Video: Carlo Rovelli and Barry Kerzin: What is real? Nagarjuna's Middle Way. (DocDrop)

00:00:01

all right so first of all again apologies for the delay to everybody that uh joined on time it's a it's a pleasure barry to see you again um

00:00:12

i feel the same i will briefly introduce you and then make a small introduction uh so first of all we have today uh barry kerzin thank you for accepting the

00:00:25

invitation barry who is an american physician academic and buddhist monk if i'm not mistaken you were born and raised in california

00:00:36

hollywood hollywood oh [Laughter] um so bail has uh lived i i don't know how if you were on and

00:00:47

off in dharamsala since 1988 that's my home since 1988 correct that is your home since 1988 serves and is serving as a personal uh

00:01:01

physician through the 14th dalai lama has studied the buddhism with senior tibetan scholars is the founder of the altruism in medicine institute whose mission is to increase compassion

00:01:14

and resilience among healthcare professionals and their patients he authored nagarjuna's wisdom a practitioner's guide to the middleweight that introduces the reader to the basis of

00:01:28

mathjamaca or middleway thought and barry holds affiliations at the university of hong kong at the university of pittsburgh and the university of washington

00:01:43

so thank you barry for joining us we briefly introduced carlo who is a third theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum gravity

00:01:55

and has also several contributions to the history and philosophy of science he has the author of several papers technical literature but also has spent some

00:02:09

[Music] very well received books even some bestsellers in science popularization and holds affiliations at the exmark state university the perimeter institute

00:02:21

in canada and the western university in canada carlo is now living mainly in canada and partly in massage

00:02:33

and about myself my name is marios i'm a researcher in quantum physics and gravitational physics as a disclaimer i did my phd studies on the super division of carlo so i know carlo very well

00:02:46

[Music] and i worked in china and hong kong and now at vienna at the institute for quantum optics and quantum information so first of all thank you for joining us

00:02:59

um [Music] all right so first let me get up to speed the audience on what this discussion is about what we would like to do is focus on the

00:03:10

question what is real of course this is a vast topic and everybody would have an opinion on this i imagine so i would like to uh specify this a bit more we would like to see whether

00:03:26

we can explore um if the understanding of how to answer this question what is real i think from the buddhist philosophy point of view could be pertinent or useful for the

00:03:40

metaphysical analysis of modern physics and perhaps even vice versa there is only so much that we could uncover in one hour so i expect we will create more questions than answers but

00:03:52

that would already be very good [Music] one word of question of what this discussion is not for the audience it's not a lecture on quantum mechanics or a lecture on buddhist philosophy we have

00:04:05

two personalities from two different backgrounds and we hope there's going to be an interesting discussion [Music] so

00:04:20

after this inspection which is turning out to not be too short i will hurry up we will have a discussion with barry and carlo we shouldn't go on for more than an hour and then we will take uh some questions please write questions

00:04:35

in the questions and answers uh feature of zoom andrea di biaggio will choose some we will not be able to take all of them probably just a few please keep them to

00:04:48

the point what is real and short and concise all right so let me first say how why we're here um

00:05:01

and first point out that barry and carl have never met before this is the first time you will discuss i met a barry at hong kong at lama island

00:05:14

it was a chance meeting because we were having both breakfast at the green cottage with the view of the sea at the lama island it's a very tranquil

00:05:28

island next to hong kong but i was discussing with uh george scalcas which i then became friends with a professor or a technologist [Music]

00:05:41

he's associate professor of buddhist studies at the university of hong kong and because he's greek i just could tell that he's greek from his accent i started

00:05:53

discussing with him and we went on for two hours with barry and joe was discussing about quantum physics and buddhism so a couple of years later pandemic intervened i met carlos

00:06:07

at another island lama island this summer where we're having dinner and the discussion turned again to to buddhist philosophy and quantum physics where i mentioned that i met

00:06:20

barry and carlo was very keen to discuss with bart so what are the points i want to make here first of all we came to bali

00:06:33

and thank you very much for being here to discuss with us second point this is all carlo's fault if anything goes wrong and the third point

00:06:44

is that the only system us to start with discussion so carlo this is a final introductory point i want to share a story about you and then i give it

00:06:58

to you so uh first of all i want to say that the first uh uh how to say course i took with carlo i guess

00:07:11

uh was you know before i started my phd when he was teaching your history and philosophy of physics first year for students and he was going on about the greeks and asian greeks and how that is super

00:07:23

important for modern physics a few years later i think it was about 2015 i was at your place to talk about the people in black holes i think

00:07:34

and you were super excited about this eastern philosopher and you were just tweeting about magarza um i remember how you were saying that

00:07:47

you've been reading about this greeks of this time and you didn't know that this guy existed and if you had known you would have started from there um and they ask you okay if it's so exciting you've written books about the

00:08:00

greeks about the maximum until why didn't you write something about nagarjuna and you were like yeah i don't know i don't know how it's going to be received because she's not the western philosopher you say about the greeks everybody's like yes

00:08:13

but if you say about the world easter flows with the language is not related at all to western science so to start the discussion i would like to

00:08:24

ask you carlos how did you come to be interested in a philosopher that is of profound influence in the buddhist tradition okay um thank you marius thank you for this

00:08:38

exactly thank you barry uh yeah i remember that uh that moment in which uh uh uh in which you were at my house and i talked about my arjuna um it's uh

00:08:50

it's uh i didn't search for it actually uh i didn't know anything about nagarjuna and uh i know very little about buddhism and buddhist philosophy so i am

00:09:04

very i'm here without any potential of saying anything uh beyond extremely superficial uh about buddhism to apologize for that i i in fact i i look forward to to to to

00:09:18

to getting from you um ideas and and take away some of my uh superficiality um i and i have a lot of buddhist friends because my catholic friends back in

00:09:30

italy many have converted or changed into buddhism somehow and i i read about maine buddhist idea but i i knew little about uh uh derek arjuna in particular

00:09:41

in fact i didn't even know that his book existed um but i worked on quantum theory on the foundation of quantum theory and i have been fascinated by a particular way of

00:09:53

viewing quantum theory which is called the relation interpretation of quantum theory in which [Music] one of the central thing one of the central ideas is that objects systems

00:10:06

things whatever by themselves do not have properties in some sense do not exist by themselves they only exist because they interact with something else and uh this is a

00:10:19

it's an idea which is not completely absent in in in western philosophy but it's not easy to frame in philosophical uh id western ideas and i've been

00:10:31

writing and talking about uh relational quantum mechanical relation contemplation of quantum mechanics and so many times after a talk people will come to me and say have you read nagarjuna

00:10:44

and i said no and i am not particularly excited about attempts to mix you know modern physics with eastern idea because uh things i've read about that i always found very

00:10:57

superficial superficial way of putting both but after you know the twentieth time i heard have you read nagarjuna i think well maybe i should read that so i read that book

00:11:08

in the translation by garfield and it was a shock for me it's an incredible it's a it's just a fantastic book so it really blew away my mind and i

00:11:21

spent a while as a a summer uh immersed in that book trying to read everything i could get nakatuna and thinking about that and i ended up with two ideas um which i just would put on the table and to to

00:11:35

discuss one smaller one larger one smaller is that in nagarjuna there are some basic ideas which are helpful uh to make sense of about quantum mechanics not not because the cartridge

00:11:48

knew anything about quantum physics of course it didn't uh but i think that to do science we need we need ideas and philosophy is very useful and uh we get from philosophy uh

00:12:01

conceptual structure way of thinking uh that as usual to make sense of of of better ways of understanding about the world and and and what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea

00:12:14

of uh what you do for quantum physics is the idea that uh it's it's better to think of the world not as entities or substance or or things of god or

00:12:27

whatever matter uh that has its own properties but only um through the interdependence of of things so you don't understand anything by itself if not connected to the others

00:12:39

that's uh in fact it's even more i think what nagarjuna shows that uh if you think that their relations with you think that things affect one another that's the only way of thinking so the idea of

00:12:52

of a thing by itself of things existing uh independently of anything else of a fundamental reality it's uh it's not useful and it's

00:13:08

i think the guardian argues contradictory that's a that's a specific idea this is the bigger idea which i i found uh wonderful and that completely captured me

00:13:20

is that uh this is a for me fascinating philosophical perspective because it starts from the day of separating uh sort of a conventional reality and

00:13:31

and an ultimate ultimate reality uh which is very common uh in in a very common perspective also in science and western philosophy um

