I take it to be inside and outside the body, but I agree it’s a philosophical can of worms. 
2 Likes
A third option is maybe to take a pragmatist stance; a framework is true in so far it helps us to achieve a goal.
E.g., if the notion ‘inside and outside the body’ helps you achieve some goal then it’s true to that extent.
Like, if someone can do body contemplation with the notion of internal and external as inside and outside the body, and they achieve the goals they seek using that notion, then it is true to that extent.
I find it easier to evaluate ideas based on what you can do with them rather than if they are ‘true’ in some eternal, objective or otherwise privileged sense 
2 Likes
1 Like
Pretty sure Jayarava would qualify as a Carvaka (materialist). I interacted with him on DharmaWheel a few times before I knew his blog or other writing - my thought was ‘very educated but committed to scientific materialism’. Nothing I have read since changes that opinion.
The ‘observer problem’ is an inconvenient truth for scientific realism and materialism and I think this post just reflects that. It true there is a lot of bulls**t generated by quantum mechanics, but at its heart it is a genuine philosophical conundrum. I have read quite a bit about it, titles such as Quantum by Manjit Kumar and Uncertainty by David Lindley, and have just finished What is Real by Adam Becker. No, I’m not a physicist, and can’t follow the maths, but I think that the philosophical implications are clearly antagonistic to any form of materialism. And also, straw polls of physicists show that the most widely-accepted interpretation of the meaning of QM now is Everett’s, which is really pretty whacky. You might recall the customary slur cast on medieval scholasticism, that it degenerated into debates about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Well, hello.
Greetings Wayfarer,
Just a heads up that we abide by the community guidelines here, which among many other things, highlight that discussion is to be non-personal. You are welcome to present cogent counter-arguments about an issue, but please do so without making it about the person who is raising issues for discussion. Otherwise, any information that you have, that adds to the discussion is most welcome.
For your convenience I post the link to the guidelines below
Viveka
On behalf of the moderators
2 Likes
I’m all for being pragmatic, and it’s all too easy to end up in a “thicket of views” on questions like this. In practice I work mostly with sense objects, eg sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, etc. This approach tends to dilute the sense of “in here” and “out there”.
1 Like
I started the blog above having the same feeling as the article, too many science and buddhism dialogues are written by Buddhists without proper training in science.
I flinched when reading these dialogues written 50 years ago, from which physics had updated, which made the comparison invalid and looks childish, desparate to align buddhism with science. It gives a bad name to buddhism to have these kind of attitude around writing bullshit.
Sorry I haven’t gone and compare all the major quantum intepretations with buddhism yet. Mainly because it is a lot of work to read up on each one and then to think what does it mean to buddhism philosophically speaking.
2 Likes
Fair point, but I don’t regard the designation of a philosophical outlook as advocating scientific materialism as being a personal comment. It’s a description of a very widespread and influential attitude. And if terms like ‘bullshit’ are deployed in the original post, then perhaps those who deploy it are deliberately stirring the pot and might expect some vigorous responses.
That is disputed by no less an authority than Schrodinger: ‘he argued that there is a difference between measuring instruments and human observation: a thermometer’s registration cannot be considered an act of observation, as it contains no meaning in itself. Thus, consciousness is needed to make physical reality meaningful.’
Read more at: Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten
You might want to look into recent work on what are called the “collapse” interpretations of quantum mechanics, which includes the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) interpretation. These interpretations attempt to eliminate the Copenhagen-style “split” between the quantum system being observed and the “classically” described measurement apparatus. They apply the quantum description to everything, treat wave-function collapse as real physical proceses governed by the interaction between the (usually small) quantum system being observed and the much more complicated quantum system ( the measurement device) being used to observe it. In this framework, quantum systems are collapsing all the time, whether or not there are conscious observers involved.
2 Likes
His cat suggestion was to make fun of the idea of consciousness collapsing the wave function. The wave function collapsed during the double slit experiment. Consciousness didn’t do it. The experimenters were just as conscious with the camera off (generating the interference pattern) as with the camera on (collapsing the wave function). Their observation did nothing.
