the mind and behavior. Thus I am trying to anticipate a special place for Buddhism, which I am sure committed followers of Buddhism would not question.
"though monotheism more obviously runs foul of science"
In Buddhist, as you mention, there are claims of mind reading, seeing the past, levitation and much more. The scriptures have miraculous birth stories of the founder, miraculous physical events around the birth. Believers make all sorts of miraculous claims all over the world (your first commenter alluded to claims of ESP for instance). So I don't understand how you can be so qualitatively confident with "more" or "obviously more" unless I remember that you are talking to believers. I recently read the auto-biography of a great Chan Chinese teacher from New York. It is packed with his claims of the supernatural and miracles.
"in the domain of the mind, and especially the problem of suffering, that Buddhism is far superior descriptively and practically."
Buddhism does offer meditation "technology" which I think is excellent. But in many areas of psychology, science is uncovering many insights and technologies that Buddhism does not address at all. I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism does not own psychology or cures to suffering.
I get your theme though and largely support it. I am glad for those that are trying to rein in the iron age miraculous, over-blown metaphors. Many Buddhist complain deeply when the same insight and corrections are applied to them. But I see your site as to check Buddhism and call her to be realistic, focused and practical -- An excellent task.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
@ David (Meaningness)
Wow, couldn't agree more with your comments. Well said! Buddhist love the "wave returning to the ocean" metaphor -- as do Hindus. It has always seemed to me to be no more simple mental candy as Heaven is to theists. I get the desire for candy -- it is Halloween this weekend in the USA and my kids love it (especially as candy does not normally live in our house). I did a little post on eschatology Mental Candy of my kids here. And there I express sympathy for such a though due to their stages of development. Good luck curing the headache-entaglement-causality thinking in your adult friends, though. ;-)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
On a somewhat related note, you might like to read a recent blog post on the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? that's critical of how the movie mangles QM to advance its own half-baked ideas about consciousness.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
@Vishal
I couldn't keep watching WTBDWK - people in my community were raving about it, but I thought it was the worst kind of nonsense (i.e. the plausible kind). Thanks for the link though.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Wow, never heard of that movie, I just added it to my netflix. And thanx for the math link, Vishal. Always good to hear how people falsely comfort themselves -- theists or Buddhists.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
@Sabio
I entirely disagree that my comments on the mind being the focus of Buddhism being applicable to any other cradle of civilization.
I think you're going to have to get used to me saying "Buddhism" and meaning the Buddhism that I know and practice; with all the contradictions that brings.
"Buddhism does offer meditation "technology" which I think is excellent."
What does this mean? What technology? Excellent in what sense?
"But in many areas of psychology, science is uncovering many insights and technologies that Buddhism does not address at all."
Such as? Choose your best single example, and we'll take a look at it.
"I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism does not own psychology or cures to suffering."
Your sentence doesn't make sense. Did you intend the double negative? Who do you mean by "we"?
I never set out to be an apologist for all Buddhists throughout history; nor for all the manifestations of Buddhism. Why do you keep expecting me to take that role?
"I get your theme though and largely support it. "
I'm not so sure that you do get it actually. You get what you want to get, and some of the things I write reinforce what you already believe; which could be a disaster if I'm wrong, which is more than likely.
"But I see your site as to check Buddhism and call her to be realistic, focused and practical"
God, I sound pompous and boring as hell! Realistic sounds awful and I doubt anyone could be a Buddhist and be realistic because that imposes limits on the imaginable and Buddhism lives in the imagination, in our ability to imagine being a better person in a better world. To be an effective Buddhist one must be completely unrealistic and impractical!
Personally, I don't get the sense that you and I think very much alike at all.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
@ Jayarava
(1) I think you are right. To facilitate any productive dialogue on this blog I should assume that when you say "Buddhism", you mean "MY Buddhism" -- or, as you said, "Buddhism that I know and practice". That is fine, I will try to stick to asking questions instead of challenging.
(2) Concerning "technology" of Buddhism, I thought that would be uncontroversial and by your tone, I think discussion on that front may not be productive either. So I will drop that too.
(3) I have seen treatments for seizures and the mental changes caused by chronic seizures prove very helpful and are due to the science of psychology and neuroscience. Such things were once thought to be demons, evil spirits, angry ancestors or bad karma. There are other examples like this, of course.
(4) Yes, my sentence made no sense -- it had a typo. It should have said,
"I don't think we want to imply that Buddhism owns all valuable/meaningful psychology and cures to suffering." My bad.
(5) You are right, we are very different -- sorry to imply otherwise.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
"(3) I have seen treatments for seizures and the mental changes caused by chronic seizures prove very helpful and are due to the science of psychology and neuroscience."
