It's with a certain trepidation, or fear, that I even raise the topic of Buddhism
and quantum physics. There's a large literature on this topic, largely can be
traced to - or at least two books really made it big - Fritjof Capra's The Tao of
Physics and Gary Zukav's the Dancing Wu Li Masters. There were many more
Amrit Goswami's The Self-aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material
World, and Physics of Consciousness the Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life by
Evan Harris Walker and so on and so forth. Now, the reason that I think people
get nervous even raising the topic is not actually because these books are bad
on the physics - that's what I found interesting. It's that they're bad on the
Asian philosophy. At the time many of the authors of these books were serious
physicists with PhDs, with research and publications and so on, but the problem is
many of them were the products of the counterculture and the New Age movement
so they're getting their mystical east notions from people like D.T. Suzuki and
Alan Watts and Krishnamurti and accordingly they regarded Hinduism,
Buddhism, Daoism, Zen, as simply different expressions of a common and somewhat
superficial Vedantic monism. So while their grasp of Asian thought may have
been limited, they were actually correct about the challenges to scientific
naturalism posed by quantum physics. In this regard they were actually
following in the footsteps of the pioneers of quantum science including
Einstein, Max Born, Neils Bohr, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Pauli,
Werner Heisenberg and so on and on. OK, so all these guys are really captured
by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and I'm not going to go into it here
I'll just mention the weirdness is generally
grouped under four headings. There's "wave-particle duality" often called
complementarity. There's the" Heisenberg uncertainty principle" and that's the
notion that two conjugate variables of a single particle cannot be known at the
same time. There's "quantum entanglement and nonlocality" when you have two entangled
entangled particles distant in space that seem to communicate with one another
instantaneously. And then there's the measurement problem, which is actually a
problem that I'm working on as part of a larger project and how it relates to the
notion of Buddhist vikalpa. So these four puzzles all have one thing in
common - each foregrounds the relationship between
the world that we observe and the mind that is doing the observing. It's
the relationship between the mind- independent universe and our knowledge
of that universe. So I've been working on the structural relationship between the
quantum measurement problem and the Buddhist problem of vikalpa, or conceptual
construction, as in both cases there's a sense in which the world that we engage
is brought into being by that very engagement. Today, for the purpose of
this conference on animals, I'm focusing on two unfortunate cats both executed to
make a philosophical point. I'm gonna start with Schrödinger's and this is
going to require very brief background into quantum mechanics. According to
what is now known as the Copenhagen interpretation, our measurement or
observation or engagement, with the quantum particle does not merely alter
the nature of the particle but it actually brings it into being. Prior to
observation there is no particle per se but only a wave function that can be
thought of as a superposition of multiple states called eigenstates. Now
various mathematical models such as the Schrödinger equation or Heisenberg's
matrix mechanics describe with amazing precision the linear evolution of the
wave function, it's the wave function through time. But these formal models can
only predict the probabilities of what will appear when we actually
interact with the wave. There is then an element of chance, or randomness, in what
appears when we take a measurement. So scientists were then brought to talk
about the act of measurement or observation as bringing about the
collapse of the wavefunction, resulting in the appearance of one eigenstate out
of many that comprise in superposition. Now Bohr and Heisenberg are the two
figures most closely associated with this Copenhagen position. In their view,
the wavefunction does not represent an actual state of affairs in the
mind-independent universe, but is rather a mathematical formula for predicting
what we see when we go looking. Accordingly, the Copenhagen
interpretation and other related anti-realist theories hold that it is
impossible to understand the natural world without taking into consideration
the act of measurement, or observation, or perhaps even consciousness. All right
this is weird stuff. They are the Madhyamikans in this this argument. But
not all scientists agreed. Einstein and Schrödinger were among the
most famous opponents of the Copenhagen view. They felt that science necessitates
belief in a determinative objective reality that is prior to, and distinct
from, mind. They argued that if quantum science doesn't give us purchase on this
objective world, if it bottoms out in chance, then it must be incomplete -
there's something we simply don't know. There must be some hidden variables that
determine what appears. So the disagreement concerns the existence of
some objective reality. Bohr and Heisenberg believed that it makes no
sense to talk about the existence of a moon when no one is looking at it, that
there is no determinative reality no numinal world lying beyond what appears.
Einstein and Schrödinger thought this position was simply bizarre, it's absurd.
