Four reasons why you don’t exist

Quantum physics, logic, Buddhism and information theory

 

James Higgo

2001

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

 

      Preface                                                             ix

      Introduction                                                       xi

I     Quantum Physics

2    Kolmogorov simplicity

3    The Logic of Liebniz, Kripke and Quine

4    The Buddha's Intuition

5    Consciousness and time

6    Physics, logic, intuition and simplicity

7    Implications: for everyday life

8    Conclusion

 

 

 

 

                        [Total 60,000 words, approx. 140 pages]

Preface

 

 

 

All we are is our present thought. Four separate bodies of knowledge bring us this one incredible conclusion: there is a thought, but there is no thinker.

 

The four disciplines converging on this conclusion are quantum physics, the logic of Western philosophy, the intuition of Buddhism, and the simplicity of information theory.

 

Quantum physics proves - science admits proof - that something in our world-view is amiss. One solution is that everything exists, so that no one person, place or time can be said to exist as an objective feature of reality.

 

In the 18th century, Liebniz came to a similar conclusion on the basis of logic alone. He has been followed in recent years by Kripke and Quine.

 

Buddhism takes many forms, but a common theme is 'anatta' - no soul. The self does not exist; to realise this is to achieve enlightenment. But if there is no self, who is it that becomes enlightened? Ah, that question sends the doctor and the priest, in their long coats, running over the fields.

 

Information theory confirms that far the simplest structure for the universe is one in which everything exists: an infinite ensemble of universes, much as suggested by quantum physics.

 

The ideas discussed here are neither provable nor disprovable, and are therefore in the realm of metaphysics. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for choosing one idea over another; in general, we should look for the simplest explanation consistent with the facts.

 

The Summary covers most of the ground of this book in a very dense few pages. It is an unedited version of a paper written in 1999 and published in the Middle Way, the journal of the Buddhist Society, in February 2000.

 

 

 

 

Introduction

This introduction first appeared, edited, in the February 2000 issue of

The Middle Way, the journal of the Buddhist Society, London

 

 

The discovery of the quantum nature of matter left the physics community of the 1920s in a state of profound shock. It was, and is, not possible to reconcile the observed facts with a universe which is remotely Newtonian. All of the competing interpretations still force us to abandon one or more cherished idea: time, locality, identity.

 

The fundamental problem in quantum physics can be illustrated by a candle. As a candle emits a single photon (a particle of light), a scientist can determine with extraordinary precision its probability of being in any one place. A probability ‘wavefunction’ (not a physical wave) is said to emanate from the source, and the photon can be anywhere allowed by that wavefunction. The details are computed by the celebrated Schrödinger equation. The problem comes when you observe the photon, and discover where it actually is. At this moment, the wavefunction ‘collapses’ from a cloud around the candle to a single point. This has led to a large number of metaphysical speculations. How does the wavefunction ‘know’ it is being looked at? How can quantum mechanics be formulated without recourse to the idea of the conscious observer, outside the system, initiating that collapse? This is the problem.

 

In 1927, at the Solvay Conference, Niels Bohr succeeded in constructing an orthodoxy – the Copenhagen Interpretation – which allowed physicists to continue building their armoury of quantum mechanical techniques, while avoiding the frightening questions of what actually happens. He simply said that it was meaningless to give a photon spatial attributes until the wavefunction collapse. This developed into the creed of logical positivism, adherents of which argue it is meaningless to discuss anything that cannot produce concrete experimental results. Positivism is still a major factor in the teaching of physics; students are still told to ‘shut up and calculate’ rather than inquire after meaning.

 

The most intuitively accessible description of the problem is the famous Schrödinger cat. In this thought experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box, along with a radioactive source. The source is set to open a bottle of cyanide if it decays. There is a 50% chance of the source decaying in the minute while the box is closed, so there is a 50% chance of us seeing a live cat when the box is opened. But, according to Bohr, it does not make sense to ask what happens before we make the observation (open the box). The Copenhagen interpretation would have us believe that the cat is in a ‘superposition’ of the alive and dead states while the box is closed, and only becomes actually dead or alive when we open the box to make our observation.