00:13:44

you can also read some of the evolution of science or western philosophy trying to search for this ultimate life is that matter is that god is that spirit is that the mind is that language is that there are many other circles is that phenomenology or

00:13:58

the whosoever whatever you want and nagarjuna the book of nagarjuna is not a positive construction it's a negative destruction every chapter takes away something look this by itself doesn't stay together

00:14:12

this there's a state together it takes away it takes somebody takes something and so the suggestion here is that maybe the question is wrong um we should look for the ultimate value the ultimate value doesn't exist in a

00:14:24

sense it's the same thing as a as a conventional reality that i found fantastic it's a it's a dissolving um it's dissolving a fake problem in a

00:14:36

sense and opening up a sudden uh uh coherence as i read it and with all my superficiality it's not denying reality right it is here i mean this pen is his pen

00:14:48

it it denies the fact that this is ultimate reality in this pen or in something on which this pen is based including the mind which is uh there's a superficial buddhism a view of

00:15:01

beauties in the west uh which is just everything is the mind the mind is it's everything is is uh if you think it's a self and everything you know um where you were born in hollywood so

00:15:12

the illusory aspect of the walls i wonder if you got it from buddhism from hollywood i don't know but this is this idea that you know the the world is a big cinema and everything is is in the mind of berkeley

00:15:25

and this is a there's a chapter in in in nagarjuna which denies that completely because the mind itself is not um it's not uh doesn't have an ultimate reality so you cannot found anything on the mind nor on the dharma or the

00:15:39

on anything up to the point and then i conclude so my reason of my fascination throwing my fascination from the guardian on the table in this passage about the view this uh

00:15:51

this comments the emptiness of emptiness which was the real moment in which the guardian captured uh captured me so it's a point in which uh you know translated the way i read it or probably superficially is that all

00:16:04

right so everything is empty in the sense of doesn't not having an intrinsic reality so therefore this emptiness is the foundation of everything and regardless of the words no no no wait this is this

00:16:16

is a this is the view uh which you which is itself empty in the sense that it depends on else this is suddenly extremely liberating i think uh and i found it it hadn't

00:16:31

impacted me intellectually suddenly i have a i have a way to take take away from my intellectual search and anguish finding the foundations uh which i find liberating and even

00:16:43

personally i mean it's thinking about myself not as an entity but as a combination of other things uh has definitely an effect on me on a on a on a human being

00:16:55

and uh so i guess what what finally fascinated me in a gardener is this anti-foundational aspect it's taking away the starting point um it's absolute radicality

00:17:08

uh when he says that nirvana and samsara themselves are sort of illusioned in some sense empty in his own sense devoid of intrinsic reality um so here i

00:17:22

am um i use uh this some of the ideas i got from that book for responding about issues about quantum mechanics where people tell me come on curly you think about quantum mechanics systems how they affect one

00:17:35

another but the two systems should exist by themselves this should exist by itself anything they should think otherwise how could they affect one another and now got an answer to that and i

00:17:47

the second point i am fascinated by the overall uh anti-foundation is with nagarjuna which i found it extremely liberating so that's my naga and barry apologies if i took something which of

00:18:00

course is far more important for you than me and misread it or misinterpreted well first let me say i'm very honored to be with you carlo and also mario

00:18:12

marios and to be you know uh kind of somehow tangentially connected with the uh iqo qi and the university of vienna and now i understand in canada etc it's a great

00:18:26

honor for me to to be with you i remember very clearly our breakfast or our brunch uh marios that we had on long island several years ago in in

00:18:38

hong kong um with uh giorgio's with professor hawkies it was a wonderful time and you mentioned that we had two hours together um for me the time went like that i had no

00:18:51

idea how long we were together i know it wasn't there the time just went like that it was a very beautiful confluence of people and ideas and and enthusiasm and openness

00:19:05

and it stuck with me so several years later when you came back at the suggestion of carlo to have this this tri-log uh you know i was very excited and very happy to participate

00:19:19

carla you paint beautiful canvas with many beautiful colors and different sized brush strokes um i would say that your understanding is not so superficial

00:19:30

um i would also say that i'm no expert i'm a beginner you know but i've been trying i've been working at this for decades quite a few decades now um and you you've said things that i think

00:19:44

would resonate with me as being pretty correct um you know i didn't see any glaring you know areas that i could challenge you on um you know with my sort of beginning

00:19:56

understanding of of mad yamaka and nagarjuna i would like to add a context here so nagarjuna is um

00:20:08

he's he's he's he's presenting from the point of view of the buddha now the buddha lived about 600 years we don't know exactly but before nagarjuna

00:20:21

and when he was about 30 when he was 35 he became enlightened until his passing at 81 he taught so there are many many teachings and we have you know this hundred or so volumes

00:20:35

of the classic texts which are this long and that thick you know and you turn them like this they're written in in sanskrit in pali that record uh sometime after the buddha

00:20:47

passed his teachings and so nagarjuna is really codifying or kind of trying to you know maybe synthesize the teachings of the buddha and particularly the

00:20:59

project paramita the teachings uh to do having to do with wisdom although nagarjuna also talks about the the compassion side the bodhichitta the universal compassion

00:21:12

though not so much in the book that you were referring to um the mullein within that larger scope we often talk about enlightenment we

00:21:29

give an analogy or an illustration of a great soaring bird and in order to keep aloft the bird has two wings and those are likened to wisdom and compassion

00:21:42

so the reason to understand and put into practice nagarjuna's wisdom of emptiness is really all about compassion because it's a way that we can be more

00:21:56

useful to others in terms of bringing happiness and eliminating suffering so i think we have to see things in that larger context you talked about the two truths which is

00:22:13

uh something very important uh in buddhism taught by the buddha and of course in other traditions also talking about wisdom and that's real crucial you also talked about

00:22:24

you you alluded to the four philosophic schools um of we say of tibetan buddhism but really this is more mahayana buddhism so mahayana buddhism is the type of

00:22:36

buddhism that's practiced looking at the teachings of the buddha that were recorded in the sanskrit language and were given by the buddha in sanskrit as opposed to those teachings that were

00:22:49

given and recorded in the more common language sanskrit was more for the scholars in the common language was pauli for for the general public and those uh teachings of the buddha are

00:23:02

the ones that are used or primarily focused upon in the in the theravadin schools uh which uh exists in the more southern asian countries um you know particularly southeast asia

00:23:15

and sri lanka the northern mahayana schools are in the northern countries like china tibet mongolia japan uh korea countries like that

00:23:28

now they're all teachings of the buddha but there are slightly different emphases so the emphasis from the mahayana school is the compassion there's compassion in both but there's an emphasis of this

00:23:40

bodhichitta literally uh the the awakened mind um and so mind we roughly understand although we don't really but we have a rough idea and awakening is

00:23:54

kind of the analogy is with waking up from a dream in sleep and then you know you take the dream to be so real while you're sleeping and dreaming and as you wake up as you're going through that little process of

00:24:07

waking up you're remembering you may be remembering the image for example of a dear friend in the dream and you're feeling this closeness this love for that dear friend and as you wake up you begin to realize wait a

00:24:19

minute there was no real friend there that was just a dream and then that feeling of you know that closeness and that love begins to kind of dissipate recognizing that it wasn't real it was only a dream so this is the analogy

00:24:33

that's sometimes used for awakening so the mind of awakening bodhichitta is the universal compassion no one is exclu no living being is excluded it involves two parts one is the compassion and the

00:24:46

other is the wisdom so right away you can see that wisdom is a subset or is very much influencing and informing our compassion or deepening our compassion so along those lines let me say a few

00:24:59

words about compassion from a buddhist perspective particularly mahayana but a buddhist perspective it's the wish and the action when we can do something to eliminate suffering

00:25:11

so then that begs the issue with what's suffering and again these are english translation of sanskrit and paulie and those languages came and grew up you know with buddhism

00:25:24

eastern philosophy and buddhism english grew up with christianity or judeo-christian traditions so the words we use in in english have very different connotations uh but we you know not

00:25:38

speaking or understanding sanskrit in in tibetan then we turn to english and now the translations and translators are quite good um but still it's there's that this

00:25:50

uh there's that um area that it doesn't quite match so compassion or karuna in in sanskrit or ningxia in uh tibetan uh really uh

00:26:03

is looking at you know getting rid of suffering for everyone including ourself and so suffering now as taught by the buddha and accepted by nagarjuna has three

