Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Before we speculate on the future of the Internet, let us go back deep in time, very deep indeed, just close to the beginning of the universe itself. I came across this amazing video from YouTube about the “Hubble Ultra Deep Field:”

It makes us wonder about what it is all about and why things are what they are right now, doesn’t it? The Hubble was pointed to an area in the sky where there was apparently nothing, but in the end it found out that this area was full of very distant galaxies, and as they are very distant they look very old from our perspective, so old that the light traveling from them shifted the wavelengths and they appear reddish to us. This phenomenon also corroborates the theory that the universe is expanding at a very fast rate, and they say in the video that it is faster than the speed of light itself.

This naturally makes us wonder. On the one hand we realize that we are just a tiny speck in the universe, but on the other, does the light from these distant galaxies are traveling toward “us”? It surely seems to be because we are the ones who are watching this video right now and are reflecting on the meaning of it all. So even if we are a tiny speck, we seem to be at the center of it all because we are thinking about it. The fact that we are conscious makes all the difference.

So what does the Buddhist say about this issue? The message of the Buddha is nothing if not directed toward the mind, toward realization of how to become one with reality such that we are released from the bondage of suffering. There is always a human dimension in the teaching. So it is well and good that we are perceive all these distant galaxies but the really important message  should be how these images point to our own realization inside ourselves. We are looking deeper and deeper at the outside, but are we beginning to look any deeper into the inside? Are we looking at our minds?

After all, it is our minds that comprehend the vastness of the univese and marvel at it. But what is more marvellous is our mind itself. In the end, however, there is not much difference between the two. Hubble ultra deep field may satisfy our curiosity, in the same way as vistas of unseen geographical regions satisfied the curiosity of our forefathers a century ago. We want to know what is out there. That is why we went to the North Pole and sent out subs to explore the ocean floor. But all these explorations would come to nothing if we do not explore the mind. If we keep on searching the outside, some part of ourselves will always be missing. Before long these images from Hubble will cease to be exciting and then we will crave more and more. More images, deeper resolution, going deeper in space and time, build a large telescope, and so on.

This is not a bad thing in itself. But if we do not accompany these yearnings by looking deeper at our mind, then we won’t be any different from what we are right now. We will still be yearning, suffering creatures we used to be even with much more powerful telescopes than the Hubble.

So the feeling we have, the sense of spirituality we feel through looking at these deep space images perhaps shows that there is a connection between the outside and the inside. We need to stop and reflect more and be more sensitive to what this feeling tells us. If we keep on doing so, perhaps one day we may arrive at a deja vu, things we have been yearning to see turning out to be what is already there in us all along.

Filed under: science , astronomy, far far away, Hubble, light years, meaning, metaphysics, ultra deep field, universe

Buddhism and Mathematics

One of the many topics that was raised during the talk on the Thai translation of Matthieu Ricard’s and Trinh Xuan Thuan’s book concerned the relation between Buddhist thought and mathematics. There have of course been quite a lot of talks about how Buddhism and science are related, but not much at all on Buddhism and mathematics. So that was a welcome change. Unfortunately we did not spend much time on this fascinating topic.

It was credit to Ricard and Thuan that they spend one entire chapter on this topic. The idea is how mathematics is related to reality and what the Buddhists think of that. The eleventh chapter of the book is entitled “The Grammar of the Universe” or something like that. What is interesting is how mathematics is an accurate description of reality at all. Which comes first, mathematics or the world?

On the one hand, this is a very simple point. We all know that two plus two equals four. So you have two things, add another two, and count the result, which is of course four. But the premise of mathematics is that you cannot get mathematics (or logic for that matter) out of empirical observation. You just cannot form a general statement “2 + 2 = 4″ from just observing two things and another two things. The reason is that you have somehow to know before hand that two plus two equals four in order for you to be able to get the conclusion that these two things and these other two make four! This is Kant’s main argumentative strategy in his entire critical philosophy. And for Kant mathematics is a prime example of what he calls “synthetic a priori” judgments, e.g., judgments that are true by virtue of their correspondence with some outside measuring point but which is known entirely through thinking alone.

We are not actually discussing Kant here; the point is that if the truth of mathematics does not come from observation, then it must come from inside. Ricard and Thuan discussed that perhaps this situation implies that there is some universal and all powerful mind whose thinking made all mathematical statements true (all the true ones, of course). It is this big mind that guarantees that two plus two equals four, that the sum of the squares on the side of the two legs of a right angle triangle is equal to that on the hypotenuse, that the law of modus ponens (‘p’ and ‘if p then q’ always implies ‘q’), and so on.

So this big mind might refer to God. So here the discussion went on to see what the Buddhists think about this. I don’t quite remember what Ricard, the Buddhist representative in the book, made of this, so I am going to present my own thought. I also did this during the talk last Saturday, but time was so limited then.