 

This, and various other paradoxes, has led wayward physicists to question the orthodoxy and try to develop interpretations that resolve the problems. Because this will not affect how physicists do quantum physics, this endeavour is called metaphysics. Few respectable physicists will lend their name to such a project. Notable exceptions include Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (based on David Bohm’s ‘pilot wave’ interpretation); Henry Stapp’s papers deriving consciousness from quantum mechanics (based on Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation), and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (based on Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation).

 

Nevertheless, the icons of Newtonian physics are crumbling. It is widely acknowledged that time can no longer be considered an objective feature of reality (Barbour, Price, Stenger), or at least its direction of travel is arbitrary. But the Everett ‘many worlds interpretation’, or MWI, goes much further. It implies that nothing is objective. Everything exists, and what you see in the plenitude is a function of how far you restrict your view.

 

Everett simply posited that there is no wavefunction collapse. In other words, the photon is emitted every which way simultaneously; the cat is alive and dead at the same time; a pencil balanced on its point will fall in all directions at once.  We only see one result, instead of all of them, because we observe a single path through an ever-branching multitude of infinite universes, and we call that path ‘our universe’. The process of splitting is called ‘decoherence’.

 

According to Everett’s MWI, the universe is branching off every Planck Time (10-43 seconds) into countless billions of other universes, each an unmoving snapshot in time, and each branching out in turn. So as you turn the page in ‘this universe’, you go out for a cup of tea in many others. When you roll a die, all numbers come up. In billions of universes, you roll a six; in billions more, you get a one. In some universes, the die turns into a diamond. None of these events contradicts any known laws of physics. As the probability of anything happening is always one (it will happen), Everett used the term, ‘measure’ to describe the relative proportions of events. For example, the measure of dice showing one to five is five times the measure of dice showing six, although there are infinitely many universes corresponding to either category. David Deutsch calls the infinite ensemble of snapshot universes the ‘multiverse’.

 

MWI is not the orthodoxy of the physics community, but neither is any competing ontology. It makes precisely the same predictions for the results of experiments as the Copenhagen or any other interpretation. When positivism is accepted as the way to do science, anything that is ‘not even wrong’ is widely ignored. Nevertheless, various polls of leading physicists have concluded that, when pressed for an answer, more believe MWI than anything else.

 

There are better reasons for supposing that MWI is true. They centre on the principle of ‘Occam’s Razor’, which states that the simplest theory compatible with the facts is the one we should choose. Superficially, we should choose the MWI because it gives the same results as the Copenhagen Interpretation, without the need for an observer-induced ‘wavefunction collapse’. But more profoundly, the MWI makes the world we observe compatible with a universe containing just one bit of information.

 

This startling idea can be attributed in outline to Max Tegmark, Bruno Marchal and Jürgen Schmidhuber. To an information scientist - and all of physics can be regarded as a subset of information science - the information content of a system (its ‘Kolmogorov complexity’) is defined by the length of the computer program required to generate it. The program to generate an MWI system, an infinite multiverse, can be very short. Wei Dai has suggested a counting algorithm. For example, the BASIC program LET A=A+1; GOTO START will generate an enumerably infinite set of natural numbers. These can be mapped onto an infinite physical multiverse - but its information content is almost nil.  On the other hand, the program required to generate a single classical universe might be as large as the universe itself.

 

By analogue, consider the Mandelbrot set, Ford froth, or a fractal pattern. The expression, znew=z2 + c where z and c are complex numbers, can  be used to generate infinitely complex, and beautiful ‘landscapes’ on the screen of a computer (see Figure 1). An inhabitant of a Mandelbrot world would see amazingly rich complexity all around. Mathematicians, outside the Mandelbrot set, can understand that the Kolmogorov complexity of their world is very small - a short equation.

Figure 1 (generated by the University of Utah applet at http://www.hath.utah.edu/~alfeld/math/mandelbrot/mandelbrot.html)

 

Given that we know that something exists (cogito ergo sum), it only takes one further assumption to give us MWI: that there exists the minimum possible amount of information compatible with something existing. Only one bit of information is required to distinguish between nothing and an infinite universe. Anyone who advocates a different interpretation of quantum physics has a lot of complexity to explain away.