00:26:15

levels the obvious is physical and and mental pain the next little less obvious is change okay um you know i had a piece of chocolate cake i just love this best

00:26:27

piece of chocolate cake i've ever had so i go up to the uh the waiter and i say please i want another piece of that chocolate cake and he says sorry sir it's all finished you know so the

00:26:39

suffering of change or loss when we lose a loved one sometimes that change can turn into the opposite so for example let's say the waiter said yes here's another piece of chocolate cake

00:26:51

here's a third and a fourth you enjoy it thoroughly and then you wake up at three in the morning with indeed gesture okay and then the deepest level is what's maybe more relevant for our discussion

00:27:04

we call it we call it all pervasive it's a conditioned kind of suffering and it's conditioned by ignorance the ignorance that does not understand reality correctly okay and that's really

00:27:17

what we're that's the opposite of what we're talking about when we talk about you know shunyata or emptiness uh this ignorance is 100 180 degrees opposite um so in that last level of suffering is

00:27:32

really the underpinnings of all the other sufferings okay so if we can address and remove that level of ignorance then all the other sufferings fall away

00:27:43

and you could also see it as all of our attachments that get us into trouble our aversions that can end in anger hatred and now we see so much violence in the world all that and

00:27:55

and our selfishness and our greed and you know on and on all that just falls away when we begin to get rid of this ignorance and we begin to not only intellectually understand emptiness but

00:28:08

we put it into our lives it percolates down and it starts to be part of our attitude the way we think the way we feel it permeates every aspect of our sleep and wake life and when that happens it's

00:28:22

it's like a revolution i don't speak from personal experience because i don't have that but according to the great saints and masters who have it's like a total revolution it's full of joy it's complete love and compassion

00:28:36

there's no moment where there isn't and it's always bathed in this wisdom of emptiness taking things as you said so beautifully in the beginning of your remarks carlo that everything is

00:28:48

in relation there are no discrete entities at all there's no independent existence i think those are the words that were used by david bohm who was a very close friend of his holiest the dalai lamas and as

00:29:01

you know a well-recognized quantum physicist um so those are just some contextual opening remarks to put us in in the in the right ball field if you will uh as a

00:29:15

with an american background baseball field right could be a soccer field yeah thank you very much both um yeah carlos please um

00:29:30

thank you thank you barry uh i this is uh let me put it this way uh this is useful to me enormously both in terms of context but also in the

00:29:42

most positive way um i take this as a criticism uh in in in a positive way which which i'm happy with uh

00:29:54

let me translate uh what you said into a criticism it's like uh you were saying look her uh fine you're finding like a june or something interesting but you missed the

00:30:06

the uh the um some uh more valuable aspect of what is around there because the uh the

00:30:19

the wisdom it's uh makes sense uh together with the compassion um and this of course is um uh is uh

00:30:31

uh it's a fault which is common in me and in a lot of intellectual tradition which i accept

00:30:42

i see and i uh i i i take it and um i think that indirectly uh

00:30:55

what what you said indeed had um i mean i didn't entirely uh ignore that in the sense that uh as i as i write in the in in the

00:31:07

chapter which i wrote about the garjuna uh in my book on quantum mechanics uh um first i go into the strictly uh use of of of of

00:31:20

nagarjuna uh or buddhist interdependence uh ideas as intellectually relevant for a sort of a useful philosophical background for understanding quantum

00:31:33

phenomena getting rid of the notion of of of a fundamental staff of fundamental reality in which to anchor everything uh second i i i talk about the fascination for me of this large uh

00:31:48

strictly philosophical perspective about what's out there what is real but then at the end of the chapter said and by the way this um uh this is talking to me at the at a more

00:32:02

large level or more personal level uh because it does change my my sense of being in the world and one way in which it does is uh um

00:32:15

is is precisely because it it uh it changes my understanding of myself of the self and and and and the relational aspect between what i am and and the rest of the world and what i am and and

00:32:28

the other beings living beings sentient beings around around me somehow um uh

00:32:38

it it suddenly uh takes away a little bit of the anguish that change impermanence causes

00:32:54

or produces by um by making me think that there is no permanent me

00:33:07

who is a threatened by impermanence um and it uh it pushes uh myself and interpreting myself as as

00:33:20

a part of a network in which i am produced by the interaction with the others and it resonates with my larger uh uh pre-existing western

00:33:34

uh political uh ideas that any uh interpretation of our human and social life in terms of uh

00:33:45

you know competition and maximizing our own good of the good of our own nation or the good of our own people um against the other uh it's badly misleading for ourselves

00:33:59

and for for everybody at a number of a number of levels so there is a interdependence of of the reading of social human relations which goes

00:34:14

together with this deep interdependence separated but it's it's a it it resonates i want to say that because i must say i'm not totally deaf to

00:34:26

the compassion side and the larger side of the story but i'm but i am i am what i am with my limits and and and uh you know you're you're you're a medical doctor you know right you cure

00:34:40

the body also not just focus on that and i am um i'm a you know western intellectual working on physics and the mental physics so in this context this beautiful context and this large picture that you have given

00:34:53

what has fascinating me on the guardian is the specific um in this book because this book is uh what surprised me about this book uh this particular book i i i i've read the

00:35:06

others also some videos also um the letter uh but this book is a lot uh some of the cajun here seems to be um

00:35:18

closer to me in the sense of focusing on it's only the last part of the book that he sort of opened up the the the the the

00:35:30

the the topic of the discussion to a more how they say eschatological uh uh uh uh uh discourse for for the majority of the book is specific about

00:35:42

um i guess what you call the wisdom uh size and it's specific about uh um what uh what what are the the way i really that is what are the

00:35:53

the main concepts that we use to understand the world and he shows that these concepts uh don't hold in some sense because it's all negative right

00:36:05

uh the verses of the this book here it's a it's a collection of chapters i suppose for the many people in the audience who have not read it or don't know about it it's uh it's a short book as a

00:36:18

collective chapter which it works on on logic essentially and shows look if you if you take this entity as existence you get into a contradiction for this and this reason

00:36:31

and it slowly demolishes all the possible foundations of our thinking not only objects but also causation itself also time itself also the self

00:36:44

itself and so on and so forth one one by one um showing that uh thinking that they are foundational they're they're they have intrinsic existence uh doesn't doesn't hold so this is a uh

00:36:56

if i get it right in your in your in your large speakers this is a wisdom part of the story which as you say makes sense because uh because of the larger story but this is the part which is

00:37:11

fascinating this is the part that has captured we are we all limited and we look at one detail at the time um i i have uh

00:37:29

look um i have a i think that uh i don't know how to put it um did

00:37:42

yeah let me put it one thing do you think that uh uh it's there's anything wrong let's put it bluntly this way in in in in trying to take that from the

00:37:55

godzilla and and uh letting the thing letting this a bit of wisdom small bit of wisdom that i can get out of it uh influence the

00:38:07

rest but uh using it directly because i think that that's my that's what i think is my contribution somehow uh look there is in this uh

00:38:19

in this large uh aspect of midfield there is a there's a part of it which is definitely very relevant uh for modern physics that could be used for it and

00:38:30

um uh and from modern philosophy and you know the people in modern philosophy the people in cambridge the people in the us um not only garfield but

00:38:42

west of the others who who who are using uh a idea from the guardian in the philosophical context

00:38:57

i i think this is dialogue and i don't know if i don't know if anything could be useful in the other direction in a sense but it's uh you know i think culture is a dialogue it's a dialogue in which uh

00:39:09

in which uh uh we keep learning from from else whether it's a tradition whether it's a different school whether it is nature itself because we interact whether there's us talking to one another this constant exchange

00:39:24

that in my opinion makes the beauty of of of of culture but also uh but also the that's how we learn that's how we know that how we change

00:39:36

and in a sense once again um all this is uh it it's relational it's a it it's how we influence one another well uh first let me say that um

00:39:51

you know i think it's very beautiful the um [Music] discoveries that you've made the journey that you've made you know the courage to do that as a quantum physicist you know being

00:40:04

suggested by some of your students or at least colleagues or audience people when you give talks uh to read nuger junit that you actually did and that you actually went into it and you actually spent time with it you

00:40:16

thought a lot about this and and as i said before i think you're understanding you know at the level that we're talking um not that i understand it much more but the level that we're talking i think is

00:40:28

very clear and very excellent and the fact that it's had some impact on your life uh you said less angst uh you can see yourself much more relational in