Now in May 1935, Einstein and two young assistants published a paper that they
thought would be the decisive blow to the anti-realist paper,
the anti-realist position. I'm not going to go into it,
it's one of the most famous papers in all of physics. It's called the "EPR
paper" and it argued that you could entangle two particles
such that if you did something to one particle it would instantly affect the
other. They showed that to them that was just bizarre because it would entail
supernuminal communication. So they said there must be something fundamentally
wrong with quantum mechanics. So on reading this EPR paper, Schrödinger wrote
to Einstein concurring with his analysis and the correspondence that ensued
led directly to Schrödinger's cat. The impetus actually came from from Einstein
but I'm not going to go into that. In a subsequent letter to Schrödinger
Einstein came up with this kind of interesting idea. He imagines a keg of
gunpowder that might explode sometime over the course of a year.
It is patently absurd, he declares, to imagine the keg of gunpowder in a
superposition both exploded and unexploded at the same time. It was
apparently this letter that prompted Schrödinger to concoct his famous cat
scenario. This cat scenario first appears in an article published a few
months after the EPR paper in 1935 and I'm quoting from it. He says "One can even
set up a ridiculous case. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber along with the
following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat):
in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that
perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atom decays, but also, with equal
probability, perhaps it doesn't decay. If it happens that the counter tube
discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of
hydrocyanic acid. If one has left the entire system to itself for an hour one
could say the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom
has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. So the psi-function
(that's the wavefunction) of the entire system, would express this by having the
living and the dead cat mixed or smeared in equal parts." This is a fancy way of
saying that the cat must be both alive and dead if you buy the Copenhagen
interpretation that the particle has both decayed and not decayed. Now this
cat in a box experiment is an elegant reworking of Einstein's previous - the
previous experiments that he - or the thought experiments he came up with,
because it now explicitly ties an indeterminate event at the quantum level -
the decay of a radioactive particle - to an event at the macro level - the death of
a cat. To accept the notion of superposition, which is a blurring of two
contradictory states, at the quantum level now demands that you accept it at
the macro level - the cat must be alive and dead at the same time. Now note that
this is a reductio ad absurdum argument. Schrödinger is not suggesting that this
is true. On the contrary, he regards the notion that the cat could be alive and
dead is so patently ridiculous that it will force folks like Bohr and
Heisenberg to abandon their anti-realist stance.
Moreover, putting a sentient creature inside the box rather than an insentient
ball (Einsteins first thought was there was a ball in the box), it forces
one to consider the cat's perspective on the matter.
Surely the cat knows if it's alive or not, and this I believe is in part why he
selected a cat, since we're more likely to empathize
with a cute kitty than with many other creatures and certainly not a ball.
Somehow the deliberate murder of an innocent cat in this outlandish scenario
underscores the outlandishness of the beliefs Schrödinger is ridiculing. Now I'm
going to skip a bunch here, everything changed in 1964. There was this guy John
Bell came out with an amazing paper (it's really quite brilliant) where he showed
that it was possible experimentally to disprove, possibly disprove, the hidden
variable notion. It's what's called a no-go theorem - in other words it can't
tell you what's happening but it can tell you what is not happening. And it
turns out that what is not happening is that there are some hidden variables
that determine the behavior of predetermined the behavior of entangled
particles and with that that ended up being tested it was first tested in
Berkeley in the early 70s. It's been tested multiple times since then in an
attempt to remove any loopholes and it turns out that local realism is not true.
Right, the Copenhagen people look like they have won. Now the summary should be
sufficient to see why at least some physicists compelled by evidence on the
anti-realist side held that a scientific account of quantum phenomena was
impossible without reference to consciousness and mind. Some of them
dabbled in Asian philosophy for precisely this reason. They believed that
Asian monistic philosophies of ancient heritage had some kind of handle on
consciousness and its relationship with the manifest world. In short,
contemplating the mysteries of quantum mechanics had a way of turning
hard-headed scientists into Eastern mystics. In time, the plight of
Schrödinger's cat which was originally intended as an amusing caricature and
repudiation of a harebrained interpretation of quantum mechanics, came
to stand for the very opposite, that Schrödinger's cat is in some mysterious
fashion both alive and dead, came to embody the believe-it-or-not
strangeness of the quantum world. To use an example of that, when Bohr was was
awarded the Order of the Elephant, and he had to come up with a, what's it
called, a seal, this is what he came up with. The Latin inscription
says "opposites are complementary". Now to turn to Song China dynasty Chan and the
plight of a similarly innocent creature Nanquan's cat. The story is best known
from Case 14 of the Wumenguan. I'm just going to read it - Master Nanquan
came upon the monks of the Eastern and Western quarters arguing over a cat.