 

Natural questions to ask at this point are: “so the universe is infinite, but why do I exist?”, “Why is my universe the way it is?”, “How can you explain death, taxes and the value of pi?”. The answer is in the ‘weak anthropic principle’, which accounts for the fact that we see a stable, congenial environment around us. Most parts of the universe (or most universes if you prefer) are not suited to life, but we can only exist in universes hospitable to life, so only see those outcomes. This is the ‘Weak Anthropic Principle’ (WAP). In 1974, Brandon Carter first proposed the WAP as an explanation for the laws, constants and regularities that we see in the cosmos.

 

I would go further in arguing that ‘laws’ are merely those parameters that need to be within certain tolerances in order for us to survive. Professor Victor Stenger runs an Internet page at the University of Hawaii, which allows the user to choose certain initial parameters for a universe, and have his computer calculate the resulting constants such as the speed of light and atomic mass.  Very few are hospitable to life, but those few are the ones life inhabits. The very Laws of Physics are subjective. 

 

Most people have come to terms with the idea of an infinite universe. An infinite ‘multiverse’ is no bigger. But the idea that everything exists is frightening. It means, for one thing, that there is no particular significance attached to you or me. All variations of you exist, all variations of me; from almost all perspectives ‘we’ are pure noise in the infinite plenitude. We have significance, existence, purely from a subjective point of view. 

 

To summarise the paper so far: there are good grounds for believing that everything exists. Everything includes an infinite number of beings of all possible descriptions. It includes a Christian God and a devil. It includes an infinite number of monkeys. It includes a thousand-foot ghost of my grandmother. It includes every dream you have ever dreamed. Everything is true.

 

Knowing this, we can see that it is purely for anthropic reasons - happenstance - that we pay any attention to our selves, or the world that we chance to find around us. It is an infinitely tiny sliver of an infinite multiverse.

 

We see ourselves as a subject undergoing successive experiences in time in a classical universe simply because our view is so restricted. If we could see the whole multiverse, we would not be able to see anything: it is all noise unless you ‘squint’ and look down a certain fissure in the multiverse, choosing a time line and spatial co-ordinates.

 

What would someone who fully understood and believed this feel? They would see that their universe is purely subjective. Nothing is objective. Everything is relative to the observer: space, time, truth. From an Archimedean perspective (outside the ‘multiverse’), you can see what you like in the universe. It makes no sense to single out one person, one universe, one set of physical laws or constants. As the Buddha taught, individual things neither exist, nor do not exist. The three signs of being, the characteristics common to all life, are impermanence, suffering, and an absence of a soul.

 

“Buddha keeps away from these discriminations and looks upon the world as upon a passing cloud. To Buddha every definitive thing is an illusion. He knows that whatever the mind grasps and throws away is insubstantial; thus He transcends the pitfalls of images and discriminative thought” (The Teaching of the Buddha, p.104)

 

The same space-time that contains you contains something else, when viewed from most perspectives. “To a man a river seems like a river but to a hungry demon which sees fire in water, it may seem to be like fire. Therefore, to speak to a man about a river existing would have some sense, but to the demon it would have no meaning” (ibid, p.110)

 

You are not an objective feature of reality; your self does not exist as an independent entity within the multiverse. But every event occurs. Time is not an objective feature of reality: the time is always now and the thought you have now is an event within the multiverse, not related to a thinker. Buddhaghosa says: “Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer is found” (in Visuddhimagga).

 

A full, deep understanding of physics is equivalent in some ways to the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. The idea of self is relinquished. The very fabric of reality is seen to be subjective. The absurdity of attachments becomes clear. Ignorance and being are ended; the events of warmth, loving kindness and compassion exist.

 

Perhaps Western science could be assimilated by Buddhism, and Buddhism could be absorbed by science. Such a process would give back to the West a basis for morality. The irony is that this has happened in a billion worlds, and it will never happen in a billion others. To wish it on ‘our universe’ is to miss the point entirely.

 

 

I

 

Quantum Theory

 

 

Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is the most accurate theory physics has ever produced, and yet it offers a counter-intuitive view of the world and begs more questions than it answers. The first half of this chapter begins at the very basics with the double-slit experiment and the behaviour of a photon emitted from a candle. It explains Schrödinger’s Cat paradox and goes on to discuss the competing interpretations.