00:40:41

relationship to others in events etc um and that changes something inside of you in a positive way i mean this is beautiful and and i would encourage you of course to continue with that um

00:40:55

uh you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the

00:41:08

beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the

00:41:20

compassion side also um so i applaud you for that and i i i feel very very happy and in a way connected with you partly because of that and partly because we're connected now having this lovely

00:41:33

conversation um allow me for a moment to dive in a little bit on you made many points here and let me sort of uh dive in on a few that

00:41:45

that i wanted to make comments on so the first and so that i won't forget the next one is going to be the four philosophic schools i mentioned that you also touched on that let's let's flesh that

00:41:57

out a little bit but before we do that let me talk about something that's even more fundamental um and helps us to understand the progression of thinking through those four schools to the what's

00:42:10

usually considered the most sophisticated in my jamaica school um and that is the distinction which is really important between existence and intrinsic existence

00:42:23

and the ex and the distinction between no existence and no intrinsic existence so this is these distinctions um if one doesn't fully comprehend the the

00:42:37

majamika system uh not fully comprehend but have some idea of the of the uh my jamaica system one then usually make is not able to make these distinctions so

00:42:49

let's talk about them for a moment um so existence um we when we talk about existence we talk about our ordinary understanding of what's real okay that things are

00:43:03

objects uh things are you know they may be in relationship but what's in relationship are two different distinct objects or entities that are in relationship and that's kind of our normal understanding of existence

00:43:15

so lacking inherent existence or intrinsic existence begs the issue to understand what is intrinsic existence okay and that's the

00:43:27

object of negation for the buddha for nagarjuna and for all those following in this tradition of nagarjuna the uh the majamika school and so

00:43:39

that's not so easy to wrap our heads around uh what is intrinsic existence in a way it's so close that we miss it you know it's it's a little bit like you know

00:43:51

staying in a in a new hotel room in a new city waking up and looking for your glasses and you can't find them and then realizing that they're already on your faces and so

00:44:05

intrinsic existence is things existing independently things existing uh through relationship um things not not things existing dependently not in independently

00:44:19

and so if we look at dependence now we can look at that at several levels and the more obvious levels you've mentioned that carlo is cause and effect causality okay but there are also more uh

00:44:33

subtle levels of dependence that the buddha and nagarjuna talk about and are real central to the philosophy so the second level is the relationship between whole and parts and parts to whole it

00:44:46

goes both ways okay that's a a a little bit you know another level if you will of of dependence uh in the particularly you know highlighted by nagarjuna and

00:44:58

then the third level which is the most uh subtle level the subtlest level which is really what we have to start to understand because the opposite of that is this independent or intrinsic

00:45:10

existence okay so this third level we call dependence through designation or sometimes called dependent designation but it's dependence through designation

00:45:22

it's a type of naming or labeling so for example barry we label or name barry my parents gave this name to barry based on a body

00:45:34

okay maybe a little tiny infant body at that time right and also uh in terms of maybe some kind of behaviors or you know how they thought this emotional structure is for this little baby right

00:45:47

he's very calm or he's very you know he's acts out a lot he's very active or you know all those things so upon all that a name is placed in this case barry okay

00:45:59

so that relationship of you know dependence through designation is really what nagarjuna is talking about when we talk about dependence um and so that's very uh

00:46:11

important to understand so the opposite of that coming back to understanding this inherent or intrinsic existence there are many words in english we use synonymous for

00:46:23

ranging not existing intrinsically or inherently or independently or from its own side those are all synonyms um to the tibetan

00:46:36

terminology that i just mentioned um so when people don't have a good appreciation for intrinsic existence and you say then so the second there were two comparisons

00:46:53

the second comparison is uh non-existence and not inherently existent so when when when when regarding says no inherent existence what often people interpret is no

00:47:07

existence at all and they fall into a nihilism that nothing exists at all so they haven't fully under appreciated this notion of um intrinsic existence so they're throwing the baby out with the

00:47:20

bathwater right when we're throwing out or negating uh intrinsic existence that they don't quite understand what that really means they think it's all of existence and therefore they you know think that nothing exists they throw the

00:47:33

baby out with a backlog so that's that's okay can i interject something before you go ahead and you you you promised us before uh the full schools before uh but but can i

00:47:44

can i make a comment here um of course about you to say because this is free flow so yeah yeah so we you know we gave the title uh

00:47:56

what is real to this uh to this i that seems to me um that's exactly that distinction that that you you made between existence

00:48:09

and intrinsic existence um inherent existence it's a it it's it's uh it's idea that that i found central and and and

00:48:22

essentially essentially useful for me for for the following reason first of all um i mean the notion of reality the notion of existence here are close i mean what what exists is what is real what is that i want to say a couple of things one is

00:48:40

that um we make a distinction with an illusory and real in our everyday life uh which it's well founded i mean if i if i see

00:48:53

the chair and there's a mirror there and i see a chair of the other side of the mirror there's a precise sense in which the chair in which the other side of the mirror is not real well this chair is real

00:49:06

um this distinction has a meaning because i can sit on the chair i can touch that one but i cannot sit on that and touch that one but

00:49:18

then we realize that some aspects of what is illusory in the chair in the mirror also are shared by the chair which i just called real which is also illusory in

00:49:31

some other sets um for instance uh the fact of being a chair uh it's uh cut out and back on so i missed you up until now please could you repeat it oh

00:49:44

uh for where for where did you be speak uh when you were saying this distinction between existence and inherent existence and non-existence non-inheritances is

00:49:56

very helpful uh and then after that i lost you yeah i wanted to um make a couple points one is that uh we use a distinction between illusory and real in everyday life for instance we say that

00:50:10

a chair but then i was saying of course then um through science uh we realized that there are illusory aspects in the chair which are just called real as well

00:50:30

but then one is tempted and that's um to say all right so there are many luxury aspects of that chair but there is a a more fundamental level in which uh

00:50:45

there is a description of what is going on there which is a real one and edinton uh made it very very vividly in a well-known uh distinction between the scientific table

00:50:57

and the everyday table when he says look i have two images two tables there there's a table of which i eat which is solid and then there's a table which i view with my scientific eyes which is made by atoms

00:51:09

uh and is not solid there's a lot of emptiness of of not emptiness negatives empty completely different sense i i've heard that that emptiness is 99.9 to the 12th

00:51:20

power based in the atom is that right yes yes but that's of course not negative emptiness that's just the lack of presence of atoms yeah um and adidas says and people use that

00:51:34

by saying the the the the chair of my uh the chairman which i see the solitude is illusory the real chair is the atoms uh this way of using the notion of real and the

00:51:49

notion of um of uh existence so what exists in the atoms uh is dangerously misleading that's what

00:52:01

i uh because uh it uh um it pushes us to try to resolve the relational and illusory aspect of reality that we see

00:52:15

in terms of some basic fundamental physical reality from which to derive it or in western subjective idealism

00:52:28

in terms and its derivation in terms of some sort of uh fundamental mind or fundamental subject which is a real existing entity

00:52:41

the cartesian mind that is certain of existing itself um or the kantian subject or even the the the fundamentality of the perception

00:52:53

itself in whosoever uh and in phenomenology so there is this western need to anchor um the uh what we mean by real or something final

00:53:07

so uh to to realize that there is dependence but then there is some basic grounds on which everything builds up on which to uh on which to sit and this is what i take emptiness

00:53:23

the notion of empty negative notion of emptiness to be useful uh to to get rid of this urge of finding beyond the uh

00:53:35

the illusory aspect of the world a a basic level which is not um uh real in in in the uh

00:53:47

in the sense of uh uh of of uh uh in which this chair is is real compared to the uh to the chair uh in the mirror but but really the fundamental way so the the the bottom line of the story the

00:54:02

the solid terrain on which to anchor the ultimate um uh uh the end point of the line of dependence the line of dependence ends to some point that's what is real

00:54:15

and and what is this nagarjuna is that that's the wrong question i mean uh it's not only that the chair the table is empty because i can understand it's something else but it's

00:54:26

also that something else is also empty because i can understand it's something else until the point in which there is this emptiness itself it's a it's empty because we shouldn't take it as a

00:54:40

as a fundamental sort of metaphysical principle on which to ground all the rest so this putting this this is yeah just putting this in slightly different

00:54:51

terminology emptiness is where it allows functionality emptiness is the lack of any kind of essence even on a you know atomic level and i agree with you what you said

