Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

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Veritas Aequitas
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Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

While listening to the Debate "Has Science Killed Philosophy"
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=34063
Rovelli mentioned Nagarjuna [Buddhist Philosopher 150-250 CE] theories could explain the fundamentals Quantum Mechanics effectively.
Here is the full extract from his book: Helgoland : Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution
Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.


.............."Quote"
In my own attempts to make sense of quanta for myself, I have wandered among the texts of philosophers in search of a conceptual basis with which to understand the strange picture of the world provided by this incredible theory.
In doing so, I have found many fine suggestions and acute criticisms, but nothing wholly convincing.
Until one day I came across a work that left me amazed.
I will end this chapter, which does not have any conclusions, with a light account of this encounter.

I did not come across it by chance.
When speaking about quanta and their relational nature, I had frequently met people who asked: Have you read Nāgārjuna?
When I’d heard my umpteenth “Have you read Nāgārjuna?” I decided to go ahead and read it.
Though not widely known in the West, the work in question is hardly an obscure or minor one: it is one of the most important texts of Buddhist philosophy, so it was only due to my personal ignorance of Asian thought (not so uncharacteristic in the West) that I was unaware of it.
Its title is one of those never-ending Sanskrit words—Mūlamadhyamakakārikā—translated in numerous ways, including The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way.
I read it in a translation with commentary by an American analytic philosopher.
It has made a profound impression upon me.118

Nāgārjuna lived in the second century CE. There have been countless commentaries on his text, which has been overlaid with interpretations and exegesis. The interest of such ancient texts lies partly in the stratification of readings that gives them to us enriched by levels of meaning. What really interests us about ancient texts is not what the author initially intended to say: it is how the work can speak to us now, and what it can suggest today.

The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that
there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else.
The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate.
Obviously, Nāgārjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta—that is not the point.
The point is that philosophers offer original ways of rethinking the world, and we can employ them if they turn out to be useful.
The perspective offered by Nāgārjuna may perhaps make it a little easier to think about the quantum world.

If nothing exists in itself, everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else.
The technical term used by Nāgārjuna to describe the absence of independent existence is “emptiness” (śūnyatā): things are “empty” in the sense of having no autonomous existence.
They exist thanks to, as a function of, with respect to, in the perspective of, something else.

If I look at a cloudy sky—to take a simplistic example—I can see a castle and a dragon.
Do a castle and a dragon really exist up there in the sky?
Obviously not: the dragon and the castle emerge from the encounter between the shape of the clouds and the sensations and thoughts in my head; in themselves, they are empty entities, they do not exist.
So far, so easy.
But Nāgārjuna also suggests that the clouds, the sky, sensations, thoughts and my own head are equally things that arise from the encounter with other things: they are empty entities.

And myself, looking at a star, do I exist? No, not even I. So who is observing the star?
No one, says Nāgārjuna. To see a star is a component of that set of interactions that I conventionally call my “self.” “What articulates language does not exist. The circle of thoughts does not exist.”119
There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand—that is the true essence of our being.
“I” is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.
Centuries of Western speculation on the subject, and on the nature of consciousness, vanish like morning mist.

Like much philosophy and much science, Nāgārjuna distinguishes between two levels: conventional, apparent reality with its illusory and perspectival aspects, and ultimate reality. But in this case the distinction takes us in an unexpected direction:
the ultimate reality, the essence, is absence, is vacuity. It does not exist.

If every metaphysics seeks a primary substance, an essence on which everything may depend, the point of departure from which everything follows, Nāgārjuna suggests that the ultimate substance, the point of departure . . . does not exist.

There are timid intuitions in a similar direction in Western philosophy.
But Nāgārjuna’s perspective is radical.
Conventional, everyday existence is not negated; on the contrary, it is taken into account in all of its complexity, with its levels and facets.
It can be studied, explored, analyzed, reduced to more elementary terms.
But there is no sense, Nāgārjuna argues, in looking for an ultimate substratum.

The difference from contemporary structural realism, for instance, seems clear: I can imagine Nāgārjuna adding a short chapter to a contemporary edition of his book entitled “All Structures are Empty.” They exist only when you are thinking about organizing something else.
In his terms: “They are neither precedent to objects; nor not precedent to objects; neither are they both things; nor, ultimately, neither one nor the other thing.”*

The illusoriness of the world, its samsāra, is a general theme of Buddhism; to recognize this is to reach nirvāna, liberation and beatitude.
For Nāgārjuna, samsāra and nirvāna are the same thing: both empty of their own existence.Nonexistent.

So is emptiness the only reality?
Is this, after all, the ultimate reality?
No, writes Nāgārjuna, in the most vertiginous chapter of his book: every perspective exists only in interdependence with something else, there is never an ultimate reality—and this is the case for his own perspective as well.
Even emptiness is devoid of essence: it is conventional.
No metaphysics survives.
Emptiness is empty.
............ "unquote".

continue next post..
Last edited by Veritas Aequitas on Tue Dec 07, 2021 4:42 am, edited 3 times in total.
Veritas Aequitas
Posts: 12379
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2012 4:41 am

Re: Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

..."quote"
Nāgārjuna has given us a formidable conceptual tool for thinking about the relationality of quanta: we can think of interdependence without autonomous essence entering the equation.
In fact, interdependence—and this is the key argument made by Nāgārjuna—requires us to forget all about autonomous essences.