 

Quantum Physics is the science of things so small that the quantum nature of reality has an effect. Quantum means 'discrete amount' or 'portion'. Max Planck discovered in 1900 that you could not find less than a certain minimum amount of anything. This minimum amount is now called the Planck unit.

 

Quantum Physics is weird. Niels Böhr, the father of the orthodox 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it". To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experiments: a light emitting a photon, a light shining through two parallel slits onto a screen, and 'Schrödinger’s Cat'.

 

The double-slit experiment

The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.

 

[2000 words explaining double-slit in detail, with three diagrams.]

 

The Schrödinger equation

Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schrödinger came up with a short equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point.  He envisaged a kind of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the filament. Once you actually look at the photon, this 'wavefunction' collapses into the single point at which the photon really is.

 

Schrödinger’s Cat

In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cyanide. A detector looks at an isolated electron and determines whether it is 'spin up' or 'spin down' (it can have either characteristic, seemingly at random).  If it is 'spin up', then the bottle is opened and the cat gets it.  Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated and you opening the box. It may seem obvious, but try asking a quantum physicist and you are likely to get a very silly answer. Nobody has actually done this experiment – to my knowledge – but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.

 

Interpretations of Quantum Physics

At school, I was shown the double-slit experiment and told 'this demonstrates the dual wave-particle nature of matter' as if that explained everything. It doesn't: it simply begs the question of what the nature of matter really is. If you dare to think about this question in the light of quantum theory, you have to believe one of the following things:

 

 

MENU

 

Your consciousness affects the behaviour of subatomic particles

- or -

Particles move backwards as well as forwards in time and appear in all possible places at once

- or -

The universe is splitting, every Planck-time (10-43 seconds), into billions of parallel universes

- or -

The universe is interconnected with faster-than-light transfers of information

----

Full English Breakfast

Coffee or Tea

 

These are the results of the major competing interpretations of quantum physics. The meaning of quantum physics is a taboo subject for physicists, but everyone thinks about it. To make it more respectable, it is better to say 'ontology' rather than 'meaning' - although it is the same thing. The only feature all of the interpretations have in common is that each of them explains all the facts and predicts every experiment's outcome correctly.

 

Otherwise respectable physicists can get quite heated about how sensible their pet interpretation is and how crazy all the others are. At the moment, there is about one new interpretation every three months, but most of them fit into the following categories. For each example, I shall try to explain what it means for Schrödinger’s poor cat.

 

Copenhagen Interpretation (CI)

This is the grandfather of interpretations, championed by the formidable Niels Böhr of Copenhagen University. He browbeat all dissenters into submission (with the notable exception of Einstein) at a Brussels conference sponsored by a philanthropist named Solvay in 1927.  Böhr thereby stifled the debate for a generation or two. 

 

The CI stretches the meaning of the word ‘interpretation’. It essentially says, "Thou shalt not ask what happens before ye look". Böhr pointed out that the Schrödinger equation worked as a tool for calculating where the particle would be, except that it 'collapsed' as soon as you looked at the experiment. If anyone asked why this was, he would say, "shut up and calculate" (or words to that effect).

 

If you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are inter-related. This is the thinking behind books such as The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

 

More recently, Henry Stapp at the University of California has written papers such as On Quantum Theories of the Mind  (1997). Stapp’s central thesis is that the synapses in your brain are so small that quantum effects are significant. This means that there is quantum uncertainty about whether a neuron will fire or not - and this degree of freedom that nature has allows for the interaction of ‘mind’ and ‘matter’.

 

What happens to the cat? You are not allowed to ask.

 

Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)

The various paradoxes that the Copenhagen Interpretation gave rise to (particularly Schrödinger’s cat, and Einstein's dislike of "spooky action at a distance") led others to keep on trying to find a better interpretation.

 

The simplest was put forward by a student, Hugh Everett, in 1958. He said that the Schrödinger equation does not collapse. Most scientists laughed at him, because they could see that the photon, for example, was in just one place when they looked, not in all possible places. But after a couple of decades, this issue was resolved with the concept of decoherence - the idea that different universes can very quickly branch apart, so that there is very little relationship between them after a tiny fraction of a second. 

