Something is Weird Here

For some years now, I have considered myself a secular Buddhist. I am usually careful not to say that I believe in Buddhism: belief implies some degree of faith without evidence. To my perspective, Buddhism is a system of careful reflection and awareness of the way one’s mind interacts with and reacts to the world. Such a system may or may not be objective (though I have some reflections on this matter which I intend to get to later), but it can certainly be evidence-based and systematic, and thus can and should continuously evolve as new experience presents itself.

I am also a physicist. When I was a child, I convinced myself that I’d like to try to understand the nature of reality. Two areas seemed to offer ideas and explanations on this matter: religion, and science. Religion, I reasoned, should be easy enough to learn about on my own, and I’d have no trouble finding people who wanted to explain their ideas to me. Science, on the other hand, requires a vast and foundation of knowledge and tools, and years of concentrated study, to be able to truly understand what we know and how we know it. And so, I studied math and physics as an undergraduate, and went on to do a PhD in physics. I thought I’d get to pursue my questions if I had a life in academia, but it turns out I am ill-suited to the many demands on an academic’s time and attention. While my path through the PhD consisted of satisfying requirements and following orderly steps, now I find myself needing to impose discipline and carve my own path. Right now, that means I masquerade 9-5 as an engineer, while returning to my childhood ambition of understanding reality in my off time. It's as though I’ve earned my black belt: no longer a beginner, I can begin the work of true mastery.

My predilection for Eastern philosophies likely began with the media I consumed as a child — for what is Star Wars but a digestible Daoism? — and solidified as I found striking similarities between the theories of modern physics and a Buddhist explanation of nature (another topic to unpack later). I am most familiar with the development of natural philosophy, on the other hand, through the Western perspective: it is shocking how profoundly Aristotle, Socrates, and other early natural philosophers continue to shape our approach to science and philosophy.

Physicists these days often show something bordering on contempt for philosophy, which is maybe not so surprising when you consider their common roots and then divergence in methods. For an insightful commentary on this topic, be sure to read Victor Stenger and co-author’s article in Scientific American, Physicists are Philosophers, Too. While the disdain physicists have for metaphysics is entirely justified, throwing out all philosophy in favor of materialism is misguided. Science a powerful mode of inquiry into reality, but it is only ever half the story: it addresses how questions. It cannot answer why questions. It cannot give meaning to phenomena or experience. Every curious and reflective person has, at some point, considered existence alongside emptiness, consciousness with nothingness, purpose with purposelessness.

The disquietude that comes from being able to ask these questions but never definitively answer them, to be restricted by the limited view of our senses and hostage to biases in perspective, is often assuaged by religion, or else its rejection. People seek the comfort of certainty, or else reject that there is any more to the universe than what we can observe. I reject both of these ideas, and must come to the simple conclusion that something is weird here.

I can explain to you that the same phenomenon manifests as an apple falling to the ground and the earth going around the sun, and then perhaps I can tell you that this is all because matter curves spacetime, and then falls along the curves in a way requiring the least energy…but wait, is this geometry really describing reality, or is it some convenient representation that gives us precise predictions? We can construct a theory that agrees with observation and experiment, that even allows us to predict what will happen in an experiment we’ve never performed. And yet, like Plato’s forms, nature is rarely so simple, so beautiful, so perfect as the theory in our minds’ eye.

What is that consciousness, awareness, ability to reason? That there is this thing we call existence, and yet we ponder non-being? That time and space, our lives, seem finite, and yet we hold infinity in our minds? I reiterate: something is weird here. Let us explore the unknown and the unknowable.

An incomplete list of the topics I have in mind:

• How questions and why questions: what is the purview of science?
• What role does mysticism have to play in understanding reality?
• Connections between modern physics and Buddhism
• Foundations of Greek philosophy and natural philosophy
• Comparing Stoicism and Buddhism
• Objectivity and subjectivity, in science and in introspection
• Light is a waveicle: are theories reality?