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https://swarajyamag.com/books/the-veda-of-physics-reconciling-the-observer-and-the-observed
The Veda Of Physics: Reconciling The Observer And The Observed
by Subhash Kak
- Dec 12, 2015, 12:30 pm
How can conceptions that came up several thousand years ago in India be
of relevance to modern physics?
It is increasingly accepted that Indian ideas have played a crucial role
in the development of modern science. We are not just talking about the
symbol zero, algebra and astronomy, but also inoculation in medicine,
the periodic table of chemical elements, and the field of linguistics,
to mention just a few.
But surely Indian ideas cannot be of any value now. The progressives,
like the colonialist followers of Macaulay in the 19th century, believe
that there is nothing in the Indian tradition that is worth anything. No
wonder, our school curriculum contains precious little about Indian
wisdom. A few years ago on a visit to BHU, I asked some postgraduate
students if they had heard of the Upanishads and they said no.
Anyway, how is it even possible for conceptions that came up several
thousand years ago to be of relevance now? The idea that Indian
knowledge might be of use to the modern physicist appears ludicrous and
delusional.
Thoughtful people are ready to grant Indian cultural contributions to
architecture, music, literature, fine arts, philosophy, and perhaps to
ancient science, but nothing more.
However there are some in India and beyond its borders who think that
Indian ideas have the potential to provide key insights for progress of
contemporary science.
The great 20th century physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, who co-invented
quantum theory, claimed in his autobiography that he obtained his
central intuition from the Vedas. This is a big deal since quantum
mechanics is the deepest theory of physics, and without quantum theory
one cannot understand chemistry, and without chemistry one cannot
understand biology and life.
Details of Schrodinger’s story may be found in my new book The Wishing
Tree and so I shall not repeat that material. In the words of Walter Moore:
“Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based
on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new
view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.”
But are the parallels or analogies between Vedanta and quantum theory
merely coincidental and nothing new is to be gained from Indian knowledge?
To answer this we must remember that physics as it evolved in the last
few centuries is exclusively about things in terms of objects and their
relationships. For example, the conception of the classical universe is
as clockwork. More recently, observers have been brought in an ad hoc
manner in relativity and quantum theory, but physics cannot, by itself,
explain them.
Now, in spite of all its great successes, physics is facing a crisis
since it appears to deal with only 5% of the observable universe, and it
must invoke an unobserved 95% of what is called dark matter and dark
energy to explain cosmological structures. But even after postulating
this, there remain serious discrepancies. For example, physicists are
freaking out due to a gamma ray excess at the centre of the Milky Way,
and then there are neutrinos that seem to be changing their form.
The phenomenon of entanglement in quantum physics, which has been
observed in many experiments, implies that objects that are far removed
in space (even across billions of miles) remain connected even though
there is no mediating agency. This action at a distance without any
explanation of the process underlying it represents a big hole in our
understanding of physical reality.
Then there is the problem of free will and intentionality which cannot
be explained either by physics or biology. Meanwhile, the view that the
biological organism is just a machine governed by the genes has had to
be revised drastically due to the discovery of the epigenome. It brings
the mind into the picture since experiments have shown that behaviors,
such as fear, aversion, or stress, can be passed down the generations.
We don’t know if the epigenome can pass down other aspects of the
personality.
The rise of scientific knowledge is a progression. We appear to be going
from what I call a B model of reality (for body in physics, or brain in
organisms) to a Bc model (with incidental consciousness or mind). The B
model assumes brain/mind identity, and it was the orthodox position in
neuroscience for a long time, just as it is the orthodox position in
physics. The Indian view of reality is a BcC model (where the last C is
consciousness as an independent entity).
Carl Jung through his idea of the collective unconscious tried to
provide an explanation for instincts and archetypes. But the logic of
this collective unconscious is not clear and it does not have the same
generality as the envisioning of consciousness in Indian thought.