 

This has led to what should strictly be called the 'post-Everett' Interpretation, but is still usually called MWI. It is now one of the most popular interpretations and has won some impromptu beauty contests at physics conferences. Unfortunately it means that billions of ‘you’ are splitting off every fraction of a second into discrete universes and it implies that everything possible exists in one universe or another. This comes up with its own set of hard-to-digest concepts, such as the fact that a 500-year-old you exists in some universes, whereas in others you died at birth.

 

In 1997, Max Tegmark at Princeton University and Bruno Marchal in Belgium proposed an experiment to prove that MWI was correct. It involved pointing a loaded gun at your head and pulling the trigger. Of course, you will only survive in those universes where the gun, for whatever reason, fails to go off. If you get a misfire every time, you can satisfy yourself - with an arbitrarily high level of confidence - that MWI is true. Of course, in most universes your family will be weeping at your funeral (or possibly just shaking their heads and muttering). The further implications of MWI are discussed in detail at the end of this chapter.

 

What happens to the cat? It is dead in half of the subsequent universes and alive in the other half.

 

Pilot Waves, Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a very brilliant physicist and that's why people went along with him when he came up with an elegant but more complicated theory to explain the same set of phenomena (normally, more complicated theories are disqualified by the principle known as Occam’s Razor).

 

Bohm's theory follows on some original insights by Prince Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), who first studied the wave-like properties of the behaviour of particles in 1924. De Broglie suggested that, in addition to the normal wavefunction of the Copenhagen Interpretation, there is a second wave that determines a precise position for the particle at any particular time. In this theory, there is some 'hidden variable' that determines the precise position of the photon.

 

Sadly, John von Neumann (1903-1957) wrote a paper in 1932 ‘proving’ that this theory was impossible. Von Neumann was such a great mathematician that nobody bothered to check his maths until 1966, when John Bell (1928-1990) proved he had bodged it and there could be hidden variables after all - but only if particles could communicate faster than light (this is called 'nonlocality'). In 1982 Alain Aspect demonstrated that this superluminal signalling did appear to exist, although David Mermin then showed that you could not actually signal anything. There is still some argument about whether this means very much.

 

Bohm's theory was that the second wave was indeed faster than light, and moreover it did not get weaker with distance but instantly permeated the entire universe, acting as a guide for the movement of the photon. This is why it is called a 'pilot wave'.

 

This theory explains the paradoxes of quantum physics perfectly. But it introduces a new faster-than-light wave and some hidden mechanism for deciding where it goes - to create an 'implicate order'. That's quite a lot of extra baggage, and scientists like to travel light. Worse still, Bohm went on to become a mystic, identifying his 'implicate order' with Eastern spirituality and spawning books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics.  That is heretical behaviour in the eyes of most physicists.

 

What happens to the cat?  It is either alive, or not alive, as determined by the implicate order.

 

Consistent Histories

The Consistent Histories interpretation, put forward by Robert Griffiths in 1984, works backwards from the result of an experiment, arguing that only a few possible histories are consistent with the rules of quantum mechanics. It is an interesting idea but not very popular because it still does not seem to explain how a particle can go through two slits and interfere with itself. Roland Omnés, in The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1994) wrote down 80 equations in a single chapter and came to the conclusion that the 'consistent histories' interpretation was much the same as the Copenhagen.

 

What happens to the Cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

 

Alternate Histories

The Alternate Histories Interpretation is quite different, being similar to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, but with the insistence that only the actual outcome is the real world and the ones we are not in do not exist. Unfortunately this gets us right back to their being some kind of 'collapse'.

 

What happens to the cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

 

Time Reversibility

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a genius who developed a new approach to quantum mechanics. He formalised its crowning achievement, Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised.  He also developed the Feynman Diagram, which represents the interaction of two particles as the exchange of a third particle.  This diagram has time on one axis and space on the other and the interaction can be viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse time.

 

An electron, on its way from point A to point B, can bump into a photon. In the diagram this can be drawn as sending it backwards not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which sends it forward in time again, but in a different direction in space. In this way, it can be in two places at once.