I think the main difference between the theistic religions like Christianity and Islam and non-theistic one like Buddhism might not appear as large as one might think. Buddhism would have no problem recognizing the Big Mind alluded to above, so long as that refers, not to some external being, but in fact to our own minds. It is us who create mathematics and it is ultimately speaking our own minds, working together collectively, that create the world such that it is true of mathematics. In other words, we could also say that we human beings are gods unto ourselves. There is a Big Mind that creates reality corresponding to math, yes, but that Mind is not apart from us.

Whether this is shocking or not depends on your view on theism. If you believe that humans are apart from God, then you’d find this shocking. However, this is entirely correspondent with the Buddhist attitude that salvation is ultimately the person’s own responsibility and lies entirely within the person’s power to achieve. The Buddha is only a teacher. You don’t need to follow his teaching. The Buddha has no power to drag you to Liberation. No being does. You have to do it yourself.

Coming down from theological discussion and back down to earth, we see that the idea that it is human mind itself that creates mathematics to which reality belongs makes quite a lot of sense. We form mathematics and we perceive the world according to the same conceptual structure that formed the math in the first place, so no wonder the world corresponds to it. However, even thought mathematics looks very certain, it does not describe what reality is like ultimately speaking. This is because all mathematics depends on concepts and language (so is logic), and once you have concepts, you have to divide reality into separate chunks. So at best mathematics is a model or a map, and no map can become identical to the reality it is the map of. This refers to the doctrine of Emptiness or sunyata. We can say that math can always approach that, but never reach it, because if it does, then it would cease to be the math that it is.

Filed under: science , Buddhism, empitness, emptiness, fabrication, Kant, logic, mathematics, matter, mind, Nagarjuna, philosophy, religion, Sunyata

The Quantum and the Lotus

My next talk will be at Thammasat University this Saturday. It is on the new translation of the book The Quantum and the Lotus, which has just been completed by Suan Ngern Mee Ma Press. The book is an extended conversation between Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan. The former is a former molecular biologist who turned to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and the latter was born in a Buddhist culture and became a well known astrophysicist working in the US.

So we have a symmetrical contrast — a French scientist who became a monk and a Vietnamese who became a scientist. The symmetry would have been more perfect if Thuan had been a monk first and then disrobed. But that is not too necessary. The idea of the book is a dialog on various topics between Buddhism, represented by Ricard, and science, represented in Thuan. This in itself is a welcoming reversal to the perhaps stereotypical perception that science belongs to the West and Buddhism to the East.

The book started with a background of both Ricard and Thuan — how both became what they are right now, and it gave an account of the two’s long conversation together when they met in a conference, an event which led to the present book. The chapters deal with topics which are of interest to both Buddhists and the scientists, such as, the structure of matter, the beginning and the end of the universe, mind, consciousness, mathematics, whether real knowledge and truth can be obtained through either Buddhism or science, and so on.

The first chapter opened with a general account of the orientation of both Buddhism and science. What are the purposes or the objectives of both enterprises? Science, of course, aims at finding truth about the natural phenomena, theories that would explain how the phenomena came about and how they are to be understood. Buddhism, according to Ricard, aims at the same goal. Buddhism has an interest in knowing what the truth is like, because then the practitioner would gain an insight which will lead him or her to attain the Final Goal, that of liberation from all sufferings.

And here is the main difference between science and Buddhism lies. Science appears to want to know how things are just for the sake of it, or at least that is the version usually put to us by scientists, who claim that the purpose of basic, in contrast to applied, science, is just to know the truth without using the acquired knowledge for some other purposes. This account of the distinction between basic and applied science is very much contested, because even the so-called basic science is fraught with interests which are immediate and social, but that would take us further from the present point of this essay, so more on this later. The point here is that the version of the real distinction between basic and applied science here appears to contrast with Buddhism. For Buddhism it is not enough just to learn how things are just for the sake of it. Buddhists would say that that is an example of lobha, or desire, in this case desire for more and more knowledge. If this is so, then the desire for more knowledge would lead us further away from the Final Goal. So if science is viewed in this way, then the objectives of both seem to lead each in opposite directions.

The Thai version

That does not seem to be what Ricard has in mind in his dialog with his physicist counterpart. According to Ricard, Buddhism has an interest in finding truth about the natural phenomena, and he apparently believes that only through getting at this truth is the Goal possible. However, if such is really the case, then it becomes difficult to understand how the Goal has actually been achieved by countless practitioners of Buddhism throughout the ages. This is because even now such truth about the natural phenomena has not been fully achieved. Scientists are still debating among themselves and are frankly acknowledging that there is a lot that we do not yet know about our natural world. What, for example, is Dark Matter or Dark Energy? Right now there is no satisfactory account. Are there really parallel universes or ‘multiverses’ where our own is just one among countlessly many?

According to Ricard, one would have to learn about how things really are before one has a chance to gain Realization. After quoting the Buddha in one of the sutras when he told his students that his teachings were only a handful when compared to the whole of knowable things, which were as many as all the leaves in the forest, Ricard says:

But experience shows that it is necessary to understand correctly the nature of the exterior world and of the ego, or what we term ‘reality,’ if we want to eliminate ignorance. That is why the Buddha made this the central theme of his teaching. (The Quantum and the Lotus, Random House 2001, pp. 12-13.)