The writings of Schrödinger are an excellent articulation of Indian
ideas by a scientist. Posing the problem of the split between objects
and subjects in Mind and Matter, Schrödinger says the solution could
only be based on Vedic ideas:
The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere
within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven
words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the
whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it. But, of
course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to
be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world is however only
one… There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of
minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth
there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.
The skeptic would just call it one person’s opinion that should not sway
our minds, given that it was written a few decades ago. So is there
something else going on now that compels a new outside-of-the-box look
at entrenched views?
The fact that Indian epistemology accepts consciousness as an
independent provides a resolution to the seemingly insoluble problem of
interaction between the causally closed worlds of matter with the world
of consciousness.
New results in neuroscience of free will indicate that the volitional
act spring from the unconscious and the conscious mind becomes aware of
it only later, believing that the decision was made by it. There seems
to be a delay of a few hundred milliseconds in which the conscious mind
embraces the action started by the unconscious and adopts it as its own.
In physics, which deals only with objects, sentient beings are zombies.
In it, it is not conscious will that causes actions at that time.
Rather, conscious will influences beliefs at a later time which
influence subsequent actions. Standard physics does not, and cannot,
explain the self who holds these beliefs. Since this self cannot be an
object or a process, we confront an enigma.
This brings us to the Veda of physics. By this I mean a framework that
explains not only the outer reality but also the observer. In the past,
the Vaiśeṣika school of Kaṇāda sought to do this in terms of atoms and
categories of which the observer is a part. What we need now is a
similar formulation that adds to the current understanding of the
physical world.
Some might say that the biggest challenge facing physics is the
explanation of dark matter and dark energy; I say it’s at the
foundations, to explain the observer and the self.
Bibliography
•Moore, W., 1989. Schrődinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
•Kak, S., 2015. The Wishing Tree: Presence and Promise of India. Aditya
Prakashan, New Delhi.
•Schrödinger, E., 1959. Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Subhash Kak is Regents professor of electrical and computer engineering
at Oklahoma State University and a vedic scholar.
The Veda Of Physics: Reconciling The Observer And The Observed
by Subhash Kak
- Dec 12, 2015, 12:30 pm
How can conceptions that came up several thousand years ago in India be
of relevance to modern physics?
It is increasingly accepted that Indian ideas have played a crucial role
in the development of modern science. We are not just talking about the
symbol zero, algebra and astronomy, but also inoculation in medicine,
the periodic table of chemical elements, and the field of linguistics,
to mention just a few.
But surely Indian ideas cannot be of any value now. The progressives,
like the colonialist followers of Macaulay in the 19th century, believe
that there is nothing in the Indian tradition that is worth anything. No
wonder, our school curriculum contains precious little about Indian
wisdom. A few years ago on a visit to BHU, I asked some postgraduate
students if they had heard of the Upanishads and they said no.
Anyway, how is it even possible for conceptions that came up several
thousand years ago to be of relevance now? The idea that Indian
knowledge might be of use to the modern physicist appears ludicrous and
delusional.
Thoughtful people are ready to grant Indian cultural contributions to
architecture, music, literature, fine arts, philosophy, and perhaps to
ancient science, but nothing more.
However there are some in India and beyond its borders who think that
Indian ideas have the potential to provide key insights for progress of
contemporary science.
The great 20th century physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, who co-invented
quantum theory, claimed in his autobiography that he obtained his
central intuition from the Vedas. This is a big deal since quantum
mechanics is the deepest theory of physics, and without quantum theory
one cannot understand chemistry, and without chemistry one cannot
understand biology and life.
Details of Schrodinger’s story may be found in my new book The Wishing
Tree and so I shall not repeat that material. In the words of Walter Moore:
“Schrödinger and Heisenberg and their followers created a universe based
on superimposed inseparable waves of probability amplitudes. This new
view would be entirely consistent with the Vedantic concept of All in One.”
But are the parallels or analogies between Vedanta and quantum theory
merely coincidental and nothing new is to be gained from Indian knowledge?