00:55:04

that's i think very true um right and this is a look at when we look at the chair versus the reflection of the chair in the mirror it gets a little more complicated because both of them of course lack any

00:55:17

independent existence both okay they're both empty uh in terms of shunyata having said that the metaphor that the buddha used he gave about 10 different

00:55:29

metaphors for you know something to be illusory and one of the important ones that he used was reflection you know he used the reflection of the moon or the full moon in in the still

00:55:41

water that it looks like the moon but in fact of course it's not it's a reflection he used such things as water in a mirage sound of an echo and you know things

00:55:55

like that to illustrate okay now um let me mention two experiments if i may and you correct me where i'm wrong i'm a

00:56:07

pop physicist from the new york times okay um and one is the uh the thought experiment of ed edwin schroedinger okay the so-called shorting her cat paradox

00:56:21

or thought experiment and you have double steel box in which you have a cat there's no doors no windows right and you have a vial of very powerful acid that's

00:56:33

connected to a radioisotope the half-life of the isotope is the same duration as the duration of your experiment your thought experiment so the chance of the cat so if the radioactive material

00:56:46

decays 50 chance it you know somehow pulls a lever and the acid spills killing the cat if that radioisotope does not decay there's no spillage of the of the

00:56:59

of the acid and the cat remains alive so quantum physicists call this superposition where the cat is both alive and dead when you crack open this steel box

00:57:13

then um you observe what's inside and then the cat is either dead if the radio isotope you know decayed and knocked over the acid or

00:57:25

it's alive it didn't okay and it's it's either or whereas when you can't observe it it's both it's superposition okay second is the double slit you know you you shoot these electrons or photons you

00:57:40

know through two slits in a metal thing and then you have a screen behind and you look at the the pattern and if you have a little camera observation device at the slit level of the slits observing

00:57:52

you find a pattern below on the back on the screen that suggests what passed through the splits were particles whereas if you remove the observation device you have an interference pattern

00:58:05

suggesting what went through this list were waves okay so these two experiments at least in my very uh you know superficial understanding tell us that observer dependence is very

00:58:18

important in terms of reality okay that whether or not there is or isn't or or maybe you can what type of observer you know presence there is very much influences and determines what's real

00:58:31

and so that then uh jumps into the four you know buddhist schools of philosophy and if we go from the so-called least sophisticated up the third one would be the one you alluded to that's somewhat

00:58:45

similar to bishop barkley in the west and other idealists that say that everything is consciousness everything is mine and things that seem to be solid out there in an external reality are nothing more than projections of our

00:58:58

mind and that's actually a very sophisticated philosophy it's a very sophisticated philosophy one of the things it starts to do is it breaks down this notion of a solid external reality

00:59:10

okay but it's con it's it's critique as you have you also mentioned is that it takes the mind you know to be somehow you know uh absolute or ultimate you

00:59:22

know existing and so then the highest if you will most sophisticated school of mediumica says well what the chidoma modulus the mind-only school says that's correct up to a point but the criticism is

00:59:36

there's no uh you know absoluteness about the mind either so then you end up with that you accept an external reality you accept a mind but both you know that is every existent thing uh exists

00:59:49

without having any uh exist in relationship without having any independence or objectivity um and so that's very roughly the at least the the the last two of the three buddhist schools the

01:00:03

third one is divided again into prasannika madhyamaka and spatrontikamanjamaka using tibetan terms that are borrowing from the sanskrit um and the prasangika mud yamaka is considered the most

01:00:16

sophisticated where nothing at all has intrinsic existence the whereas the uh svaltronticom and yamaka they say that some uh conventional reality does exist uh

01:00:30

from its own side having some essence uh so there's a little bit of a distinction in the debate there um so just wanted to to mention those things i'd like you to comment if you

01:00:42

would on some of the quantum physics um you know and bring that in as we come to the near the end of our hour you know transition to our to our questions and you please allow me i'm almost out of

01:00:56

battery so i'm going to have to move my computer and get bin and i'll be listening to you intently i promise okay do you want me to talk over to wait yeah please no go ahead i'm listening

01:01:08

okay good so um first of all let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's

01:01:21

what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book

01:01:34

i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive

01:01:46

i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that

01:01:58

uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um

01:02:10

what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of

01:02:25

wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books

01:02:37

that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are

01:02:50

paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of

01:03:02

modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of

01:03:14

of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story

01:03:28

so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point

01:03:39

of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist

01:03:52

which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not

01:04:05

something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or

01:04:18

galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not

01:04:32

about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the

01:04:46

real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind

01:05:00

interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen

01:05:14

school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most

01:05:27

textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements

01:05:39

so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real

01:05:54

fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was

01:06:07

i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there

01:06:20

independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with

01:06:32

a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand so these are

01:06:44

also these are also cultural differences carlo because in the western cultures generally it's the individual in eastern cultures generally it's the group and no one wants to at least traditionally step

01:06:57

out or seem separate from the group and so the identity of an observer from a western perspective would more be an individual person whereas from a you know eastern perspective it would really be a group

01:07:10

um and so there are some cultural distinctions here also i just wanted to interject that uh could i come at this point carlo i would like to insist a bit on this because i'm i'm not quite clear

01:07:22

on whether you are agreeing or not on the question of the mind um thank you this is also i wanted to ask him the same question mario uh so by just raise the question

01:07:40

specifically all right so let me okay since we're talking about nagarjuna now i would also like to uh read some simple verses that he has and get from both from barry and you what do you

01:07:53

think so this is from chapter three examination of the sentences seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and mind are the six sense faculties their

01:08:04

spheres are the visible objects etc like the scene the herd the smell that tasted and the touched the hair sound etc and consciousness should be understood so actually i'm confused from both of

01:08:18

you first of all barry is the mind anything special in buddhist philosophy or is it just like seeing and hearing and carlo are you saying there is anything

01:08:31

special about them right can i i mean i i want some questions very answer in detail but let me let me just uh uh uh also shortly first and and because that's exactly where i was going

01:08:43

in in the previous thing i wanted to say there's a crucial distinction between what barney called three and four that's what uh captured me so

01:08:55

if you take the mind as fundamental as existing the only existing thing where where the the movie of the world is reflected into i am not happy

01:09:08

my my culture uh rejects then as a useless point of view to do science that's what but there is an alternative much more interesting and i find much more

01:09:21

deep in which which i read in a garage you know which is what uh barry seems to be is calling the fourth alternative in which the mind is not the fundamental thing in which everything is it's

01:09:32

reflected it's just one part of this uh uh uh interdependence now namely it's not the things that not intrinsic existence but mind has intrinsic existence that's not the

01:09:45

the the there's a more interesting answer namely that mind itself has no intrinsic uh uh existence uh and so it's just uh uh

01:09:57

it has an existence but is is it of course it's an existence my mind exists and i exist but uh and and and and if i think in terms of groups to say i mean all sentience being or all

01:10:10

human beings whatever um together uh which is an ideal also some some some some western philosophy that you know um it's collectively that through language and

01:10:22

that would create a vision of the world but i want to think of this as one aspect of the ensemble of things which is existence where uh uh nothing of that has um

01:10:36

uh has intrinsic existence so i want to think about my mind it's my brain my sensation my all my my my love people loving me the the image that people have of me my instead of the set

01:10:48

of processes uh uh which part of the world and it seems to me that the belgian allows me to think at me as part of the world at the same sense of the same ground as the world being

01:11:01

reflected in my consciousness without having to choose one of the two perspective to be the true one the intrinsic existence um

01:11:12

all all perspectives are uh uh empty they're all good but they are um they are not the the one on which the rest is ground they

01:11:24

each of one i can understand dependently on something else so marios you read a a verse or two from the third chapter of nagarjuna and uh let me comment on that

01:11:38

please and the question you were asking was what is mind or consciousness so here we're using the words synonymously um and from a buddhist perspective uh there are

01:11:50

six what we call primary minds and then there's a whole slew of secondary minds and some of the more common systems include 51 in the secondary minds now please understand that mind like

01:12:04

everything else that exists in the world doesn't exist permanently it exists there are a few exceptions okay but essentially everything that exists in the world um is not permanent therefore

01:12:18

it's changing moment to moment therefore everything exists as a continuum including mind so that means there'll be a moment of mind followed by a next moment of mind etc

01:12:31

and the next moment of mind is determined primarily but not solely by the previous moment of mind so from that we can extrapolate a continuum an infinite continuum and mind is an

