The Participatory Universe

On the surface, science and Buddhism have many diverging fields of inquiry. Buddhism tends to look inward for truth, whereas science examines outer phenomena. Science, a language that focuses on mathematical precision and quantification, speaks in a language that is different from the language of Buddhism. Furthermore, some Buddhist practices are accompanied by ritual and cultural traditions, leading many to categorize it as a religion.

“Buddhism is the science of the mind. Please make it shine for the benefit of all.”
—Lama Ole Nydahl

Yet, a fundamental thread joins the two systems of searching for truth. Science is based on observation, experimental testing and repeatability, which are known as the scientific method in the West. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Buddha’s search for ultimate truth mirrored what is now known as the modern scientific method. His observation that mind is the source of all phenomena and his view that it is possible to know mind via the laboratory of meditation form the very foundation of Buddhist philosophy. Fully knowing the nature of mind (enlightenment)is possible for everyone, and therefore the experimental result of meditation practice is repeatable.

Does science need Buddhism, or does Buddhism need science? While both have been successful on their own, a cross-examination of their fundamental similarities and differences may make the two truth-seeking systems more than the sum of their parts. Neither may need the other, but they can inform each other, to the benefit of all.

We hope that this regular column in Buddhism Today will benefit both practitioners of the dharma as well as the scientifically minded reader. We particularly welcome your Letters to the Editors of this column, which will further enrich the ongoing dialogue between science and Buddhism.

With best wishes,
Drs. Blakesley Burkhart, Melanie Boly and Alex Rush
Co-editors of “Buddhism and Science” for Buddhism Today

“May precise observation sever mistaken views about the ground.”
—3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, from the Great Seal Wishes

The Historical Buddha Gautama lived more than two thousand five hundred years ago. He taught that we live in a world of appearances where nothing is solid or lasting. Buddha’s teachings refer not only to our inner mental states of mind, but also to phenomena in the outer world. Although some of Buddha’s teachings are culturally conditioned metaphors, Buddhist insight into the nature of reality often strongly resonates with the scientific understanding that has been developed over the past century.

“Buddhist practice is something that doesn’t really belong to a philosophy or religion. I have found that the practice of Buddhism is like learning a science.” Karmapa
—Thaye Dorje, His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa

The scientific method is based on precise observations, measurements, experiments and deduction. It is powerful because it is self-critical and self-correcting: nothing is held as a sacred dogma, and everything can be challenged.

It took humanity several millennia to develop the scientific method and modern physics. Ancient cultures related to the nature of the world through myth, tradition and poetry. For example, for centuries throughout India, China and Europe it was widely believed that earth was flat and resided on the back of a giant animal, such as a turtle. The fundamental building block of this ancient cosmology, “The World Turtle,” was that this great turtle—with the world literally on its shoulders—stood on the back of a bigger turtle, which itself stood on the back of an even bigger turtle, and so on—with turtles “all the way down.”

An example of the triumph of the precise methods of scientific inquiry can be found in the field of physics with atomic structure. In the fifth century BCE, a Greek philosopher Democritus suggested that everything is composed of indivisible particles, atoms. More than two thousand years later an Englishman named John Dalton studied the properties of gases and proposed a theory of the atomic composition of matter. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the atomic theory was widely accepted, and scientists began to analyze atoms. They discovered that atoms were not indivisible either, but consisted of a heavy nucleus in the center of each atom and light electrons on the orbit around it. Atoms mostly consist of empty space: if the nucleus were the size of a ping-pong ball and placed in the center of a field in a large football stadium, the electrons’ orbits would reach approximately to the top level of the stadium.

Subsequent research revealed that nuclei are composite and made of tons and neutrons, which in turn are made of quarks, which in turn may be made of tiny vibrating strings, which in turn may be made of something else, and so on—that is to say, not entirely dissimilar to “turtles all the way down”! This infinite regress, which explains the world in terms of a beginningless chain of ever-deeper underlying structures, cannot have anything material or existing at the bottom. When science discovers more fundamental building blocks of matter, it must ask what these blocks are made of.

Looking around us, we see people, trees, buildings and stars. We look at pictures of distant galaxies as well as tiny viruses. We see, hear, taste, touch and smell a world that feels tangible and real. We are used to thinking that matter exists, that space is unchangeable, that the flow of time is steady and that events are binary: either they happen or they don’t. However, when physicists dig deeper, they start noticing that this apparent reality starts to unravel. What looks like solid matter to a naked eye is, in fact, an arrangement of pulsating, rotating, vibrating, appearing-and-disappearing, tinier and tinier “pieces” surrounded by empty space. The deeper we look, the less real or substantial these pieces become.

