Buddhism and Quantum Physics

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Buddhism and Quantum Physics A Strange Parallel of Two Concepts of Reality by Christian Thomas Kohl

What is reality? The mindsets of the modern world provide four answers to that question and oscillate between these answers:

1. The traditional Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions speak about a creator that holds the world together. He represents the fundamental reality. If He were separated only for one moment from the world, the world would disappear immediately. The world can only exist because He is maintaining and guarding it. This mindset is so fundamental that even many modern scientists cannot deviate from it. The laws of nature and elementary particles now supersede the role of the creator.

2. René Descartes takes into considering a second mindset, where the subject or the subjective model of thought is fundamental. Everything else is nothing but derived from it.

3. According to a third holistic mindset, the fundamental reality should consist of both, subject and object. Everything should be one. Everything should be connected with everything.

4. A fourth and very modern mindset neglects reality. We could call it instrumentalism. According to this way of thinking, our concepts do not reflect a single reality in any one way. Our concepts have nothing to do with reality but only with information.

Buddhism refuses these four concepts of reality. Therefore it was confronted with the reproach of nihilism. If you don't believe in a creator, nor in the laws of nature, nor in a permanent object, nor in an absolute subject, nor in both, nor in none of it, in what do you believe then? What remains that you can consider a fundamental reality?

The answer is simple: it is so simple that we barely consider it being a philosophical statement: things depend on other things. For instance: a thing is dependent on its cause. There is no effect without a cause and no cause without an effect. There is no fire without a fuel, no action without an actor and vice versa. Things are dependent on other things; they are not identical with each other, nor do they break up into objective and subjective parts.

This Buddhist concept of reality is often met with disapproval and considered incomprehensible. But there are modern modes of thought with points of contact. For instance: there is a discussion in quantum physics about fundamental reality. What is fundamental in quantum physics: particles, waves, field of force, law of nature, mindsets or information?

Quantum physics came to a result that is expressed by the key words of complementarity, interaction and entanglement. According to these concepts there are no independent but complementary quantum objects; they are at the same time waves and particles. Quantum objects interact with others, and they are even entangled when they are separated in a far distance. Without being observed philosophically, quantum physics has created a physical concept of reality.

According to that concept the fundamental reality is an interaction of systems that interact with other systems and with their own components. This physical concept of reality does not agree upon the four approaches mentioned before.

If the fundamental reality consists of dependent systems, then its basics can neither be independent and objective laws of nature nor independent subjective models of thought. The fundamental reality cannot be a mystic entity nor can it consist of information only.

The concepts of reality in Buddhism surprisingly parallel quantum physics.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Quantum Physics

This is no presentation or criticism of quantum physics but a discussion of the metaphysical mindsets that underlie quantum physics. The concept of reality in quantum physics can be expressed by the key words: complementarity, four interactions, and entanglements [entanglements will not be explained in this paper. According to Roger Penrose “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press 2000, p.66)].

In the long prehistory of Quantum Physics it could not be proved experimentally whether the smallest elements of light are particles or waves. Many experiments argued in favor of one or the other assumption. Photons are sometimes acting as waves and sometimes as particles. This behavior was named a wave-particle-dualism. The idea of dualism used to be understood as a logic contradiction: only one or the other could apply but paradoxically both appeared. Photons cannot be both. These are the expectations according to atomism. According to atomism a scientific explanation consists in a reduction of a contradictory object into its permanent components or its mathematical laws. This is the fundamental dualistic concept that modern atomism and modern physics have adopted from ancient Greek philosophy of nature: substance and permanence can not to be found in objects of perception in the world we are living in, but in the elementary elements of objects and in mathematical order. These material and immaterial foundations keep the world together; they do not change while everything else is changing.

According to atomism it should be possible to reduce an object to its independent elements or to its mathematical laws or to its simple and fundamental principles and according to these the fundamental elements should be either particles or waves, not both.

What is to be understood by independent elements? Plato made the difference between two forms of being. In the second part of his 'Parmenides' he distinguished between single objects, which exist exclusively by partaking and insofar they have no own being and ideas, that have an own being. Traditional metaphysics adopted this dualism from Plato. An independent own being is characterized in traditional metaphysics as something that, as an existing thing, is not dependent from anything else (Descartes), existing by itself, subsisting through itself (More), which is completely unlimited by others and free from any kind of foreign command (Spinoza), and exists by itself without anything else (Schelling). Albert Einstein was following this metaphysical tradition when he wrote: For the classification of things that are introduced in physics, it is essential that these things require for a certain time an independent existence, as far as these things lay 'in different parts of space'. Without the assumption of such an independent existence [of 'So-seins' as Einstein called it, this expression can be translated by a word like 'likeness' or 'to be like this'] of things being distant from each other in space, physical thought in the usual sense would not be possible“.