01:12:43

infinite continuum from perspective of buddhism and that means that we've had that implies suggests rebirth and it suggests we've had ultimate we've had infinite rebirths there's been no beginning

01:12:56

and so this then comes up again with the notion of a beginning creator if you will a so-called you know god there are some some problems here to resolve this um

01:13:07

and so mind is a continuum it's infinite now each moment of mind is made up of a primary mind and a constellation of secondary minds these six primary or the five as you read from nagarjuna the five

01:13:22

sensory minds of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching tactile right these five plus what's sometimes called the mental consciousness and that has live different levels of subtlety on the

01:13:34

grossest level is thinking if we go a little bit deeper a little bit more so little subtler we have dream mind which seems like these senses are active but actually

01:13:46

when we're sleeping the senses are inactive so it's just something coming from our sixth or mental consciousness it seems like the senses are active in dream mind that dream mind is a little more subtle than a wake mind awake

01:13:59

thinking mind and then if we go more subtle we're talking now again about awake mind we we talk about intuition when we're in intuition we're not thinking right it's a non-conceptual

01:14:11

mind uh in that sense and deeper yet our minds we call non-conceptual and non-dual where there's no awareness of a subject or an object so subject object non-duality so

01:14:25

that's kind of the rough sort of you know lay of the land of what you know buddhism thinks about mind now each of those moments let's say for example i'm talking so my primary mind now is going

01:14:37

to be an auditory mind okay and then there's going to be a whole constellation of next secondary ones which are basically positive and negative or harmful uh positive non-harmful and harmful uh

01:14:51

qualities or attributes or emotions or thoughts or attitudes and then the next moment i'm looking at my screen so i have a visual mind and the constellation will change you know some of those

01:15:04

positive and negative qualities like i'm feeling a little sleepy or i'm very alert or i'm feeling jealous or i'm feeling very happy and connected you know with this

01:15:16

conversation those would be part of the secondary minds and then you know you have this infinite continuum everyone every living being every as you rightfully said sentient beings a living

01:15:26

being with a mind carlo um has um its own mental continuum um so it involves it's a big picture of mind it involves you know our

01:15:40

our thinking it involves our intellect it involves our heart feelings emotions uh and it involves those deeper levels in that sixth primary mind mental consciousness such as intuition and

01:15:53

deeper minds now when we die we go through eight stages according to the buddhist understanding and each of those stages the first four the elements the sort of solidity if you will i we know they're

01:16:07

not solid but from a conventional perspective the solidity elements the liquidity elements the thermodynamic elements the movement the kinetic elements those all dissolve as we die in

01:16:19

the first four and when that fourth one happens there's no more circulation of blood or of air so we don't breathe we have no circulatory you know blood pressure so we're declared clinically dead but

01:16:30

there's four more stages we go through and those are when the mind becomes successively subtler and those are when we get into the non-dual minds that are the most subtle minds and the last

01:16:43

eighth stage it's called worser in tibetan and we translate that as luminosity or clear light it's not light it's not you know but it's the most utter clear clear mind

01:16:57

and that mind if it goes on if we don't die if we meditate on that luminosity and sustain it through our meditation infinitely we can become a buddha and that's why the buddha is

01:17:09

sometimes called a buddhism an enlightened buddha is a deathless state because you don't actually die so those would be the non-conceptual and non-dual minds and just for completeness

01:17:23

those last four minds are called these are technical terms so it won't make much it won't have much give you much understanding white appearance red increase black near attainment and then this worst air this

01:17:35

luminosity so that's kind of the the the road map if you will for for mine and it's not the brain now on the gross level of thinking in our sensory minds there's a very close

01:17:48

connection with you know meant with the brain okay but when you die the brain is supposed to be dead and you're still alive okay and so these more subtle minds

01:18:01

are not related actually to the brain so we could really say that mind is experience it's awareness it's knowing not knowing something but

01:18:12

the act of knowing so the qualities of mind the most important qualities are awareness and clarity so that gives you just some rough idea of the buddhist understanding of mind or consciousness

01:18:28

i see um yeah carlo would you like to comment i was going to ask about time and experience of time if you would like to go to that yeah i can comment one thing about this

01:18:41

um what barry said about mine which is not uh is not something i've studied uh which uh does resonate to me a very um

01:18:54

very strongly and very interesting and that's uh and i found very interesting and then i go to time because uh it is very much related um when you ask when mario you asked you

01:19:05

asked perry so what is mine uh i i i was particularly struck by the fact that barry didn't say the mind is this this and that okay barry said well the mind is many things

01:19:18

uh look there's this and this this and this and there's a sort of layers also in some sense in which we can talk about it or or have some understanding partial media

01:19:30

understanding about it some wisdom about it and this layering i find it it's uh absolutely brilliant from my perspective

01:19:43

uh because it it dissolves the wrong question which is what is the mind period what is the thing which is the mind here is the thing which is mine uh let's just

01:19:55

define it characterize it and understand what it is that's a wrong that's a wrong way of thinking about it it's when we say when we think about our mind of course we think something you you unite somehow

01:20:09

it's the set of processes that happen into me and it's about my thinking my emotions but it's not one thing it's a complicated layer there's many layers of discussion possible about

01:20:21

that i don't want to enter into the specific but i found this fascinating and let me go to time immediately because uh it's it's deeply related i got the book of time which is a um

01:20:34

the audio of time in which i carlo this carlo is very timely because we're also kind of running low on time absolutely absolutely

01:20:46

and and and in the book i sort of uh try to collect everything we have learned about time from science from special activity from generative statistical mechanics from other pieces and and what we

01:21:00

tentatively uh learn about time with quantum gravity which is my uh specific field once again you have to sort of uh put your hands on the notion of time and the main message of the book

01:21:12

in fact the single message of the book is that the question of what is time is a wrong question because when we think about time we think about the single thing okay we think we have a totally clear idea about time time is a single thing

01:21:25

that flows from the past to the future and the past influence the president the president of the future in the present this is how things are the reality of the present entire universe is a real state in that and we learn from science that this way

01:21:37

of viewing times is wrong it's factually wrong okay it's not true that uh we all proceed in in in together from

01:21:48

moment a to moment b and the amount lapse amount of time lapses between a and b is the same for everybody and so on and forth because we learned from from experiences especially activity generativity statistical mechanics and

01:22:01

other things so the way to think about time is that it's a very layered thing but with this thing we call time is made by layers um conceptually and when we look at larger

01:22:14

domain the one of our usual experience some layers are lost so uh some aspects some some properties of what we call time are only good

01:22:25

uh are only appropriate for describing the temporal experience we have if we don't move too fast it doesn't look too uh to to to too far away if you don't look at the atoms too in detail as a single

01:22:38

degrees of freedom and so on so forth so the notion of time opens up in a in a in a set of layers which are become increasingly

01:22:53

uh general only if you go down to the bottom level um some aspect of time like the universality of time uh uh only makes sense if if we don't go too

01:23:06

fast velocities for instance um so this is a similarity and that's why the the opening up of what the mind is into layers seems to be uh

01:23:19

the right direction to go right when if if i ask uh does a cat has a mind or does a fly has a mind it seems to me that the only answer is uh to get out of the idea that the

01:23:31

answer is either yes or no i mean i i suppose that certainly a cat has a certain you know a sleepy feeling in the morning and the moment of

01:23:43

joy when he sees his fellow cats but i suppose a cat doesn't go through a complicated intellectual game of trying to understanding what is reality and debating about that so there is some aspect in common uh either not break up

01:23:56

this this notion in in pieces once again uh i mean the the topic is what is real uh

01:24:08

if we start by saying time is real it's a beautiful chapter why you cannot say that time is an intrinsic existence uh we just get it wrong if we think well then atoms are real or the mind is real

01:24:21

all these answers we got it wrong we can say that things are real in a uh in a conventional sense within a context within a within a um

01:24:37

and and then we when we try to realize what you mean by uh something is real this is certainly real in a conventional sense but we realize that um reality the reality of this object

01:24:49

itself it gets sort of broken up into interdependence between this object and else and its different layers

01:25:02

and and that's the reality that as a scientist i can deal with not the ultimate reality the the conventional reality of course conventional reality is real as uh perry

01:25:15

was saying this is not a negation of reality uh it's a it's a it it's a freedom from the idea of the ultimate reality uh

01:25:27

the ultimate uh sort of intrinsic inherent reality being there on which in terms of which building progress may i say a few words about time and i'll keep it

