Seeing Through Self: David Bohm & Krishnamurti's Ego

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) was a protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer and liked by Einstein. So impressed was Einstein, that he referred to Bohm as his successor. As for Bohm, he had deep interests outside science. This led to the day when Bohm met J. Krishnamurti and began studying under him until the two men had a falling-out.

Peter Lynds on The Physics of Time

Peter Lynds on The Physics of Time

Another, this one antique: How do you reach a goal? You cover half the distance, then half of that, then half of it. You keep halving your distance but always another half remains.

In fact, we do reach goals, but the above paradox has stumped philosophers for centuries. (Newton was able to predict the goal, but his calculations were inferred from a universe quantum physics undermines.) A 28 year old New Zealander and college drop out thinks he has an answer, and he has many physicists impressed with the boldness of his theory.

A tutor at a broadcasting school, Peter Lynds believes that his idea is quite simple and should have been recognized by other thinkers much earlier. Of course, he has uncommon sense. The problem has been with common sense, which gets in the way of understanding and has done so for centuries.

Peter Lynds believes that the mistake lies with thinking of time as a series of moments. From antiquity to the present, philosophers and physicists have assumed that objects in motion have determined positions at any instant in time. It's not true, Lynds says. In an interview with Astroseti.org, he says "People have wrongly assumed that an object in motion has a determined position at any instant in time, thus rendering the body's motion static at that instant and enabling the impossible situation of the paradoxes to be derived." One can infer from this that we believe in time because our brains are hard-wired for us to do so. Neurobiology.

Of course, the implication of his idea is that time has no flow as it would require progression through definite instants. If no progression, and no flow, then there is "freeze." We don't move, you and I. We are frozen in time.

This, too, seems paradoxical but reason offers at least one way out. There is no you or I, at least not in the usual, the common, sense. This requires exploration of one's own mind, as philosopher David Hume did, wherein he found no sufficient empirical evidence for the existence of a self. Of course, he was preceded in this by millennia of consciousness explorers from the Buddha and before.

In brief, can Lynds' theory make sense? Yes, but uncommon sense is required. After all, among the adults, a little boy pointed out that the emperor was naked.

The paradox is enhanced by the evidence of physics. Time does not seem to be inherent in nature, which, so to speak, has no need for it. Einstein's Special and General Theories have demonstrated that

a present moment, or "now," does not underlie physical processes.

judgments of simultaneity depend on position. Recall the relativity thought experiment in which (inside a train) a thrown ball reaches its target sooner for an outside observer than for a passenger on the train.

the mathematics of relativity suggests a block universe in which events don't occur but, rather, are mapped out in space-time so that nothing "happens" because all is rather like "here": one person's "here" (read: "now") may be a cafe on the Left Bank in Paris; another's might be an espresso house in North Beach, San Francisco. The "here"/"now" is "location" rather than "event." Events haven't happened in the "past"; don't happen in the "present"; nor will happen in the "future."

Albert Einstein: "There exists, therefore, for the individual, an I-time, or subjective time. This in itself is not measurable." Time as flow, as progress, is a product of our perceptions, our neurobiology, and has no basis in nature.

All of this is counter-intuitive. It defies common sense.

In its early days, physics wanted to separate the psychological from the evidentuary or traditionally theoretical. It finally accepts that these aspects are hopelessly intertwined. This takes me back to common vis a vis uncommon sense. All calculations, all theories, all experiments ensue from ways of seeing. If the emperor seems clothed, then he will be described thus. What do I mean? Henri Bergson said that time is merely a personal construct (read: psychological) that we force as fact.

I might as well end, then, on the psychological. Marcel Proust exquisitely explored his own psychology, to include how tea tasted in his childhood. I will close with part of a lovely passage, one that opens Swann's Way, of In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past, as I learned it):

"And as I would lay in bed, I would listen to the whistle of trains. At which point I would try to reckon the passage of time."

Looking for Reality: Billiard Balls, Einstein, and Nisargadatta

Looking for Reality: Billiard Balls, Einstein, and Nisargadatta

A billiard ball strikes another and moves it across the table. The proximity of the one effected a change in the second. Right?

Einstein said so. He, of course, took it further and asserted that the speed of light is an absolute, a constant, that determines physical effects, none of which can be transmitted faster than its own speed, 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second). Things happen locally, not across great distances, he added. Although Einstein didn't put it in the same manner, his principle also holds that when nobody is in a forest to hear a tree fall, there is sound nonetheless.

Then along came Quantum Theory and a physicist named Werner Heisenberg who challenged Einstein's theory. Einstein's view had reality as something with falling trees making sounds, and particles giving simultaneous position and velocity--something like a car crossing a railroad track at twenty miles an hour. (This is not a good comparison, but it helps impart the idea of position and velocity.) Heisenberg found that he couldn't have it both ways. He could either "snapshot" a particle's velocity or its position, but not both, which is akin to saying that we can describe that the car travels at twenty miles an hour or that it crosses a railroad track, but not both. On the quantum level the world simply didn't behave as Einstein conceived it on the large, gravitational level.

The point here: if things happen locally, if the local implies the real, then why can't both position and velocity be described at the quantum level?

Things happen locally?, somebody might ask, then reply, Why of course they do. Reality is based on conditions right in front of us. Things, and the conditions for an event, can't happen anywhere else but where we see an occurrence. Right?

Not necessarily.

John Bell had problems with this. In 1965 he wanted to determine whether reality could be described by a theory supporting local variables. For this purpose he developed an Inequality Theorem. This didn't work as it, too, implied non-locality. Subsequent experiments by other physicists indicated that reality, if there is one, cannot be local. (This, of course, comes as no surprise to a Zen master who teaches Big Mind, or a Hindu sage who speaks of Consciousness with a capital C. That art thou, as an ancient Sanskrit saying has it.)

In 1982, Alain Aspect conducted experiments at the University of Paris-South to determine if reality is non-local. His photon detectors were forty feet apart (12 meters) in order to record events at Track X and Track Y, sufficiently distant from one another. For purposes of this explanation, here is a key element of his experiments:

They were measured so that they could not "talk" to one another across Tracks X and Y. (Thus if reality is local, then the photon in Track X is independent of that in Track Y.)

What implications for the outcome? If reality is local, then measuring the photon in X would have no effect on measurement of the photon in Y. If non-local, then measurement at X can affect measurement at Y.

What did Aspect discover? That measurement at X affected measurement at Y. The findings imply that Einstein was wrong about locality and that the speed of light may be irrelevant to some events, or (horror! heresy!) something there is which travels faster than light. In any event, reality is non-local.

A humble Indian merchant, Nisargadatta, had a different view of the entire matter. This is how he put it in I Am That:

"There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what? You can only be the real, which you are, anyhow. The problem is not mental. Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any. " (359-60)