Future Physics – Will It Be Advaita-like? – Part 4
The New Approaches in Physics (Contd..):
The advaita Vedantins of the ancient times unequivocally declared that the objective world with all the entities in it is totally illusory, non-existent. Whatever appears to exist is no more than mere sensations to which our mind gives a name and meaning attributing solidity and physicality to the perceptions. The eighteenth century British philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume also pointed out to the non-existence of objects beyond our mental imagination, though they could not go as far as the Vedantins. They stopped with what is called as the theory of solipsism because they could not exclude the existence of their own mind. The Vedantins, in contrast, considered their mind too to be an object sensed by something subtler than the mind. We shall come back to this in greater detail later on. However, the point of interest right now is to examine the possible reasons for our inability to knowing the “things” as things and not in terms of their relationship to us — the Question posed at the end of Part – 3.
Even in the case of our most intimate relationships, what we are aware of is the knowledge provided by our sensory and mental perceptions only. We never know an actual person or object. The following example, originally attributed to David Hume and graphically described by Peter Dziuban in his book, Consciousness Is All (2008), dramatically illustrates the point.
“Right now, the finite “mind” supposedly looks out over a book, a body, and a room, observing a universe of objects and space. But on what basis would the “mind” even say there is a body now holding this book and doing all that? In fact, on what basis would it be said there even is a weighty physical world of time and space at all?
It is all based on the five senses.
To even say there is finite or human experience would depend entirely on the senses sensing it: seeing it, hearing it, touching, tasting, and smelling it. As said earlier, if one were to take away the five sensations of human experience—all the sights of it, all the touches of it, all the sounds, smells and tastes—one couldn’t even say there was such a thing as human experience!
[This happens to us in our deep sleep every night.]
Now exactly how does this sensory experience seem to work?
As an example, consider any everyday item sensed by the five senses. Say it’s a nice red apple. How does the “mind” know anything about that apple—or even claim an apple is there in the first place?
The sensing “mind” experiences a specific visual sensation, which also could be called an appearance, or a mental image of the apple. That particular visual sensation of red color and roundish shape is one way the mind differentiates an apple from other items, such as a book or a hand.
Simultaneously with this visual sensation, the mind experiences a particular tactile sensation of the apple; there is a feeling of weight and texture when holding it. Also simultaneously, there may be a sense of sound associated with an apple, such as crunching when a bite is taken. There also is a sensation of taste, and a scent.
Each of the five senses contributes its particular “aspect” of the apple to the mind. As a result of all the sensations it experiences, the mind instantly says to itself, “An apple is here.”
This same process of course applies to all items in daily experience.
When the senses combine in their normal operation, it results in normal human activity; this is how the sensing mind experiences its entire world. The mind experiences all sensations at once, which in this case equals “apple.”
Now look again.
A question long pondered by philosophers concerns the nature of the substance of this whole apple experience. Exactly what kind of substance is one dealing with here?
The entire and only basis on which the mind would say an apple is present, is by way of the senses. Absolutely everything the mind would know about the apple is thanks to a visual sensation, a sensation of touch or feel, a sound, a taste and smell. The mind’s entire “evidence” is sensations.
Now ask yourself, what makes up the apple itself—that supposedly is giving off this sensory experience to the mind?
Really stop a moment. Ask yourself what the apple itself consists of, apart from those five sensations.
When you try to think of what an apple is, entirely apart from those five sensations—what happens?
You can’t think of anything.
And why can’t you think of anything besides the sensations?
Because there isn’t anything.
There are only the sensations!
There are not the sensations of an apple and an apple! Sensations are the entire and only “substance.” There is no apple that is a standalone physical object “out there,” with its own substance, in addition to the sensations experienced by the mind. The “apple” would be entirely mental—consisting one hundred percent of sensations only.
The “apple” as a separate, solid object didn’t go anywhere. It never was out there as a separate object in the first place!
The mind’s experiencing of sensations results in what is called an apple, but never is there a separate item “out there.” All there would be is a series of images, feelings, tastes.”
(Adopted from: http://www.consciousnessisall.com/PDF/CIACh13.pdf )
In many of our day to day operations too, we are often concerned with the relations rather than an exact object. You are an applicant for a job; a customer for a goods; a passenger on a rail transport system. In the road and rail network itself, what is of prime importance is the way one station is connected to the other than the beautification or the looks of each station. Same is the case when we consider the Internet and the World Wide Web, the neuronal network in the brain and so on. The individual entities are not of significance but the inter-relationships.
The above arguments of structural realism may be a bit hard for physicists to digest. It does sound strange to talk of ‘relations without relata.’ So a compromise that is argued for by some scientists is not to deny existence to the objects but at the same time assign primacy to the relationships. But no radically new concepts emerges from this approach. Therefore, many philosophers tend to go with the idea that only properties and not objects are the fundamental features in nature. This leads to the queer possibility of the existence of free floating properties like, say, “redness.” When once we get accustomed to this worldview, a thing would be redefined to be a ‘particular’ set of such free floating properties — the exact opposite of what we normally do. (Normally we specify an object and then define its properties). This concept is slowly gaining ground. The technical term used for the free floating properties is “tropes.”
Neuroscientists found that when a child views various objects in the world for the first time, the brain stores these as ‘bundles of properties’ rather than specific objects with an ID tag. As we grow we learn to give an identity and separate individuality to each object. The trope theory thus leads us to the way we perceived the things in our infancy.
Now extending these trope concepts to the subatomic particles, they can be viewed as bundles of certain properties and not as point particles or fields. For example, an electron gets described as a combination of certain essential properties and some variable properties. The essential properties would be mass, spin, charge and the non-essential properties would be position and velocity. This model based on the tropes explains better the paradox of vacuum space having energy we referred to earlier. If we think in terms of solid particles, it is inconceivable how particles could disappear into nothingness and be reborn from nothingness. As per the trope theory, a vacuum will contain tropes (free floating properties) and particles can emerge from various combinations of these properties.
The latest results from the most expensive Physics experiment, namely the large Hadron Collider do confirm the presence of Higgs Boson as anticipated based on the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Two scientists won Nobel prizes for the prediction of this particle almost fifty years ago. Yet this has not given raise to satisfaction to a number of physicists. None of the loose ends within the Standard Model could be closed nor have any new avenues of research (expected in terms of the Super Symmetry Particles) opened up. Physics cannot stop with just performing some successfully predictive calculations. Physics should be able to describe and depict the fundamental aspects of nature. To this extent a few Physicists are reexamining the Quantum Field theories and others are digging deeper into Metaphysical realms.
We shall next examine the new developments being given shape to by some of the leading Physicists.
(To Continue..)