 

There is little doubt that a Feynman diagram offers the easiest way to predict the results of a subatomic experiment. Many physicists have seen the power of this tool and taken the next step, arguing that reverse time travel is what happens in reality. Victor Stenger of the University of Hawaii argues strongly for this ontology in his book, The Timeless Quantum (2001).  Of course, for a layman, it is hard to understand why a photon bounces around in such a way that it appears in two slits at once.

 

What happens to the Cat? You will need to ask Vic Stenger. I did not understand when he explained it to me (very many times).

 

Transactional Interpretation

Like Stenger's, John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation relies on the fundamental time-symmetry of the universe. He argues that particles perform a kind of 'handshake' in the course of interacting. One sends out a wave forward in time, and another sends one out backwards in time.

 

What happens to the Cat? Ask Cramer.

 

Summary

There is no evidence for one interpretation rather than another. However, it can be argued that the 'Many Worlds Interpretation' (MWI) makes fewer assumptions than the others and dissolves more paradoxes. If MWI is true - and I believe that it is, in its own terms - then no structure in the 'multiverse' has any objective significance. You only exist to you and anyone else who chooses to see you within the infinite potential of the plenitude. There is no significance whatsoever to the particular pattern you think of as yourself. This is a common thread, arrived at independently in the following chapters and I shall not labour it here.

 

 

2

 

Information theory

Does the universe contain almost no information?

 

Synopsis

Kolmogorov shows us that the whole can be very much simpler than its parts. If we assume everything exists, then we can 'generate' the universe with a very short algorithm: count to infinity and map the infinite pattern somehow onto a ‘physical’ universe. If we assume just one classical universe exists, we have to explain where a near-infinite amount of information came from. It is, therefore, more parsimonious to believe that everything exists. Again, there is no significance to the pattern you call ‘yourself’. It is not an objective feature of reality and can only be seen if you set out to look for a you-shaped pattern. We should not be surprised to find that we are - 'environment' and 'self' - as we are. This 'you'-pattern is bound to exist.

 

A diverse Internet-based group of information scientists, physicists and logicians have spent the past few years discussing these ideas. This chapter owes its existence to this group, the 'everything-list'. The conclusion reached here is that, although 'Observer-Moments' exist, there is no 'observer'.

 

[8000 words]

 

 

3

 

Liebniz’s Monads

 

“I find in these thoughts so many things which alarm me, and which almost all men, if I am not mistaken, will find so shocking, that I do not see of what use a writing can be, which apparently all the world will reject” - Arnaud, letter to Liebniz, c1695

 

 

Synopsis

Liebniz believed that the world was composed of ‘monads’ - a sort of thought particle. He argues that each monad had within itself a complete knowledge of the universe seen from its perspective. However, it does not interact with other monads or anything else for that matter. This is analogous to the idea, in the information theory and physics chapters, that each thought or Observer Moment, contains its own ‘memories’. These, while not objectively related to any other thought, will happen to be ‘true’ memories; since all thoughts, including the 'remembered' thought, exist. Any memory is therefore a ‘true’ memory.

 

I believe I dreamed of France last night. All thoughts exist, so a dream of France exists. Hence, that memory can be said to be true, even though it is not causally related to ‘me’ in any way.

 

These concepts were not arrived at through religious introspection, nor through scientific analysis of the physical world. Liebniz deduced all of this through pure, daring, logic. In the 20th century, Russell clarified Liebniz’s underlying system of logic. Quine and Kripke developed the ideas to some extent; their contribution is discussed also.

 

[4,000 words]

 

4

 

Buddhism

 

Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found.

 (Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught)

 

 

There are as many interpretations of Buddhism as there are of quantum physics. However, there is a core doctrine - the four noble truths and anatta - that is common to all the main schools: 

 

Buddhism is presented here very briefly, for the purposes of drawing out the parallels with the other strands in the book. I ask the majority of Buddhists, who will view this cut-down version as a travesty, to skip this chapter or accept my apologies.

 

The Four Noble Truths

1.   Things are unsatisfactory. This unsatisfactoriness, or suffering, is called ‘dukkha’ in the Pali language of the major Buddhist scriptures.