01:25:40

brief because i see we have a lot of people in the chat who have questions it would be nice to turn to them let me make a few comments if i may about time from nagarjuna's perspective there is no

01:25:52

time i don't think i can be more brief and how does he support that he says well when you're in the present moment there's no past and there's no future

01:26:06

if you dissect the present moment even to a more granular present moment some of that's going to be passed some of that's going to be yet to come and then you have even a finer more

01:26:18

granular present moment if you keep going on with that granularity you end up having no time you have no past no future and no presence so that's kind of in a nutshell some of the arguments or

01:26:32

logic that knock arjuna nagarjuna uses to establish no time now of course what he means is there's no absolute time there's no time on a some there's no essence of time um there is you know

01:26:46

time from the perspective of of of conventionality um cause and effect is reciprocal so when we have a cause we have an effect or we know there's

01:26:59

going to be an effect but also from the point of view of the effect the result we know that there must have been a cause so this reciprocality is something unique to the highest

01:27:10

school of prasannika majamaka uh within the fourth highest school of majamaca i just wanted to mention that to to round out one of our previous discussions and it would be wonderful if

01:27:22

we can to turn to some of the questions yes we will and thank you very much buddy uh we will now turn to the questions but i wanted one quick comment uh now that we're on time

01:27:36

on the discreteness of time because i am a bit confused about this you talked both about a continuum you were talking about the mind of course but the existing moments we're talking about the continuum with infinite continuum but at the same time

01:27:49

about some sort of steps which is what we would say discreteness in physics i'm just curious what is there how is time although it does not exist ultimately

01:28:04

imagined in uh buddhist flesh so you're very astute marios my description of time comes from the abi dharma literature and the philosophic school would be probably one

01:28:18

of the two lower ones not the mind only or the mud yamaka yeah um so you have to understand that number one number two the understanding of time as i presented it from the logic used by

01:28:31

nagarjuna is from the high school okay um so from you know he is negating so much of what we take to be absolutely real and we take time to be absolutely real however we carve it up and whatever

01:28:45

descriptors or properties we use for it we take it automatically to be something that has an essence and nagarjuna is using the logic i mentioned no past no future only the present you get cl finer

01:28:59

and finer with your present and you have no present anymore either so therefore no past so that's what he's doing here he's trying to negate showing the contradiction between in understanding

01:29:11

time to have some essence okay thank you very much so this reminds me a bit the talks in your group carlo i had prepared like six pages of questions and comments in case you get stuck

01:29:27

and the discussion is not going anywhere and it's been one and a half hours [Music] so that is very nice thank you very much let's go to the

01:29:40

second part um i i didn't stop you because this is exactly what we wanted to do right it just happened um [Music] i would like to take a couple of questions from a few specific people

01:29:52

first please let's keep keep it quick let's start with jorgos if he's still here yes

01:30:14

uh yours can you hear us no yes it should now i think you will have to unhurt yes hi

01:30:38

can you hear me can you see me um it's so nice hi barry hi mario hi carlo uh it's so nice to to be with you let me um let me just oh there i am i can see myself so maybe

01:30:52

you can see me as well yes we can see you so let me remind you i started the story i met barry with jorge specifically an assistant professor of philosophy of

01:31:10

excuse me no i got this wrong this is amit i'm sorry your boss tibetologist at the hong kong university yeah that's that's fine thank you very much mario and thank you for uh having

01:31:22

this very interesting talk i mean you all you covered such uh profound topics and i think of course the time is very limited um i don't really have any um i have more i

01:31:34

just wanted to summarize some things that you said and i wanted to start first with the with the notion of course that uh that barry mentioned about the media amica school

01:31:46

of course that pasanga madyamika becoming the dominant uh you know the most important superior philosophical view in tibet of course we must bear in mind that that was a later development that early on in

01:31:59

tibet we have with such figures in indian figures of santa rexita an attempt to combine yoga sarin media a synthesis between the two schools which as barry said they're very

01:32:11

profound i mean i think your gatsara and i'll come back to this because it it really relates to the consciousness and the importance of consciousness in this discussion about what is real um i think it's it's it's

01:32:25

not something we can get rid of it's not something we can say it's not primary to our discussion or it doesn't play an important role so eventually of course uh the evolution is that

01:32:37

um the prasanna madhyamika school by most tibetan schools is considered the highest view and of course nagarjuna is the exponent of that position now

01:32:49

i think we must bear in mind that any any sort of verbalization about reality um is dependent on consciousness it's not possible to have a discussion about what is real

01:33:02

and not have consciousness in the discussion uh especially when we are to verbalize it i mean of course any reality that is independent of consciousness is not dependent on consciousness

01:33:15

is beyond verbalization and i think the buddhist position is very clear on that and i think arjuna if i read him correctly it's very clear that the when it comes to the ultimate reality to um

01:33:28

it's something that actually we cannot talk about and basically all discussion all this course is very much uh within the level of conventional the conventional real

01:33:42

uh so this is a very interesting i think um a point that i wanted to make that i think i can also raise it as a point for the two of you to respond uh from your respective uh

01:33:54

perspectives um because if consciousness from my understanding is primary to this discussion of what is real uh and if consciousness does not inherently exist

01:34:07

right well at least i mean barry also talked about the different kinds of minds um then how does all this discussion about

01:34:20

what is real what kind of claims can we ultimately make about what is reality now i think i have a feeling that carlos comes from a different perspective

01:34:31

then barry in answering that question so i'd like to really point to this question about can we make any claims about reality and if so based on what

01:34:44

from your respective disciplines so that's my um my question and comments yeah who would like to go first um please let me put this way i i don't buy the

01:35:07

algorithm um i don't bite the algorithm uh we cannot have a discussion about reality unless it's it's it's it's a discussion there's courses involved

01:35:20

but all the discussions i didn't know about reality um as far as i know happened um through sounds or writing in which atoms were

01:35:32

moving so we cannot have a discussion without atoms right um and so on i could i could so then atoms are fundamental no uh

01:35:44

the fact that something is it's it's part of our discussion about this doesn't mean that uh it's primary with respect to the rest i think we have to take this that's my that's my own personal um

01:35:56

view of that so of course we talk about uh from today from within our consciousness of course and of course we have information about reality from within our senses and of course we talk in

01:36:08

english we talk in tibetan we talk in pali but that's not because english tibetan empire consciousness or atoms are a necessary starting point for understanding the rest i think it's uh

01:36:20

that's exactly the uh the the uh what i read in a gardener's uh uh uh chapter about the self um

01:36:33

it's uh we recognize his dependence uh of of i i would i would say levels of the pieces of the story one respect to the other one

01:36:45

and uh uh but also at a clear at a clear logical analysis this is what nagajuna does none of this stands up as primary with

01:36:57

respect to the other that's my reading uh professor halcyas georgios my dear friend and colleague um i agree with you when we talk about reality we are we are talking not about

01:37:13

reality uh we're talking about reality it's not reality and that is not the reality of the uh of nagarjuna nevertheless it's very useful because

01:37:35

without this conventional reality of words and concepts that are correct in understanding nagarjuna without that it's very difficult for us to have that experience that non-conceptual experience of reality so you know

01:37:49

there's a kind of a metaphor that's used is you you know you take a boat and you cross the river and then uh you leave the boat or the other analogy is you you're out in the forest and it gets cold and you

01:38:02

take two sticks and you rub them together and with a friction you get fire and the fire then burns the sticks so the sticks are conceptuality as was the boat that got you across the

01:38:14

river not any conceptuality but very clear understanding of nagarjuna and of course the buddha his discussion on on the buddhist wisdom

01:38:31

thank you um i would like to bring one more question discussion first of all the reason i i confuse your village is because you're both at the university of hong kong so let me correct your use his scholar of tibet and himalayan

01:38:44

studies comparative religions and buddhism associate professor of buddhist studies at the university of hong kong and we also have amit shari that i would like do you have a commentary question

01:38:56

who is an assistant professor of buddhist philosophy at the university of hong kong and incidentally also a resident of lama island and uh yes that's right so actually at the moment i'm in vienna when i was uh

01:39:09

only coincidentally uh marios has relocated here there's too many questions we're all very entangled um so uh i have a question um

01:39:21

perhaps carlo you can speak to this uh i i wonder what you think about um this aspect of madyamaka philosophy that i've found uh difficult to take on board in my own to accept

01:39:34

and so i can grant so that particles in the sun are not ultimately real they don't have intrinsic existence in that somehow they depend on each other for their existence they're all um