The long search for the “ultimate substance” in physics has passed through matter, molecules, atoms, fields, elementary particles . . .
and has been shipwrecked in the relational complexity of quantum field theory and general relativity.
Is it possible that a philosopher from ancient India can provide us with a conceptual tool with which to extricate ourselves?

It is always from others that we learn, from those different from ourselves.
Despite millennia of uninterrupted dialogue, the East and the West still have something to say to each other. As in the best marriages.

The fascination of Nāgārjuna’s thought goes beyond questions raised by contemporary physics.
His perspective has something dizzying about it.
It resonates with the best of much Western philosophy, both classical and recent.
With the radical skepticism of Hume, with the unmasking of badly posed questions in Wittgenstein.
But it seems to me that Nāgārjuna does not fall into the trap in which so much philosophy is caught, by postulating starting points that invariably turn out to be unconvincing in the long run.
He speaks about reality, about its complexity and comprehensibility, but he defends us from the conceptual trap of wanting to find it an ultimate foundation.

His is not metaphysical extravagance: it is sobriety.
It recognizes the fact that to inquire about the ultimate foundation of everything is to ask a question that perhaps simply does not make sense.

This does not shut down investigation. On the contrary, it liberates it.
Nāgārjuna is not a nihilist negating the reality of the world, and neither is he a skeptic denying that we can know anything about that reality.
The world of phenomena is one that we can investigate, gradually improving our understanding of it.
We may find general characteristics.
But it is a world of interdependence and contingencies, not a world we should trouble ourselves attempting to derive from an Absolute.

I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something.
The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty.
Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better.
This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change.
There is no cardinal or final fixed point, philosophical or methodological, with which to anchor the adventure of knowledge.

There are many different interpretations of Nāgārjuna’s text.
The multiplicity of potential readings is testimony to its vitality and to the capacity of ancient texts to continue to speak to us.
What interests us, anew, is not what the prior of a monastery in India was actually thinking nearly two thousand years ago—that is his business (or the business of historians).
What interests us is the power of the ideas that emanate today from the lines he left; how these, enriched by generations of commentary, may open up new spaces for thought, intersecting with our culture and our knowledge.
This is the meaning of culture: an endless dialogue that enriches us by feeding on experiences, knowledge and, above all, exchanges.

I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic.
And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nāgārjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations.

But Nāgārjuna’s emptiness also nourishes an ethical stance that clears the sky from the endless disquietude: to understand that we do not exist as autonomous entities helps us free ourselves from attachments and suffering.
Precisely because of its impermanence, because of the absence of any absolute, the now has meaning and is precious.

For me as a human being, Nāgārjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of images.
Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.
........... "unquote"

Views??
Veritas Aequitas
Posts: 12379
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2012 4:41 am

Re: Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

Youtube Videos re the OP;

Nagarjuna, Sunyata and Quantum Mechanics - Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrdaIFuJdLc

Of Nagarjuna, Sunyata and Stardust| Carlo Rovelli
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgIfNuZs56w
seeds
Posts: 2147
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 9:31 pm

Re: Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

Post by seeds »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:56 am While listening to the Debate "Has Science Killed Philosophy"
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=34063
Ravioli [sic] mentioned Nagarjuna [Buddhist Philosopher 150-250 CE] theories could explain the fundamentals Quantum Mechanics effectively.
Was that Chef Boyardee ravioli in pasta sauce that mentioned Nagarjuna's theories, or was it some other brand?
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:56 am Here is the full extract from his book: Helgoland : Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution
Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

.............."Quote"

The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that
there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else.
The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate....

...I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic.
And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nāgārjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations...."

............ "unquote".
In other words, because many physicists tend to ignore the deeper philosophical questions that their measuring devices simply cannot answer, Carlo (ravioli) Rovelli is happy to see that Nagarjuna's words seem to support their surrendering lament: "shut up and calculate."
_______
Veritas Aequitas
Posts: 12379
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2012 4:41 am

Re: Nagarjuna & Quantum Physics

Post by Veritas Aequitas »

seeds wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:39 pm
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:56 am While listening to the Debate "Has Science Killed Philosophy"
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=34063
Ravioli [sic] mentioned Nagarjuna [Buddhist Philosopher 150-250 CE] theories could explain the fundamentals Quantum Mechanics effectively.
Was that Chef Boyardee ravioli in pasta sauce that mentioned Nagarjuna's theories, or was it some other brand?
It is Heinz's.
Veritas Aequitas wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:56 am Here is the full extract from his book: Helgoland : Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution
Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell.

.............."Quote"

The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that
there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else.
The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate....

...I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic.
And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nāgārjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations...."

............ "unquote".
In other words, because many physicists tend to ignore the deeper philosophical questions that their measuring devices simply cannot answer, Carlo (ravioli) Rovelli is happy to see that Nagarjuna's words seem to support their surrendering lament: "shut up and calculate."
_______
I believe Nagarjuna's views reinforced and expanded Rovelli's perspective besides merely calculations.
Nagarjuna's views focused on the "relations" between whatever is supposed to be objects with the view there is no independent objects [as empty]. Nagarjuna went further in asserting, even the 'relations' are empty.
This view is in alignment with Kant's there is no thing-in-itself at all while at the same time Kant also focus on 'relations' especially with the human self.

While Kant's focused on systematizing such theories, Nagarjuna's views are targeted toward practice in alignment with Buddhism's purposes, i.e. into how to live and manage life optimally for the individual[s] thus for humanity.
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