2.   Things are unsatisfactory because we would rather they were different.

3.   Things will cease being unsatisfactory if we stop wanting them to be different.

4.   There is a path to achieving this cessation of unsatisfactoriness, and that is the Noble Eightfold Path.

 

On first inspection, truths one to three seem glib, almost obvious. But this is a very deep truth, which really does need to be contemplated for some time before the penny drops.

 

For us to be perfectly happy with the world, we either need to change it so that it fits our ideal or change ourselves so that the world as it is becomes our ideal. In the West, we are constantly attempting the former. This is futile, because we cannot make the world perfect; we cannot possess all of the world, which is what most people want. It is, however, possible to change ourselves. Unfortunately, it is not easy; but at least it is possible.

 

Dukkha: unsatisfactoriness

I have translated ‘dukkha’ to mean unsatisfactoriness. In general use, it can also mean sorrow and misery. It applies to our deep unhappiness at the loss of a loved one, and to our mild irritation at the broadcasters when we try to find an interesting program on television. I want my life to be different: I do not want the battery on my laptop to expire before my train reaches Zürich. I do not want this cold I picked up in Chamonix. I do not want my nice view to vanish as we enter a tunnel. I want this book to be finished. I do not want my mother to be suffering after her recent hip operation. In general, things are pretty unsatisfactory. All these unsatisfactorinesses are dukkha.

 

Samudaya: the origin of unsatisfactoriness

My room service menu is lousy. I want smoked salmon. I am unhappy. What has made me unhappy? The chefs, the hoteliers who created the menu? Or my desire for smoked salmon? The second noble truth is that the cause, the origin, of suffering, is our own desire.

 

This is a universal truth, and applies to all suffering. If we are ill, we blame the disease. In fact, if we lived in the present, and stopped wanting to feel different, we would cease to suffer.

 

When a family member dies, it is natural to think of this as a bad event in itself. It is a stand-alone bad thing. Buddhists point out that value judgements can only be made by people. The death of my father is only unsatisfactory if I wish he were still alive, rather than accepting the here and now as it is. This wishing is an essential ingredient in the unhappiness. Sorrow cannot exist unless we wish the world to be other that the way it is.

 

This is one of the hardest things for non-Buddhists to accept. The very idea that all our anguish is of our own making arouses people to anger: how dare you say I have only myself to blame for this suffering? There are many parables designed to deliver the message far more subtly that I have done here.

 

Nirodha: the truth of freedom from suffering

The third truth, the truth of emancipation, follows logically from the second: stop wishing things to be other than they are, and you will stop causing suffering for yourself. If I stop wanting salmon, the fact that it is not on the menu will not bother me. The same is true, but less intuitively so, of illness. If I stop thinking about being sick, but live in the present, then I stop suffering.

 

Magga: the path to the freedom from suffering

The Noble Eightfold Path is essentially a technique for living in the present. One who lives in the present and sees things as they are is enlightened, (has reached Nirvana). The way to achieve this is to act like an enlightened person until eventually one becomes enlightened. That is, acting selflessly until one becomes selfless. The Path is a list of specific selfless things one must do, which come under the general headings of wisdom, ethical behaviour, and mental discipline. The Noble Eightfold Path (after Rahula) is as follows:

1.   Right understanding (wisdom: seeing things as they are; understanding the Four Noble Truths)

2.   Right thought (wisdom: thoughts of love, selflessness, detachment)

3.   Right speech (ethics: no lies, hurtful or foolish speech)

4.   Right action (ethics: not harming others)

5.   Right livelihood (ethics: do not make money by helping people to harm themselves or others)

6.   Right effort (discipline: preventing and eliminating negative states of mind)

7.   Right mindfulness (discipline: to be aware, attentive to the activity of the mind and body)

8.   Right concentration (discipline: meditation to achieve thought-free awareness)

 

Anatta: no self

“There is no unmoving mover behind the movement. It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving, but life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is no thinker behind the thought.”

 (Walpola Rahula, ibid)

 

 

[10,000 words]

 

 

5

 

Time and Consciousness

 

 

Synopsis

 

It is no coincidence that the time is always now. Time does not exist as an objective feature of reality. But could consciousness exist if time did not flow? If consciousness is a flow of sequential thoughts in time, then the answer is no.