A “thing” or a phenomenon may be called real if all observers agree that it “exists.” If an object or event fundamentally changes or disappears by merely changing the point of view, then it has just an appearance without actual existence or reality. For example, rainbows in the sky are illusions created by sunlight refracted in raindrops. Fleeting beautiful mirages exist not as “things” but as appearances without substance. We accept multiple truths or incompatible points of view in human relationships, art, politics, and interpretations of history, but we expect the material world to be free of such ambiguities—that is, we do not see viruses or mountains shimmering like mirages in hot air.

As I will explain, this somewhat hazy line of reasoning finds confirmation in a precise scientific analysis of the world. For example, an Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, showed that, in quantum mechanics, phenomena that exist for one observer may not exist for a different one. Thus, the realities seen by different observers are neither independent nor objective.

On the other hand, two thousand-five hundred years ago, the Buddha taught about the lack of an independent existence of phenomena. While most of us lack the realization of Buddhist masters to understand the meaning of these teachings, we cannot fail to notice that well-established physical theories may lead to strikingly similar concepts and even words.

“If nothing outer or inner appears, this is mind’s space-essence, its possibilities. When something appears…this is its clarity-nature, mind’s free play. The fact that both can happen, space and what occurs in it, is its unlimited expression.”
—Lama Ole Nydahl, from The Great Seal: Limitless Space & Joy

Together with general relativity, quantum mechanics is one of the towering discoveries of twentieth-century physics. It discards the image of the world as tangible, real and fully predictable—like the mechanics of a giant clock—and replaces it with a world of uncertainties: particles fleetingly appear and disappear out of empty space, distant objects communicate instantly without any medium, and phenomena and their opposites coexist.

Quantum mechanics is an extremely precise and well-tested science which underlies a lot of modern technology. At the same time, its logic and properties are vastly different from our intuitive understanding of the world. Since the famous discussions between Bohr and Einstein about reality, existence, the role of chance and the role of observers, physicists have tried to relate the paradoxical world of quantum mechanics to our everyday intuition.

John Archibald Wheeler made major contributions to the debate. He asked deep, probing questions about the very foundations of physics and made major contributions to the field of general relativity and quantum information. He could find words that expressed the essence of complex ideas and coined terms such as black hole, wormhole, it from bit and many others. Wheeler’s most poetic expressions and similes strikingly resemble the very words of Buddhist masters to point out the nature of reality and illusory appearances. He once said, “As surely as we now know how tangible water forms out of invisible vapor, so surely we shall someday know how the universe comes into being.”

“How does something arise from nothing?” he asked about the universe. As an answer, he formulated the hypothesis of a “participatory universe,” in which the universe is bootstrapped into existence as a self-excited circuit. Wheeler’s starting point was the “delayed-choice” thought experiment, in which present observations appear to have influenced past events. In the most striking, cosmic version of it, “past” can mean billions of years ago.

Wheeler’s cosmic delayed-choice thought experiment can be summarized as follows: according to general relativity, space bends around massive objects such as galaxies and curves, passing rays of light around them in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Light from a very distant and bright object bends around a distant galaxy and arrives to Earth following different paths, as shown in Fig 1.

Light, however, has a dual personality and may assume either a wave identity or a particle identity. These are incompatible descriptions because waves spread out in space, interfere and refract; whereas, particles follow defined paths and have definite locations in space. Nevertheless, experiments show that light can sometimes manifest as a wave and sometimes behave as a particle, a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality.

Imagine that light is bent around a galaxy and travels billions of years to reach an observer on Earth. The observer’s decision today to study the distant light either as a wave or as a particle would force the light to retroactively travel as a wave or particle since billions of years ago. This delay in making the choice of being either a wave or particle until after the event was the basis for the name of the experiment. Wheeler’s thought experiment has been verified in laboratories, and its paradoxical conclusions have been confirmed.

Quantum mechanics relies on fully consistent abstract mathematics and is unambiguous in its predictions. Even cases like the above, which defy our everyday experience and intuition, are within the formalism of the theory. The question remains: what is the ontological reality of quantum particles? In other words, Wheeler asked: what is actually happening in the delayed-choice experiment?

Sherlock Holmes quipped that, after eliminating the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, however improbable. Since changing the events that have already occurred is impossible, Wheeler questioned their reality before they were observed. In his own words: “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”¹ Thus, Wheeler resolved the paradox of apparently influencing the past: the photons in the experiment were potentialities without true existence until they hit the lens of the telescope.

Ultimately, the view expressed by Wheeler is that the universe is participatory, because it is created by the observer. Appearances arise through the interaction of the observer and the observed. Every act of observation actualizes events or phenomena and makes them appear tangible. Who—or what—are the observers in Wheeler’s universe? How can observers create the universe, if they first need to appear in the universe? Did Wheeler replace one paradox with another even more bizarre one?