To answer this we must remember that physics as it evolved in the last
few centuries is exclusively about things in terms of objects and their
relationships. For example, the conception of the classical universe is
as clockwork. More recently, observers have been brought in an ad hoc
manner in relativity and quantum theory, but physics cannot, by itself,
explain them.
Now, in spite of all its great successes, physics is facing a crisis
since it appears to deal with only 5% of the observable universe, and it
must invoke an unobserved 95% of what is called dark matter and dark
energy to explain cosmological structures. But even after postulating
this, there remain serious discrepancies. For example, physicists are
freaking out due to a gamma ray excess at the centre of the Milky Way,
and then there are neutrinos that seem to be changing their form.
The phenomenon of entanglement in quantum physics, which has been
observed in many experiments, implies that objects that are far removed
in space (even across billions of miles) remain connected even though
there is no mediating agency. This action at a distance without any
explanation of the process underlying it represents a big hole in our
understanding of physical reality.
Then there is the problem of free will and intentionality which cannot
be explained either by physics or biology. Meanwhile, the view that the
biological organism is just a machine governed by the genes has had to
be revised drastically due to the discovery of the epigenome. It brings
the mind into the picture since experiments have shown that behaviors,
such as fear, aversion, or stress, can be passed down the generations.
We don’t know if the epigenome can pass down other aspects of the
personality.
The rise of scientific knowledge is a progression. We appear to be going
from what I call a B model of reality (for body in physics, or brain in
organisms) to a Bc model (with incidental consciousness or mind). The B
model assumes brain/mind identity, and it was the orthodox position in
neuroscience for a long time, just as it is the orthodox position in
physics. The Indian view of reality is a BcC model (where the last C is
consciousness as an independent entity).
Carl Jung through his idea of the collective unconscious tried to
provide an explanation for instincts and archetypes. But the logic of
this collective unconscious is not clear and it does not have the same
generality as the envisioning of consciousness in Indian thought.
The writings of Schrödinger are an excellent articulation of Indian
ideas by a scientist. Posing the problem of the split between objects
and subjects in Mind and Matter, Schrödinger says the solution could
only be based on Vedic ideas:
The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere
within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven
words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the
whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it. But, of
course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to
be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world is however only
one… There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of
minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth
there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.
The skeptic would just call it one person’s opinion that should not sway
our minds, given that it was written a few decades ago. So is there
something else going on now that compels a new outside-of-the-box look
at entrenched views?
The fact that Indian epistemology accepts consciousness as an
independent provides a resolution to the seemingly insoluble problem of
interaction between the causally closed worlds of matter with the world
of consciousness.
New results in neuroscience of free will indicate that the volitional
act spring from the unconscious and the conscious mind becomes aware of
it only later, believing that the decision was made by it. There seems
to be a delay of a few hundred milliseconds in which the conscious mind
embraces the action started by the unconscious and adopts it as its own.
In physics, which deals only with objects, sentient beings are zombies.
In it, it is not conscious will that causes actions at that time.
Rather, conscious will influences beliefs at a later time which
influence subsequent actions. Standard physics does not, and cannot,
explain the self who holds these beliefs. Since this self cannot be an
object or a process, we confront an enigma.
This brings us to the Veda of physics. By this I mean a framework that
explains not only the outer reality but also the observer. In the past,
the Vaiśeṣika school of Kaṇāda sought to do this in terms of atoms and
categories of which the observer is a part. What we need now is a
similar formulation that adds to the current understanding of the
physical world.
Some might say that the biggest challenge facing physics is the
explanation of dark matter and dark energy; I say it’s at the
foundations, to explain the observer and the self.
Bibliography
•Moore, W., 1989. Schrődinger: Life and Thought, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
•Kak, S., 2015. The Wishing Tree: Presence and Promise of India. Aditya
Prakashan, New Delhi.
•Schrödinger, E., 1959. Mind and Matter, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Subhash Kak is Regents professor of electrical and computer engineering
at Oklahoma State University and a vedic scholar.