This idea of an independent reality was projected to the fundamental elements of the material world by atomism. For atomism, a scientific explanation means to reduce the vicissitude and variety of objects and conditions to its permanent, stable, independent, undividable elements, or mathematical laws. According to the expectations of atomism all changes of nature can be explained as separation, connection and movements of unchanged and independent atoms or still more elementary components. They and their mathematical laws are the core or fundamental reality of objects. They keep the world together. The question whether the fundamental objects are particles or waves was an explosive issue: the traditional concepts of reality, that had been made available by metaphysics, were at stake. Maybe the fundamental reality could not be grasped by traditional concepts of reality. Of which value of explanation was atomism, if it should turn out that there are no independent atoms or elementary particles and that objects have no stable core? Are quantum objects objective, subjective, both, or none of both? What is reality? Is there a difference between the quantum world and the world we are living in?

Niels Bohr. In 1927, the physicist Niels Bohr introduced the concept of complementarity into quantum physics. According to this concept the picture of wave and the picture of particle are not two pictures that contradict and exclude each other but two (contradictory) pictures that complete each other, only concertedly they can give a complete description of physical phenomena. According to Bohr, complementarity meant that in the quantum world it is impossible to speak about independent and objective quantum objects because they are in an interactive relation with each other, as well as with the instrument of measurement. Bohr considered the interaction between the object and the instrument of measurement as an inseparable element of quantum objects, because the interaction itself is important for the existence of some features of these objects: some measurements set photons as particles and destruct the interference that characterizes objects as waves. Other measurements set objects as waves. That was the new concept of reality by Niels Bohr. Bohr did not transform the concept of complementarity into the instrumentalist conclusion: there were no quantum objects [at least when his argumentation was one of a physician’s view. However, when he talked on a metaphysical level about quantum physics, he took the position of an instrumentalist approach]. In a physical sense the fundamental physical reality consists for Niels Bohr of interacting complementary quantum objects.

Interaction in the standard quantum model. In the meantime the concept of the four interactions was introduced to the standard quantum model. These four elementary interactions do not permit the reduction of quantum objects to their elements – as Democritus proposed. Interactions, the forces that act between the quantum objects, cropped up to the elementary particles. As elementary objects, not single independent objects were being established, but two-body-systems, multi-body-systems or complete assembles of elementary particles. Between its components, forces of interaction are effective which keep the components together. They are parts of the components. Mostly they are forces of attraction. In the case of electro-magnetic forces they are also repulsive. It is possible to think of the interactions between the elementary particles as an exchange of elementary particles. The physicist Steven Weinberg writes about this: „Today we come within reach of a standardized view of nature, if we think in concepts of elementary particles and interactions between them. (...) Best known are gravitation and electro-magnetism that belong to the daily world of experience because of their range. Gravitation keeps our feet on earth and planets on their path. The electro-magnetic interactions between electrons and atomic nucleus are responsible for all well known chemical and physical qualities of usual solid bodies, liquids, and gases. The two nucleus powers belong to a different category in respect to reach and familiarity. The 'strong' interaction that keeps protons and neutrons inside the nucleus together has a reach of about 10-13 centimeters. So it goes down in daily life and even in the realm of an atom [10-8 centimeters]. The 'weak' interaction is the least familiar. It has such a short reach [less that 10-15 centimeters] and is so weak, that it probably does not keep anything together“. Sometimes explanations go very far into difficult and subtle details. How does an electron interact with another quantum object if it exists of one part only? Which part it should emit if it exists of one part only? There is an answer to these questions by the concept of interactions. An electron does not exist of one single part only, because the interaction is a part of the electron. In an article about super gravitation of 1978 the two physicians Daniel Z. Freedman and Pieter von Nieuwenhuizen write about it: „The observed mass of electrons can be described as the sum of a 'naked mass' and the 'self-energy' that is based on the interaction of the electron with its own electro-magnetic field. Individually none of these parts are observable“.