Thereupon Nanquan held up the cat and said if one among you can speak the
truth, you will save the cat. if not I'll slice it in two. No one said
anything, so Nanquan sliced the cat in two. That evening Zhaozhou returned that Nanquan
raised the incident with him thereupon Zhaozhou took off his sandals placed them on
top of his head and walked out. The Master said had you been there you would
have saved the cat. Now Wumen comments "Now tell me, what is the meaning of Zhaozhou
putting his sandals on his head? If you can give me a single transformative word
in response to this, then you will see that Nanquan's
injunction was not a pointless exercise. If not, misfortune". Now in order to unpack
this anecdote, a bit of background is in order.
Larger monasteries in China, at least by the Song period, where the case genre
first came into being were divided into a western half for religious practice
and an eastern administrative half. The anecdote doesn't mention what the
quarrel was about but presumably cats were valued in monasteries as they kept
rodents at bay. However, the fact that the cat uses a binome with the diminutive
suffix for cat and 'mao'er' perhaps better translated as kitty, suggests that the
rival groups simply fancied the cat because it was cute. That we're not told
what the quarrel is about has a certain conceptual elegance. We know only that
there are two sides, each with its own conflicting interests, views, and
perspectives. In other words, the content of the dispute is beside the point.
The quarrel over the cat offers the master a teachable moment - an opportunity to
demand that his students rise above their contingent conventional bifurcated
frames of reference and respond from the perspective of the absolute. He demands
that they daode they "speak their attainment" which is an overdetermined
compound that means both to attain the way, and to express what is thereby
attained. But this is the vikalpa problem - the
conditioned and contingent world that is known to us through the senses is the
product of the distinctions imposed by our cognitive apparatus. Buddhist
practice is directed toward the attainment of the ultimate - a non
conceptual or unconditioned state or understanding - and by definition this
state must transcend or be free of all distinctions and hence cannot be
captured or transmitted through words. nor can it be signified through silence
as silence is meaningful only to the extent that it has something to say. In
other words it must entail vikalpa. To even posit such a state, to imagine a
goal toward which one can aspire, is already to be thrown into dualism and
errors, so what is one to do? Nanquan's demand for a true word is a trap.
Any attempt to respond, including responding, through some kind of silence
is destined to fail. The two quarreling sides each want a whole cat - a real
intact living cat - but they shirk from the challenge thrown at them which is to
express their wholeness and so they end up with a sliced cat - a parsed or
disaggregated product of the conceptually constructed
world in which we find ourselves. So why does Zhaozhou succeed where the others fail?
He knows that there's no place to stand, there's no true word to be given.
But he also knows that a bodhisattva is compelled to transmit the dharma and
thus has no choice but to respond. So he up ends things, figuratively and
literally, placing his sandals on top of his head. Now most of the traditional
commentators say that this action is meaningless, it's kind of a non sequitur
and that's its meaning, but I think that that's not what's going on. I think
Zhaozhou's action is that that's only half the truth. His gesture is more than a
mere refusal to be drawn into Nanquan's trap. There's a certain dramatic and
conceptual elegance eloquence to his mute response. Placing his soiled
footwear on his head is a profane and vaguely offensive act that
suggests disapproval, if not censure, at the same time it represents a reversal
or up ending, or turning the tables. In this way Zhaozhou not only escapes Nanquan's
trap but he also manages to one-up his teacher in a gesture that suggests
playful ridicule. Nanquan, delighted by Zhaozhou's audacity, acknowledges that Zhaozhou
would have saved the cat. So Nanquan is sitting at the opposite end of the
realist anti-realists divided from Schrodinger, whereas Schrodinger is
arguing that there must be some independent, mind- independent truth of
the matter. Nanquan's challenge is predicated on precisely the opposite -
the anti-realist insight that there is no outside, no escape from the
contingency of the subject position. They both use a cat, or a kitty, to
dramatically drive home their point. In both cases, as a public relations ploy
the gambit works. In the popular imagination Schrödinger and Nanquan are
known for one thing and one thing only - their murder of a cat. Thank you.
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