 

This chapter reviews the extensive and growing body of literature which concludes that time is subjective, a function of our own perspective. The recent books by Huw Price and Julian Barbour lay out the arguments in much greater detail.

 

If there is no consciousness, we are drawn once again to speculate that this very thought is all that exists of ‘you’. That does not mean that all of the patterns that you think of as ‘I’ do not exist. They do, but someone needs to be looking out for them in order to give them any significance over the ‘white noise’ of the infinite multiverse. Everything exists.

 

The key to this chapter is the recognition that Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum is incorrect. It is a leap of faith to say I think, let alone I exist. All we can say is, ‘this thought exists, therefore a thought exists’. This thought may be a thought replete with ideas of an objective outside world. But like Liebniz’s monads, it has no direct knowledge of an ‘outside world’.

 

[6,000 words]

 

6

 

Physics, logic, intuition and simplicity

 

Four reasons why we don't exist

 

A recap of the ideas of the book, set against the writings of the Buddhaghosa (from Visuddhimagga).

 

[12,000 words]

 

7

 

Implications for everyday life

 

Synopsis

 

What would you feel if you truly believed that you were nothing more than your current thought? One thing is certain: you would not have anxieties about the future, because you would know that the future did not exist. You would be forced to live in the present: where could you live but now? You would explore your current awareness. This is a state the Buddha called Nirvana.

 

Could this synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and Western physics give us back a basis for making moral choices? The religion of the West could be characterised as conscientious nihilism: science with a residual Christian conscience. With no moral foundation, this residue can evaporate, leaving us with pure nihilism. And nihilism is the basis for sociopathic behaviour: acting purely selfishly, with no qualms about deceiving or harming others.

 

[3,000 words]

 

 

8

 

Conclusion

 

This Very Thought is all there is of 'you'.

 

Three completely different areas of study are pointing in one counter-intuitive direction. Information theory, quantum physics, some Western and much Eastern philosophy all suggest that the Newtonian world we take for granted is an illusion. The reality is something you cannot accept: nothing exists of you but this very present thought, this thought that you are a human being in such-and-such surroundings, reading this sentence.

 

For an information theorist, all systems - including the universe - can be thought of as information. The information content of a system is defined by the length of the shortest formula (computer program) which can generate that system. What is the simplest explanation for the existence of the universe? That the formula is ‘count to infinity’ - a very short program indeed. Within that infinite series is every system in our infinite universe. The alternative would be to program a single universe: that would take a formula which specified every molecule in your body - something mind-bogglingly complex. So, the simplest explanation consistent with your thinking this thought is: all thoughts exists, this is one of them. There is no relationship between this thought of yours and any physical body. No relationship between your memories and a ‘past’.

 

From quantum physics, we learn that the Newtonian world-view is false. There are many competing interpretations, but the most parsimonious appears to be the Everett ‘Relative State’ formulation, or ‘Many Worlds Interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. This simply states that, compared with the orthodox ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of 1927, there is no ‘wave function collapse’ - i.e. the universe splits in all directions, rather than following the one time-line that we think of as our universe. This implies that all possible universes exist. What we think of as ‘time’ is one line connecting many ‘snapshot’ universes together. This line is purely subjective. It is not an objective feature of reality. Hence, our own existence is merely our current thought in this very universe.

 

Buddhism teaches us anatta: the doctrine of no-self. The thought without the thinker. The Buddha seemed to come to this conclusion on the basis of similar lines of reasoning to Liebniz: all we can operate on are our own logical constructs. You can make no true statement about a thing that is not included in the nature of that thing…

 

What does all of this mean in practice? That there is no practice. That ‘you’ are a disembodied thought. An immortal thought. I hope you like it.

 

 

 

 
References

Barbour, Julian, 1999: The end of Time, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London

Bohm, David and Hiley, BJ, 1993, The Undivided Universe, Routledge, London

Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966, The Teaching of the Buddha, Kosaido, Tokyo

Carter, Brandon, 1974: ‘Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology’ in Longair, M.S. (ed), Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp 291-298, IAU.

Couturat, Louis, 1901, La Logique de Liebniz