We were talking about the mind. Seizures are a physical problem, though of course there are mental effects. But the real problem with your assertion is what comes next:
"Such things were once thought to be demons, evil spirits, angry ancestors or bad karma. There are other examples like this, of course."
Once thought by whom? In fact you just don't know how Buddhists (of any period) have treated seizures or mental disturbances. You are guessing from a rather biased view of traditional societies. I do know how Buddhist texts talk about mental disturbances and have blogged on the subject, as well as writing several mostly unpublished essays on the subject. I fact it was a particular interest of mine and one of my published article is on the subject of suicide as it is portrayed in the Pali texts.
The early texts alone are far more sophisticated that you suggest. They make fine distinctions between the causes of various mental disturbances, and illnesses and the vinaya encodes a humane way of dealing with madness and diminished responsibility. What's more contemporary Buddhist approaches to mental disturbance can be very successful. Compare Sally Clay's The Wounded Prophet essay.
Where is the real comparison here? You know one side of the equation but not the other. You have no idea if what you've seen in terms of dealing with mental disturbances is more effective than anything Buddhism has to offer. You appear to be a long way out of your area of competence on this subject.
Jayarava
Monday, November 01, 2010
This comment has been removed by the author.
Monday, November 01, 2010
"Wounded Prophet" looks fascinating. I will give it a read.
My comment is largely from my gut and very uninformed, as you point out. It comes from images and superficial experiences of my 9 years in Buddhist parts of Asia where I saw Buddhists acting just as superstitiously as the rest of us. I worked in hospitals in Japan, for example. But I was not studying Buddhism in anyway at that time though I was surrounded by it in very personal ways.
But of course, these experiences were only with common folks and I never separated serious practitioners thus that is to be expected. Superstition is a human trait, not the privilege of any religious group.
I am personally convinced that Buddhist practice can offer a huge array of psychological benefits and did not mean to imply otherwise.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Again- thanks for pointing this article out- I am extremely appreciative of the effort to write it and the knowledge/intelligence contained- I enjoyed reading it and will fowrard it to others!
That said, without meaning to be contrary, but rather just simply wondering what your response would be, something arose when I read the following "The behaviour of any one particle, or even any million or billion particles, is not going to change the average properties of the cat. "
I thought, yes millions of particle changes might not change the physical properties of the cat, where, in a collective and very reasonable sense we could all point and say, "there is, and continues to be, a cat," however, would it is less certain these same changes would not change the THOUGHT of the cat, its perceptions at a given moment, looking left or right, having impulse or not, for example? In this way I see the territory that QM could be involved in, in our daily lives, how this receptivity to the interconnectedness inherent in the archetecture of reality COULD (just maybe) change something about us- what we see at a given moment (versus what we overlook), and how we could respond to that (even slightly) higher perception of interconnectivity.
In the same way as the cat quote from above, you later on apply that to people: "QM issues have to be taken into account in designing new micro-processors which pack millions of transistors into square millimetres; and in nascent nano-technology. But in terms of our daily lives none of the observations of sub-atomic particles apply. None. "
In this territory of thought- seemingly so bound up with QM, the double slit-experiment, etc., is what seems to be, at least to some degree, a helpful crossover between Buddhism (being a path towards a full and unhindered perception of existence) and QM (the continuation of the most advanced inquiry into the nature of existance ever undertaken).
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Hi Mike
I think this is the trouble with this kind of discussion. I don't think you've understood Quantum mechanics. I know I haven't.
You've made a great leap into interconnectedness without ever establishing why you believe in it. How could a change in the atoms of a cat change the thought of 'cat' in your mind? This is not science or ever science fiction. It's just fiction. It's find as far as it goes, very entertaining and all that, but we're not having the same discussion. I'm talking about science. I struggle to see middle ground.
By the way there is no interconnectedness in early Buddhism - conditionality yes, interconnectedness, no. At that time the people who believed in interconnectedness were the Brahmins. And ultimately this is where we trace the idea in Indian thought. Buddhism works perfectly well without it. Better in a way.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The greatest implication of this experiment has to do with human consciousness being the determining factor in the cat's existence. At least that's how Michio Kaku explains it. According to Wigner, "Consciousness determines existence...If I make an observation, what determines which state I am in? This means someone else has to observe me to collapse my wave function. This is sometimes called "Wigner's Friend." But it also means that someone has to observe Wigner's friend, and Wigner's friend , and so on. Is there a cosmic consciousness that determines the entire sequence of friends by observing the entire universe?" This reasoning is the source, I think, of how QM got into eastern religious apologetics. I would also add that those who bat this argument back and forth, the swamis and cosmologists, ignore existential phenomenology, which has a far greater grasp on the meaning of consciousness than do physics, Buddhism, Hiduism, and psychology. I refer especially to the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is not farfetched to say that "unseen dimensions" and "parallel worlds" stem from the phenomenological concepts of "margin" and "transcendental reduction."
