Quantum Reality and Theory of Śūnya Siddheshwar Rameshwar Bhatt Editor
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Quantum Reality and Theory of Śūnya Siddheshwar Rameshwar Bhatt Editor Quantum Reality and Theory of Śūnya Editor Siddheshwar Rameshwar Bhatt Indian Council of Philosophical Research New Delhi, Delhi, India ISBN 978-981-13-1956-3 ISBN 978-981-13-1957-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1957-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933413 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Dedicated to Seers, sages and thinkers Who have shown the way to Reality Foreword As I assumed the office of the President of the ICCR, I received a challenging letter from Dr. Peter Gobets to record concrete historic evidence on the precise genesis of the zero as a digit. The date of the origin of zero deserves study. Its presence in grammar and metrics as a semantic category goes far back in history. He sent a note of Dr. Elizabeth P. den Boer of the Leiden University on the uncanny convergence of the world views of Indian philosophies and quantum physics. The practical utility of the zero has been adopted in the West, but its deeper meaning remains to be grasped. As all signs refer both to a concrete presence and an intangible realm, the duality of the vestigial and ineffable is the reality of the pūrṇa and śūnya. Sanskrit stands out in having the dual number besides the singular and plural. Creation was viewed in India as a binary phenomenon, in consonance with the androgynous birth of humans and animals. The duality of consciousness and intellection was denoted by analogous verbal roots. The fundament of consciousness was the root cit and its nominal form cetana. It became the verb cint ‘to think’ with the addition of the infix n (from cit to cint) and the noun cintana. Creativity was binary and so was its grammatical expression in the dual number. The concept of empirical pūrṇa suggested the subtle śūnya ‘void’. The nāsadīya hymn of the Ṛgveda on creation speaks of sad ‘existence’ and a sad ‘non-existence’. The binary principle of India’s approach to reality, phenomena or vacuity induced the emergence of śūnya both as (i) zero and (ii) as a void vacuum where subatomic phenomena arise and decay. The monocentric approach of Western philosophy, strengthened by monotheism, has led to the ontological quandary of quantum physics as to why subatomic phenomena arise and decay in an empty vacuum. The zero-based philosophy of nonism (no philosophy) has been missing in the West. The vast Buddhist literature of root texts and commentaries of the last two millennia on ‘negation’ and ‘sūnyatā’ can provide insights into the subatomic vacuum. Is this subatomic vacuum ‘empty’. No, it is a ‘creative void’. The word śūnya goes back to the Ṛgveda where it means ‘emptiness, lack, want, absence’ from śūna ‘swollen’, or the state of hollowness. The verbal form śvayati vii viii Foreword means ‘swells, increases and grows’ as both increase and emptiness are ingrained in the word śūnya itself. Śūnya means ‘sky’ in the Śabdacandrikā.Jaṭādhara’s lexicon translates śūnyavādin ‘one who propounds śūnya’ as a Buddhist. Śūnya developed as a philosophical term in Buddhism, e.g. paribhāvitāśūnyatādīrgharātram ‘we have meditated long on the void’ in the Lotus Sutra 117.7 (gāthā). There are different lists of śūnyatā: 18 in the Mahāvyutpatti 933–951 and ŚatasāhasrikāPrajñāpāramitā and 20 in the Dharma-saṅgraha. The different śūnyayās have to be interpreted by physicists and mathematicians. Buddhist thought was based on the negative concepts of anātmavāda denying the existence of soul and secondly the theory of anityatā ‘impermanence’ denying the eternal dimension. Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra 22.10 speaks of śāśvatoccheda ‘denying the eternal’. Both were to lead to śūnyatā.Nāgārjuna the founder of the Mādhyamikaschool was associated with the Prajñāpāramitā and gave rise to the doctrine of śūnyatā which should be translated as ‘Creative Void’. It is not emptiness related to the empirical volume. He defined śūnyatā as pratītya-samutpāda which can be rendered as ‘interdependent origination’ to state that things are not self-arisen but come into existence in mutual dependence on conditions. The conventional truth (saṁvṛti-satya) is a necessary means for the ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya), and the ultimate makes the conventional possible. The language of Buddhism and that of quantum physics have to overcome dualism of value and validity. Scientists have started to think more subtly than they had hitherto been accustomed. To cite Heisenberg, ‘Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind’. In the increasingly busy crossroads of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, con- sciousness, quantum physics and computing sciences, scientists have begun thinking deep below the level of consciousness, beyond the intellectual formalism of logic but with fluidity. The contemporary philosophy of science is becoming the spoilsport of modern logic, like Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem which declares that any attempt to build a complete and consistent logical theorem will inevitably be ruined by undecidable proportions. Modern understanding of how the glories of the mind spring from pure matter is a challenge. The mind has been viewed as creative and self-aware, how can we think of it as nothing but electrical impulses and biological tissue. Intuition gave rise to Vedic Mathematics and to the unique mathematical genius of Ramanujam at Cambridge who was hailed as the ‘man who knew infinity’. Semiotics, the science of signs and mathematical thought, invites us to study new realms of abstraction and meditational insights of Buddhist śūnyatā to co-contribute to progress, away from the deep-seated Greek aversion to the concept of emptiness. It will be pāramitā or trans-going to comprehend the universe. These proceedings of the seminar on śūnya theory and quantum reality held in December 2016 are a milestone in the study of scientists. Philosopher and meditator Prof. S. R. Bhatt has provided insights into the India perceptions as well as put in Foreword ix hard labour to edit the presentations. The śūnya and pūrṇa are the elemental binary eternals, and the dedicated efforts of Prof. Bhatt enshrined in this volume remind me of the words of Poet Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The flower’s sacrifice ripens in the sweetness of the fruit’. Former President, Indian Council for Lokesh Chandra Cultural Relations, New Delhi, India Preface Quantum Reality and Intimations of Śūnya The history of human kind reveals constant recurrence of some fundamental problems which have agitated reflective human mind right from the dawn of civilization. One of such perennial problems is the nature of Reality. The demand for some kind of universally acceptable conception of Reality is one which the rational human mind cannot help making. But no two minds have ever agreed with one another in their pronouncements. Another cognate problem which perplexes is ‘How and why the mutative world has come to exist?’ along with its corollaries of ‘whence’ and ‘whither’ of this universe. There have been twofold approaches to Reality and hence to knowledge: the fundamental and the derivative, the ultimate and the proximate, the transcendental and the immanent, the ectype and the archetype and the pāramārthika and the vyāvahārika. There has been search for the transcendent and attempts to understand the immanent. For this, both the intuitive and the ratiocinative modes have been adopted. The inward exploration in the form of pragyā and outward observation in the form of pratibhā need to be taken as complimentary. It should be a synthesis of experience and expression, of course maintaining clear distinction between the two as Kaṭhopaniṣad rightly emphasizes. This is the message of the īśopaniṣad also which talks of symbiosis (ubhayosaha)ofvidyā and avidyā. The subject matter of our deliberations consists of two subthemes, viz. search for the nature of quantum reality and the corresponding theory of Śūnya as a possible approach. We begin with the Indian scene and expound the theory of Śūnya which is to be equated with Brahman, as the two have similar etymology and semantics. The roots siv and bṛh stand for ‘to manifest’ and ‘to grow’. ParamaŚiva or Brahman is regarded as the ultimate ontological substratum of the entire cosmos. It is at once both transcendent and immanent. It is unitary and unifying (Tadekam) and has a natural tendency to manifest and diversify (Eko’hambahusyām).