The problem here is how much of this ‘correct understanding’ would suffice. The Buddha’s parable of the leaves in his hand and the leaves in the forest shows that we can make do with the small amount we have and achieve the Goal. This would be all we need if what we really want is to achieve the Goal and nothing else. Science, on the other hand, seems to want more and more. You can’t stop at the level where you smash atoms to bits; you have to smash the bits further and get even smaller bits. You can’t stop at seeing this far out in space; you have see even further and further. But do the ever smaller bits belong to the leaves in the Buddha’s hands or out there in the forest?

It is true in a way that Buddhism has an interest in knowing the reality. Ricard’s examples of knowing the real nature of the ego and the “empty” characteristic of everything are good ones. But in Buddhism it does ultimately speaking not matter whether what you get is the real truth any way, so long as you sincerely believe it is. This is very difficult for non-Buddhists and especially scientists to understand, because they typically would think that our own thinking or conception of things is one thing, and what is out there objectively is another. But that is not the case in Buddhism. You will achieve Liberation if you sincerely believe that the ego is just a mental or conceptual construction and that reality is empty of inherent characteristics. What things really are outside of our conception or perception is not so important. They can be anything they like. They don’t matter at all.

One of the main practices in Tantric Buddhism is to visualize that the place that we are in right now is the Buddha’s realm full of jewels and the like. Every sound that we hear is mantra; every sight that of an enlightened being; the air we breathe is the air of Enlightenment, and so on. Here what scientists or empiricists usually take to be the “truth” has no place. In full visualization, in the eyes of an enlightened one, a “truth” is just that, a bubble in the water.

Filed under: science , Buddhism, emptiness, lotus, Matthieu Ricard, quantum, science, Thai, translation, Trinh Xuan Thuan

Matter, Antimatter, Universe, Multiverses

Roaming about the blogs in wordpress, I found out the other day this blog that contains a post of a google video on a documentary by the BBC on history of contemporary physics. The story is about the discovery of the structure of atom and the intimate connection between the very big and the very small. Those who are familiar with physics will immediately recognize Rutherford’s discovery of the internal structure of the atom and all the subsequent developments after that.

There are two things that got me watching the whole video until the end (it took me almost an hour). The first was that there is matter and there is antimatter. Antimatter is just like matter, except that it is a mirror image of matter. Antimatter exists in an alternative universe, so to speak. It might be compared to a shadow of the entire visible universe. This has very startling implications.  For example, I now exist (this much is certain because, as Descartes said, I am now writing this post and am thinking (or at least believe I am thinking, and so on). But according to this antimatter theory, there is somewhere out there my counterpart, another me who exists in the fullest sense as I do exist now, only that that another me is a mirror image of myself. Since I am right handed, my doppelganger is then left handed, and so on.

Another thing, which is perhaps more outrageous, is the proposal that there are a multitude of universes apart from our own. I remember reading a science book when I was a teenager that there can be only one universe, because the universe is the sum total of everything there is. But then this physicist suggests that our universe is just one among very, very many! What is going on?

The physicist (I happen to forget his name, but he’s from Oxford) suggests that there are a universe for every possibility. Hence each possibility is an actual reality in some universe. He calls them “multiverses.” Thus there is another universe (or philosophers prefer to call “another world”) in which I am not a Buddhist, but a Christian, yet another where I am a Taoist, and another where I am a Jewish, and so on and on. This is not mere philosophical argument out of the logic of possibility (such as David Lewis’s), but a *physical* theory.

But if all this is true, it has a profound implication for Buddhist teaching. If there are many, many multiverses in many of which there is a ‘Soraj’, so where is the real ‘Soraj’? What about the sense of identity of the ego, which is so hard for most of us to get rid of and is the root cause of ignorance (avidya) which brings about sufferings and endless roaming in samsara. If there are an infinite number of Sorajs then who is the real Soraj? Is it the one who is conscious now of writing this very sentence and is feeling the tactile sensation of a Korean-made keyboard? Not exactly, for all the other Sorajs in all the multiverses could be doing the same thing and are feeling the same sensation. The only reason why this might seem counterintuitive to some is that the attachment to the sense of the ego is so strong. There has to be something to hold on to which is part and parcel of the sense of the identity of the self. This feeling just cannot be dissipated to the many personalities out there in the multiverses. The problem, though, is that this feeling, this seeming sense of identity of being oneself is just an illusion. It is an illusion because we can always imagine a scenario where we do not possess the perspective of a particular person, but instead view that particular person just as another among very many human beings there are, each feeling the same thing and having the same perspective. So there is nothing in the putative sense of the ego that can guarantee that this sense of the ego is for real.

Enough for now. It’s late already. Back to the TV

Filed under: Buddhism, science , antimatter, Buddhism, matter, multiverses, physics, religion, science, universe