Determinism and the Dalai Lama

Continuing the documentation of the determinism thread… BBB wrote:

Well, by all means, take me up on my challenge — formulate a principle of determinism and let’s have at it. You seem to be satisfied to voice increasingly vague arguments about determinism, but it is unclear to me what you mean by the term.

I finished the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom a couple of days ago. I think you might be one of the few people who might be able to address it in its proper spirit. Which is to say, there are certain people for whom any hint of mysticism is enough to validate, and others for whom any religiosity is enough to invalidate. But the Dalai Lama’s approach is quite refreshing, I think. He is willing to spend some time explaining some convoluted doctrine, and then add his own comment, such as “I have never understood why this view was reasonable” and then explain his objections. He is a man of great kindness and humility. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this book, for me — and the thing that distinguishes him from other folks like Fritjof Capra — is that over many decades he has moved in what you would call elevated circles, and been able to cultivate friendships with some of the most insightful people in science and philosophy in the twentieth century. Without a hint of self-importance, he discusses his sustained relationships with people like David Bohm, Carl von Weizsacker, and Karl Popper. His international connections have opened doors to people like Richard Davidson, Anne Harrington, Paul Davies — and Eric Lander.

So anyway, here’s some of what the Dalai Lama relates concerning the free-will / determinism antinomy:

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the “conventional” and the “ultimate,” relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identity and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic — such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle  — to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one’s death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is “empty” in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being….

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one’s understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error….

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we’re connected to.

So it would appear that this coming-to-terms would be sufficiently dualistic to satisfy your yen. The Dalai Lama has a good deal more to say about this subject and its relation to modern science, but I advise you read the book.

It seems to me that the kind of predictability to which you refer in physical experimentation revolves around conserved quantities. Four-momentum is always conserved. But that doesn’t place much of a constraint on things. In a two-body decay (e.g. alpha production), conservation of 4-momentum is enough to determine the alpha’s energy (but not its direction), given the initial and final masses of the nuclides. But three-body decay is different, e.g. the decay of a beta emitter into daughter nuclide, beta-minus, and antineutrino gives rise to a spectrum of energies.because the end-state energies are insufficiently determined by 4-momentum conservation. So. We know there are a handful of conserved quantities — 4-momentum, electric charge, angular momentum, baryon number, etc. but these are only sufficient to determine the end states for certain classes of reaction. So I don’t think this has anything to do with your (still unformulated) determinism.

It seems to me that your other examples are of a species I would call “contingent determinism”. That is, the outcome of some measurement, or the behavior of some object, can be forecast, provided that nothing that would change the outcome intervenes. A cynic might call this “tautological determinism”. It is one way to avoid facing the relativistic indeterminism I mentioned in the last post but it really solves nothing.

A personal anecdote addresses your question about clocks. I own a nice big Invicta wristwatch. Had you asked me last week what time it would show right now, I might have guessed “6:48 pm Central Standard Time”. But I would have been wrong, you see. Because I happened to drop my nice Invicta on the floor of the bathroom last Friday and it stopped working a few hours later. So it now shows 12:36 (right twice a day, just as predicted).

Funny thing, moral culpability. On the one hand, some folks (like Alan Dershowitz) argue for a restrictive interpretation of moral culpability. They feel that conditions like mental incapacity, or the inability to tell “right” from “wrong”, should exempt some humans from moral culpability. I would say the broader Buddhist view is that all sentient beings participate in the cycle of karma, but that moral culpability per se is a “conventional level” concept that we use to ground our system of ethics. I think a number of science fiction authors have tackled the concept of moral culpability in alien and other variant forms. Obviously Kirk thinks it is reasonable to hold Klingons and Romulans (and hortas?) to human standards of culpability. Androids and clones, of course, were dealt with in the Alien movie series and Blade Runner, speaking of Philip K. Dick.

Ironically, when #2 Son G is trying to evade responsibility for causing some foreseeable disaster, he exclaims, “It was an accident!”, i.e. the result was unintentional. Perhaps instead he should say, “It was pre-determined!” and thereby avoid culpability altogether.

BBB

This entry was posted on Friday, 6 August 2010 at 16:20 and is filed under Politics & Society, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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