The knowledge of quantum physics about the particles that carry the interactions, shall be mentioned here in the words of the physicist Gerhard’t Hooft. He writes, "that an electron is surrounded by a cloud of virtual particles, which are permanently emitted and absorbed. This cloud does not exist of photons only, but of pairs of charged particles, for example electrons and their anti-particles, the positrons“. (...) "Even a quark is surrounded by a cloud of gluons and pairs of quark-anti-quark“. Individual, isolated, independent quarks were never been observed. This phenomenon is named confinement. This means quarks are captives, they cannot appear as a single quark but as a pair or a trio only. If you try to separate quarks by force, there will appear new quarks between them, which unify into pairs and trios. Claudio Rebbi and other physicists reported: „Between quarks and gluons inside an elementary particle, permanently additional quarks and gluons appear which disappear again after a short time“. These clouds of virtual particles represent or produce interactions.

We now arrived at the centre of quantum physics. It consists of a new physical concept of reality, that does no more consider single and independent elements as the fundamental reality but two-body-systems or two states of quantum objects or two concepts like earth & moon, proton & electron, proton & neutron, quark & anti-quark, wave & instrument of measurement, particle & instrument of measurement, twin photons, superposition, spin-up & spin-down, matter & anti-matter, elementary particle & field of force, law of nature & matter, symmetry & anti-symmetry etc. These systems do not break up into independent parts. They cannot be reduced into two separated independent bodies or states with one part being fundamental and the other one deduced, as it is the case with substantialism's and subjectivism’s either-or-scheme. Together they are not a mysterious unity, they are not ‘one’ and identical as holism tries to convince us. Furthermore, we cannot claim that they are nothing but constructed mathematical models and that no physical reality corresponds to them, what has been claimed by instrumentalism. Exactly the latter is claimed by Stephen Hawking who does not consider himself as an instrumentalist but as a positivist. In a discussion with the mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking said: "I am a positivist who believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct; and that it is meaningless to ask if they correspond to reality, just whether they predict observations“.

It is not meaningless to ask for the correspondence between model & object. If a model of thought is accurate it has a structural similarity with the phenomenon that it constructs, otherwise it can lead to calculations without any meaningful physical explanation, because they cannot correspond to any reality.

Physically, a fundamental reality is not a one-body-system but a two-body-system or an assemble of bodies that surrounds the central or the 'naked' body. Between quantum particles there is an interaction that is part of these particles. That's the way it is but all our metaphysical schemes put up a real struggle. This 'cloud' does not correspond to our traditional metaphysical expectation of everything that should represent order and should be fundamental. How can 'clouds' be that which we are used to call the basic elements of matter? How can this little vibrating thing be what generations of philosophers and physicists were looking for? Is this supposed to be all? From the little 'cloud' we try to filter with metaphysical interpretations what has substance and what maintains. Completely for the purpose of Plato’s substance metaphysics Werner Heisenberg called elementary particles 'the idea of matter'. The philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker named mathematics 'the essence of nature'. According to the physicist Herwig Schopper, fields of force are the ultimate reality. Some of us like to consider the fundamental reality as a whole [holism] and according to others all is nothing but a construction and no reality correspond to this construction [instrumentalism]. Why all these extreme metaphysical positions? Just because we cannot easily admit that complex interactions of the world we are living in, have a foundation that is a complex reality by itself. It is impossible to get out of the entanglement of this world by quantum physics. It is impossible to find an elemental quantum object that is independent from other quantum objects or from its own parts. It is impossible to dissolve the double-sided character of quantum objects. The fundamental physical reality consists of 'clouds' of interacting quantum objects.

4. Results. Reality is nothing static, firm or independent. It does not consist of single, isolated material or immaterial factors, but of systems of dependent bodies. Most of the systems consist of more than two bodies but there are no systems that consist of less than those two bodies. In quantum physics we call such fundamental two-body-systems earth & moon, electron & positron, quark & anti-quark, elementary particle & field of force. Nagarjuna calls his systems walking person & way to be walked, fire & fuel, action & actor, seer & object of seeing. Both of these models describe two body-systems which have objects that are separate and at the same time in communication with each other. They are neither identical with each other, nor do they break up into parts. The bodies are not independent and individually none of these parts are observable because in their state of existence they are dependent from each other and cannot exist independently. They are entangled by interactions, even in a far distance. One body cannot be reduced to the other. The systems have a fragile stability that is based upon four well known, sometimes not completely known and sometimes completely unknown interactions [in the case of entangled and separated photons] and mutual dependencies of their components.

What is reality? We are used to being on our feet on terra firma and to see fugacious clouds in the sky. The concept of reality in the philosophy of Nagarjuna and the physical concepts of complementarities and interactions in quantum physics, tell us something different that could be expressed as follows: all is build upon sand and even not the grains of sand have a solid core or nucleus. Their stability is based on instable interactions of their components.