Wheeler called this process a self-excited circuit, illustrated in Fig 2. He explained it thus: “Beginning with the big bang, the universe expands and cools. After eons of dynamic development, it gives rise to observership. Acts of observer-participancy—via the mechanism of the delayed-choice experiment—in turn give tangible ‘reality’ to the universe not only now but back to the beginning.”² The universe—together with its content and physical laws—bootstraps itself through a self-excited circuit. Wheeler calls this “the law without the law,” to stress that there could be no primary cause or beginning.

Fig 2. The universe viewed as a self-excited circuit. Starting small (thin U at upper right), it grows (loop of U) and in time gives rise (upper left) to observer-participation—which in turn imparts tangible reality to even the earliest days of the universe.

The participatory universe is not material in the sense of being made from tiny blocks of tangible stuff. This universe is made of information, not merely described by information. Wheeler coined the phrase it from bit, where “it” stands for the tangible world that we see and “bit” represents a unit of information. He explains: “It from bit symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at the bottom… an immaterial source and explanation.”³

This description of the universe is very natural in Buddhism. Whereas Wheeler’s it from bit is controversial and somewhat unsettling for physicists, the 3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje explains, “Although empty, all things arise in every way without hindrance.”⁴ A Buddhist would say that the eye in the drawing of the self-excited universe is looking at itself without realizing it. Phenomena appear through the dualistic distinction between the observer and the observed. The arbitrary line of separation between them breaks the totality of being and creates the appearance of independent existence.

The 3rd Karmapa taught that, even though the “truth-nature…is non-composite,” the conditioned world arises because of illusory separation between perceiver and perceived. That is:

Mind’s self-expression, which has never existed as such, is mistaken for an object
Due to ignorance, self-awareness is mistaken for an “I”
Clinging to this duality causes one to wander within the conditioned world⁵

“Mahamudra cannot be taught.”
—Tilopa, from the Ganges Mahamudra

Wheeler’s theory is challenging for physicists—his underlying questions “How come existence?” and “How come the quantum?” have certainly stirred the imagination and pointed out gaps or chasms in the existing paradigms.

Progress in both the inner human development and the outer world is always driven by tension. For example, the enjoyable but temporary pleasures of the bourgeois lifestyle may decrease the motivation to develop lasting qualities. Human development may happen when familiar concepts and models of behavior can no longer solve problems or bring satisfaction.

Likewise, science often thrives on internal tensions. Scientists love anomalies and paradoxes, because they bring into sharp relief the limitations of current knowledge, descriptive language or worldview. Thus, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, taken to their logical conclusions, demonstrate the falsity of naive materialism. The world is not made of permanent solid “stuff,” and existence and nonexistence are not absolute. When we look at a computer screen, we see pictures, rather than the underlying pixels. Similarly, many physicists today think that even space and time are not fundamental but emerge from the underlying fabric of information. As Einstein once remarked, “Time and space are modes by which we think, not the conditions in which we live.”

Wheeler believed that “Someday, surely, we will see the principle underlying existence as so simple, so beautiful, so obvious that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could we all have been so blind, so long.’” However, even the it-from-bit universe, which is abstract, non-tangible and made from information,⁶ relies on concepts.

The Indian Buddhist master Tilopa taught in the Ganges Mahamudra that knowledge of the conditioned world is limited: “With the ways of the intellect you won’t see beyond the intellect.” Indeed, the mere need to define concepts introduces limitations. Concepts require other concepts to explain, which require other concepts to explain the previous ones, with concepts…”all the way down”! The physicists’ search for their Holy Grail—with a characteristically humble name, the Theory of Everything—may never end, because there could be no ultimate conceptual answer. So, physicists will always have jobs!

“When you come to nothing to come to, you come to Mahamudra.”
—Tilopa, from the Ganges Mahamudra

The scientific method, although powerful, approaches its own fundamental limits when it studies the nature of reality. It relies on the objective observation of existing phenomena. Both of these concepts are now understood to be untrue: observations cannot be separated from the observed in an objective way. Phenomena do not have objective existence. Transcending this limit is neither possible nor necessary for science. Science will continue its powerful march of understanding and mastery of the conditioned world, making amazing discoveries and spurring the development of unimaginable powers and fantastic technologies.

The experience of fully realized Buddhist masters has shown that ultimate reality is beyond building blocks, concepts and paradoxes. But that is a different story. The End.

The author is grateful to Blakesley Burkhart for the exchange of ideas and help with editing and to Alex Katalkin for the illustrations.