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Contemporary Buddhism

Buddhism and Quantum Physics

Christian Thomas Kohl

Published May 1, 2007• 8 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling, the famous English author of The Jungle Book, born in India, wrote one day these words: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. In my paper I show that Kipling was not completely right. I try to show the common ground between Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. There is a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nāgārjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core to reality; rather, reality consists of systems of interacting objects. Such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic or instrumentalistic concepts of reality that underlie modern modes of thought.

DOI
10.1080/14639940701295328

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Rudyard Kipling, the famous English author of The Jungle Book, born in India, wrote one day these words: ‘Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. In my paper I show that Kipling was not completely right. I try to show the common ground between Buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. There is a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nāgārjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core to reality; rather, reality consists of systems of interacting objects. Such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic or instrumentalistic concepts of reality that underlie modern modes of thought.
Rudyard Kipling, the famous english author of « The Jungle Book », born in India, wrote one day these words: « Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet ». In my paper I show that Kipling was not completely right. I try to show the common ground between buddhist philosophy and quantum physics. There is a surprising parallelism between the philosophical concept of reality articulated by Nagarjuna and the physical concept of reality implied by quantum physics. For neither is there a fundamental core to reality, rather reality consists of systems of interacting objects. Such concepts of reality cannot be reconciled with the substantial, subjective, holistic or instrumentalistic concepts of reality which underlie modern modes of thought.
Niels Bohr himself pointed out to similarity of some philosophic approaches in quantum mechanics and in Buddhism. Some modern interpretations of quantum mechanics go even closer to the Buddhist approach, such as Everett interpretation and, specifically, the recent 'Extended Everett Concept' developed by M.B. Mensky. The present paper shows that both Buddhist thinkers and modern physicists, using very different methods, arrived basically at the same description of reality we live in. This is the point where the parallel worlds of Buddhism and Physics unexpectedly touched each other, and the deeper meaning of this contact is yet to be appreciated by both parties. NeuroQuantology | March 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 1| Suppl 1 | Page 123-128
A comparative analysis of the process of measurement in classical and quantum physics is given. It necessitates the expedience of the reexamination of the role of the researcher and his consciousness in the process of the interaction of the subject with the material world around him. A survey of the philosophical aspects that pertain to the problem of measurement in quantum physics leads to the conclusion that the scholar is not an independent observer of the material world beyond him, he rather becomes a part of this world to an extent that he brings pressure to bear on the properties of the observed objects. In other words, man becomes an integral part of the universe hence the classical assumption about the existence of the objective reality that is beyond the consciousness of man ceases to be relevant. That is why the philosophical treatment of the problems of quantum theory appears to be much closer to the philosophical principles of the East than to the more common here Western philosophy. Key words : quantum world, measurement, subject, object, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism.
The article highlights those discoveries of quantum physics, the philosophical understanding of which leads researchers to compare its ontology with Buddhist ontology. These are phenomena that reveal the subjectivism of physics. Thus, the discovery of the fundamental role of the observer for quantum mechanical processes and the collapse of the wave function became a «bridge» for the rapprochement of quantum mechanics and Buddhist philosophy, which asserts the relative nature of reality. The phenomenon of quantum non-locality or the plurality of parallel worlds became another basis for seeing the similarity of quantum physics and Buddhism. The idea of universal interdependence, characteristic of relational interpretations of quantum physics, also contributes to strengthening the idea of its similarity with Buddhist ontology. However, as the analysis of two representative comparative approaches shows – one developed by W. Mansfield from the side of physics, and the other developed by A. A. Terentyev from the side of Buddhism – the general tendency to compare the ontology of quantum physics and Buddhism is based on the incorrect reduction of Buddhist ontology to the doctrine of dependent origination and the wrongful identification of emptiness with dependent origination. Although the perception of Buddhist ontology as «Indra’s net» serves for comparativists from the side of physics, as well as for a wide circle of intellectuals, as the first step towards understanding the closeness of Buddhist philosophy to modern science, nevertheless, such popular interpretations are not entirely correct.
As we shall illustrate in this paper, it appears that quantum ‘particles’ might be thought to have aspects of both reality and unreality, and this is a paradoxical viewpoint which leads us in the direction of some dramatic claims about the nature of reality made by Buddhist metaphysicians such as Dharmakirti and Nagarjuna, claims which move towards providing an answer to Penrose’s quandary: “can real objects be constructed from unreal constituents?” According to Nagarjuna: “everything is real and not real, both real and not real, neither real nor not real which is the Lord Buddha’s teaching”. The resolution of the apparent paradox will become clear as we explore the relationship between the implications of quantum theory and the Buddhist doctrine of the ‘two truths’, or ‘two realities’, in detail. In fact we will discover that an appreciation of the Buddhist perspective throws significant light onto quantum conundrums. We shall discover that Dharmakirti’s philosophical analysis, alongside other Buddhist insights, which lead to the ‘ultimate’ realm of ‘empty’ Mindnature, prefigures modern quantum discoveries, particularly the notion of an ‘Epiontic Universe’ which derives from the ‘quantum Darwinism’ perspective suggested by Wojciech H. Zurek.
The Buddhist metaphysical conceptual analysis of the nature of reality has always been founded upon the basis of a rigorous employment of scrupulously coherent conceptual analysis, which is in turn based upon an empirical observation of experience in a manner appropriate to the time, although one major difference between the empirical attitude of Western science and philosophy during the age of science and that of Buddhism was the Buddhist development of rigorous techniques of meditation in order to explore the structure and nature of consciousness. In this paper I will use the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti‘s imaginative deconstruction of reality, in the context of quantum theory, to try to answer the question which seems to be posed by quantum theory: Is 'Reality' really real? In our search for the ultimate nature of reality we have to leave behind the 'seeming' appearances of the everyday world, however persuasive the appearance may be, and break through to a more 'ultimate truth' concerning the nature of reality. We shall discover that Dharmakirti's philosophical analysis, alongside other Buddhist insights, which lead to the 'ultimate' realm of 'empty' Mindnature, prefigures modern quantum discoveries.