I though Jayarava was a bit unfair in his blanket condemnation of nearly all Buddhists who have written about quantum mechanics as bullshitters. Buddhism is major world religion with hundreds of millions of practitioners. A not insignificant number of those people must be trained physicists. Presumably, many of those Buddhists write about quantum mechanics all the time without getting into the more speculative and outlandish realms of QM bullshit - because they know better.
3 Likes
Actually, it’s collaspe whenever we have information about the path it has taken, it doesn’t matter how we get the information, as long as the information can exist in the world, inteference disappears.
This can lead to different take depending on what information means to people. Some say information means mind, so without mind reading and understanding information, there is no meaning to information. However, there can be a consistent physical interpretation of information, that information is physical. Since we are all made up of the same atoms and subatomic particles, information is what really codifies us to be what we are, to distinguish us. So quantum teleportation is a teleportation of quantum information, not of matter. And there is this whole saga that quantum information is lost in black holes or not called the black hole information paradox, which most theorectical scientist agree that quantum information is not lost.
But another thing is interesting, entropic definition of information, whenever information is erased, entropy increases, and this information is not the quantum information because quantum information is never lost. So in short, information is physical, maybe. I still have lots to learn about the physics of information.
The Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha are my pilot waves. 
1 Like
But human beings don’t need to know that information for the wave function to be either collapsed or not collapsed. Human beings and consciousness are not necessary.
In the double slit experiment, if they had turned the camera on and left the room, never to look at the room again, the wave function would still have collapsed.
Can this be experimentally verified?
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? Does it even fall?
Sometimes we walk in the woods and we find fallen trees. Was anyone around to watch them fall? Did they fall at all?
Who knows?
IMO I think it is best to at least pragmatically hold to at least a basic belief in causality until we are quite sure the opposite is the case. In yogic equipoise, upon the reaching of some deeper truth, maybe then we can do away with beliefs, notions, and things like “causality”. Until then I’m going have to look at X causality, look at Y causality, and presume Z causality will be just as causal. And I’ll have to presume I’m not a brain in a vat as well, likely.
What about the respective absence or presence of the two scientists would have changed the experiment? Why would its results be different with them absent? They were present to witness both the collapsed and uncollapsed wave functions. Why would those wave functions be any different without them?
My point is that when we’re talking about assertions that cannot be experimentally verified, we are no longer talking about science, but about metaphysics.
It’s easy to mistake the metaphysics of some science (e.g. materialism) for the actual science. My argument is that this debate is essentially about which metaphysics to interpret quantum physics through.
I don’t see any challenge to causality whether you think a tree makes a sound irrespective of observers or not. They’re just different untestable assumptions we can make; essentially different metaphysical positions.
We don’t even have to say one is true and the other is false, there’s no way to verify it anyways
1 Like
Here is the difference, then. I wasn’t talking about science, because I am not a scientist. I was talking about a scientific experiment, but not as a scientist commenting on it.
Instead, I am talking about reality, which is indeed a metaphysical concept.
If I were to argue from a scientific perspective, I would have to just link to a bunch of papers saying that it was actually the camera causing the interference all along. That’s all I could do, not understanding the math of it myself. Alas.
1 Like
Consciousness causes collapse has one build in almost impossible to disprove thing, or maybe totally unfalsifiable: to know if the wave function collaspe, we still need consciousness to know. So it’s not possible to isolate consciousness. Even if you video tape the results, the moment your consciousness sees it, it can still collapse, and before that be in uncertain state.
Here is a scientific paper on it.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/121/Does_Consciousness_Cause_Quantum_Collapse
And this one says it can be testable. But brings consciousness to become something quantifiable, to which even inanime things can have consciousness.
So quantum interpretation is like how religion for the agnostics. The agnostics do not know which one is fundamentally true, if any at all. But there are adherents to each one of them. The reason they choose their own interpretation is not scientifically verifiable for now, and is of various other reasons. Thus it is not fair to bash consciousness causes collapse as false, nor is it fair to elevate it to become the only true interpretation.
2 Likes