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Canto34
No. You have this completely backwards. The cat's existence is irrelevant - we assume it exists. Whether the cat is alive or dead, however, determines the experience we have when we open the box. Not the other way around! No physicist in their right mind turns this fact on it's head!
And let us not forget the lesson I laboured over in my post: this only applies on the level of subatomic particles.
Untold septillions (real number) of sub-atomic interactions are going on all around us, entirely unobserved. You do not even observe all of the 100 billion neurons that make up your brain, let alone the molecules that make up the neurons, or the atoms and particles that actually conform to the principle of entanglement.
It is entirely far-fetched to impute cosmic consciousness or parallel worlds from any of this. Just wrong. And it just goes to show that people really don't understand Quantum Mechanics. But they are not willing to believe that they cannot understand the most fiendishly complex and counter-intuitive scientific theory ever devised. Which shows the cosmic scale of their folly. Mystics seem to explain everything, but understand nothing. I've no time for them.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
@Canto34 : I have read all the phenomenologists you mention. Their work is interestingly parallel to Buddhist philosophy in some ways, and there may be productive syntheses possible.
However, phenomenology has absolutely nothing to do with quantum physics. It is utterly farfetched to say that '"unseen dimensions" and "parallel worlds" stem from the phenomenological concepts of "margin" and "transcendental reduction."'
That represents a dire misunderstanding of quantum, or phenomenology, or probably both.
Do you know what a Hamiltonian is? Can you compute one? May I suggest, if not, you have no knowledge of actual quantum physics whatsoever. Supposed explanations of quantum in English (not math) are inevitably misleading gibberish.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
By the way, please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it so that the assertion "X is both A and B until I observe it, at which point I find it to be either A or B" either a trivial tautology or logically incoherent? It seems useless to talk about the state of things that are by definition outside of my knowledge. By saying this, I do not mean to imply that, if the best mathematical description of physics implies the above, it must be wrong. No, I trust the math, but I don't trust the ability of English to express what the math means. If the plain language description of this problem is completely useless, then it matters not at all if the conclusion sounds ridiculous or not. I hope that is not the method Schrödinger was trying to use with his thought experiment of the cat, because if so it sounds entirely quixotic.
Based on my extremely limited knowledge, one thing I find interesting about the particle-wave duality is that, I seem to recall, there are ways the experimenter can cause a photon to behave as a wave or as a particle that seem counter-intuitive. If Schrödinger's thought experiment involved causing the cat to be alive or dead in some surprising way, then it would be a more interesting thought experiment. In that case, perhaps one could devise a version not involving so much animal cruelty and then actually carry out the experiment in real life with interesting results.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015
Schrödinger's whole point was to highlight the logical incoherency with the Copenhagen interpretation and to try to discredit it. He was wrong and now his criticism is co-opted to explain the thing he thought was wrong. Now that is irony.
Turns out that at the nano-scale it is not illogical for a particle to be in all possible states simultaneously until it physically interacts in such a way as information about it is transferred (eg. if we bounce a photon off a particle and measure the photon's frequency, momentum etc). This is why Schrödinger was wrong. After interacting, the wave function collapses and the particle takes on a definite position, momentum, spin etc, at that time. Although the Heisenberg proviso applies. The product of certain pared quantities (position and momentum for example) is a constant. So the more accurately you know one of the pair, the less accurately you know the other.
But you are right in the sense that the best physicists tend to say that such a world is unimaginable. Some people can do the maths. But no one can visualise the world the maths describes.
The wave-particle duality is, to my knowledge, dependent on how one looks for the thing. If one looks for waves, by for example setting up an experiment that will produce an interference pattern, one sees wave-like phenomena. If one looks for particles, by measuring the momentum changes of a collision, one sees particles. But beneath all this are the quantum fields. I don't understand much about Quantum Field Theory (it didn't exist when I studied quantum mechanics at university) but it seems that understanding everything in terms fields and interactions of fields resolves or explains the duality.
I think the thing about so-called animal cruelty is that in the midst of a very complex idea, the implications of which are almost incomprehensible, all some people can grasp is that it involves a pussy cat in jeopardy. Since that is all they can understand they latch onto that and try to make it a thing. Or it is the source of weak jokes. Either way it's just a distraction to take the metaphor literally and miss the point. But then if the point was always going to be missed, it's all some people have left. But this is why I gave the essay the title I did.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015