Will future scientific progress explain consciousness and spirituality in mathematical terms?

Transcript

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We have been studying using science and mathematics specifically for just a few hundred years. So, if we give more time, then possibly, the whole of human personality, including meditation and spiritual aspects, could be explained in the language of mathematics. Yeah, there is always the exciting possibility that further scientific knowledge will reveal more and more about our human person, or about all of existence.
Now, there are two, you could say, broad ways in which scientific knowledge advances. One is advancement in quantity, and the other is advancement in quality. By quantity, I mean that we now have phenomenal amounts of knowledge about practically every field.
In atomic physics, there are over a hundred journals which are publishing articles almost every month. There is an explosion of knowledge in terms of information about every single aspect of, many aspects of the material world around us. At the same time, if we consider in terms of the overall picture, as science is advancing more and more, each branch of knowledge is actually becoming more and more fragmented.
Each branch is very specialized and it’s very sophisticated in terms of what understanding it is providing. But in terms of providing an integrated picture, even in physics, if we see, quantum physics and relativity, they offer two pictures of the world which are in some ways violently contradictory. And for many years, many decades, scientists have been trying to bring it together in one picture.
That’s what the theory of everything, or the grand unified theory, or whatever other name you want to use it. There were scientists in the 1980s, they said, by 2000, we will have one equation that you can write on your T-shirt which will explain everything. In 2000, Stephen Weinberg, a Nobel laureate scientist, he said that we have made tremendous progress in the last 20 years, but the more progress we make, the more the solution seems to be further and further away.
In 2004, Stephen Hawking said that I’m happy to announce that humanity’s quest for knowledge will never end. At one sense, it is positive, we can always keep learning. But what he was saying is that a grand unified theory seems to be nowhere.
It is not just that there is no light at the end of the horizon, we don’t even know where the horizon is. I can’t go here in this forum in the technical aspects, but the quantum physics worldview and the relativity worldview, their implications are so different that even Einstein, in his times, was exasperated. One of his most scathing critiques of quantum physics, he said that I would like to believe that the moon continues to exist even if I am not looking at it.
What he meant by that, the quantum physics worldview is that, again putting it in a very bare bones way, that ultimately there is nothing but waves, and when there is a conscious observer, then the waves collapse into an object, which is perceived by the conscious observer. So, if we take the quantum physics worldview to its extreme, what it means is that there is no such thing as a moon existing. But only when I look at the moon, then the waves that comprise the moon come together and they form an object, that’s when I am able to see it.
So, again, quantum physics is a very complicated subject. I am just giving a very simple explanation here from a general educated perspective. The point which I am making is that there is enormous amount of knowledge that is coming through science and this knowledge is likely to increase more and more.
But this knowledge is more and more in the direction of specialization within individual fields. But in terms of integration of the whole picture, there is, even scientists, there are books that are being written like that. Are we coming to the end of physics? Not end of physics in terms of physical information not coming, but an integrated coherent worldview.
One of the most prominent quantum physicists, once his student asked him, I think Charles Hindenburg or someone, his student asked him that, this quantum physics, how do we make sense? How do we visualize the world as it is talked about by quantum physics? So, his professor told him, this is a famous reply, stop thinking, start calculating. That means the calculations work, but translating those calculations into a worldview that we can make sense of, that we are getting nowhere near that. So, it is good that we be open to the possibility that the advancement of scientific knowledge may reveal something more in future.
But at the same time, why not be open to the possibility that there could be an alternative way of knowing, which we have not yet explored. So, till now most of science has operated using the methodology of what is called as methodological naturalism. That means for all natural explanations, we look for natural phenomena, we look for natural explanations, which is good, but there are some phenomena for which we look for non-natural explanations also.
For example, if we see an artifact, we see a globular object with groovings on it, we find that deep in the earth, then archaeologists will try to infer, could this have happened by natural phenomena or does this indicate the action of some primitive human beings who are living. So, here what we are looking, we are looking for natural explanation, but we are also looking for an intelligent explanation. And just as in archaeology we are open to this, similarly in criminal investigations, we find somebody has died with a knife in their stomach, then investigators see, could this knife have just fallen down from somewhere and pierced the stomach or has the knife gone with such force, with such angle that somebody has to perfectly insert it in their stomach.
So, in the normal quest for knowledge, we need to be open to all possible avenues of knowing. So, spirituality and science are not in that sense contradictory. Spirituality, sometimes people think of religion as requiring faith and dogma, but if we see one of the most fundamental texts in the Vedic canon, Vedanta Sutra, it starts with now ask questions, enquire.
Brahma Jigyasa, now enquire about life’s ultimate questions. So, Einstein who said that the sciences, the arts and the religions they are all fruits of the same tree of human knowledge. So, if we are open to knowledge from whichever forces we may get it.
So, we can benefit from the ongoing advancement of scientific knowledge within the world of matter, but we can also take that scientific spirit of enquiry and be open to explanations that take us beyond the world of matter. And then for each of us, it’s up to us to see which world view gives us a more coherent, a more cogent explanation of reality. So, shutting off certain theories or certain options without even considering their possibility, without even examining the evidence, that is actually unscientific.
Thank you. Thank you Chaitanya sir for giving such a wonderful talk.