01:39:48

in whichever way you break that down in contemporary quantum physics there there's no intrinsic there's no they're all um ontologically causally dependent upon each other um so in certain

01:40:00

in the uh quote unquote lower schools of uh indian buddhism that barry alluded to uh the ones that still maintain some belief in uh sulphava or intrinsic nature they too will think that yes everything

01:40:13

is causally dependent because everything is dependently originated so that uh you have these momentary entity so a fire atom or if not even an atom but a a quality of heat arises from

01:40:26

a previous quality of heat or whatever you have these momentary entities floating in and out of existence uh but they all are intrinsically real they have subhaba in that they have causal power they have they they have

01:40:38

the ability to do something and that is really what their existence consists of or is constituted by is this causal power that they have in and of themselves not in and of themselves in that you know nothing produced them

01:40:52

they are they are causally dependent upon um their you know the conditions that gave rise to them but they have uh some intrinsic nature some essence loosely speaking in that they have this

01:41:03

this thing that they're going to do uh just by virtue of their existing now and so mad yamako will come along and very roughly speaking deny this that even this type of intrinsic nature

01:41:16

is is acceptable in their analysis because um once you so let's say you grant that okay they're causally dependent uh but they have intrinsic nature still also there's some sense of conceptual dependence that like we

01:41:30

cannot make sense of you know just as you can't uh really say that someone is a son like a child with intrinsic nature because that notion uh conceptually depends on on their being a parent and that you can't be a parent unless you

01:41:43

have children so you can't be a parent with intrinsic nature um but that's a conceptual dependence right a parent just person can exist you know the person can exist without having children

01:41:55

they can't exist as a parent but they can't exist um you know we can't apply the concept to them but physically let's say they'll exist with their own causal powers um

01:42:06

and so on so i wonder if you if you um uh would also like to uh say that this notion of call of conceptual dependence uh which madhyamaka thinkers put quite

01:42:19

um they put quite quite a lot of weight on in in in going that last extra step of saying everything is without slow subhable not just um not just eternal things like the self or god but that

01:42:32

even uh what other buddhists thought to be intrinsically real and causally efficacious momentary physical entities let's say even those are um not ultimately real because not only are

01:42:44

they causally dependent upon past causes uh but that you know conceptually speaking we we can also find some sort of conceptual dependence uh as well and therefore they should be ruled out so is there um

01:42:57

in you're seeing uh madhyamaka and you're recommending madhyamuka anti-foundationalism does this kind of conceptual or nominal dependence also uh play a part

01:43:08

yeah um i can also specifically um not only uh the answer is yes um and and not only uh i find this interesting but that's the thing that i found it interesting i mean i i

01:43:22

was less ignorant that i pretended about some aspect of moody philosophy before reading the garciana and what i found

01:43:36

remarkable is uh and relevant for quantum mechanics in nagarjuna is exactly this this this uh this feather step that you uh that you say that's what uh i found is astonishing and let me connect you to quantum mechanics

01:43:48

specifically because um uh one one effort and try to say quantum mechanics is to sort of reduce it to um elementary uh discrete separate um

01:44:01

uh manifestations uh uh like it's called dhamma in you know something like that um in in the buddhist edition and uh um so you can take what what the what the

01:44:14

um uh what the quantum mechanics are called the outcome of experiments which are the the the single thing forget about any reality in between them

01:44:26

and and and try to view quantum mechanical descriptions the the the ensemble of these things here and quantum theory uh i i don't want to go into the in into the technical detail of about the problems

01:44:39

with individual quantum mechanics uh it just doesn't work you have to view this uh um uh this uh uh it's kind of flash ontology in in

01:44:52

single events that make up reality us themselves um relational to something else and in in quantum mechanics they are simply relational to uh

01:45:04

to to a system with respect uh with which they manifest themselves um the point in nagajun is much more much more uh

01:45:17

much wider i mean the the the lack of interesting existence is much wider but then i found so that's why somehow but the cardio perspective allows me to do that but then what he

01:45:30

captured me is that uh in his discussion about the views nagarjuna uh takes the very representation of all that as dependent and that's i think it's uh

01:45:42

that's a that's a that's the aspect that captured me in in in in in that it takes away a problem it takes away a problem and of course one can

01:45:55

i mean i know that there are some more sort of mystical ways of reading the guardian which i profoundly respect and i don't but from the specific

01:46:09

perspective of the physicist's interest in quantum mechanics this is it i mean just get rid of the idea of this fundamental and elemental entity of realities as the proper way of describing the

01:46:21

universe and get rid of a notion of i don't know discreetness either in in whatever sure yeah sure i mean this goodness i mean i'm i'm uh i'm a defender of the scrutiny of space

01:46:34

and time and uh maybe my career on this christmas space is fine but this but you know it's just conventional reality there's no absolute reality okay right so it's a i know that this is made

01:46:46

by atoms i'm i'm ready to debate strongly and defend the idea that this is made by atoms but like journal would be very happy with it in the in the frame of conventional reality that i can reduce to spend two

01:46:58

atoms in some sense but first of all i'm losing something and second this is not the ultimate reality of the pain it's just part of the interdependence is the aspect of the whole and the parts

01:47:15

good yeah thank you thank you very much uh i think we could go on for a very long time but we have to um keep this a certain amount so that people are not extremely tired either

01:47:32

i'll try to answer and we can try to answer shortly maybe we should uh however try to meet one day somewhere maybe in dram salad uh hopefully

01:47:46

um you're you're welcome thank you thank you very much uh who knows so i would like to this was a bit short it would be nice if we would have more

01:47:58

discussion with somebody but maybe we'll wait for another time um so that we can take a few questions from the audience we have andrea andre are you here yes can you have mute yourself

01:48:11

so andrea had the task to [Music] go through the questions and to select a few maybe let's try a couple to begin with and we see

01:48:25

okay hi hi everybody um thank you carlo and barry for this for this uh conversation meeting of two different cultures in a way i i tried my best to select the the

01:48:38

questions that seemed to me most on topic relevant to discussion and that i could understand and maybe i will read them to you one by one um [Music]

01:48:51

so first two questions at the beginning were about this idea of um about relations making up reality somehow so no independent existence but resistance independently and uh mano

01:49:04

srivastava asked why doesn't identity count as a relation so a relation of an object with itself to give an object intrinsic existence and this i think is a question

01:49:17

interesting both from the point of view of buddhism and physics now guard arjuna takes up that identity relation uh actually extensively and he

01:49:28

makes some arguments that show a contradiction for example if something were identical with something else excuse me if something were identical with itself that means that agent and object would

01:49:42

have to be identical which is a contradiction um there are other contradictions of what he calls one in many um for example if we look at barry and and what makes up berry so-called

01:49:55

five aggregates for the body and the mind let's make it simple body and mind if we uh propose identity in that relationship between barry and barry's body and barry's mind

01:50:08

then there's a problem of one and many there's one berry yet there's two things when we look at body and mind so those are some of the um recurring a lot that that is some of

01:50:19

the recurring logic that nagarjuna uses to refute the relationship of identity with somebody yes i don't think identity as far as i could

01:50:43

tell was really thought of as a relation that um uh for for inside yeah that for uh just as barry mentioned right if you're going to be um you know so take a two place

01:50:56

relations were typically sort of understood as two-place things in in indian philosophy so you have a causal relation you have a cause in fact you have an action as you have an act agent and an object and so if the

01:51:08

same thing where both a agent an object that would uh violate some basic uh principle uh in indian grammar and indian philosophy or logic um so i yeah i don't

01:51:21

really uh can't think of a place where identity was considered in relational terms uh something you know something has an identity if it has intrinsic nature or sulphava there are other words for it

01:51:33

too it's its own particular nature um but yeah it wasn't conceived of in relational terms um i don't know about the history of indian mathematics whether that would uh also be the case

01:51:46

or not and there you can go on with the i leave it to you and take a couple of questions we should finish in 10 minutes let's say 16 okay another question by

01:52:05

johannes kleiner was asking about the relevance of classical logic to reason about these things about these topics and in particular is there is there like a search for a

01:52:17

justification for using placio logic to explore something about existence and non-existence and uh i wonder i mean just i'm not an expert on non-classical logics uh i guess carlo do you so some people will

01:52:34

read nagarjuna as allowing for the existence of true contradictions that something can be both true and false at the same time and uh graham priest is a philosopher who has a

01:52:46

uh reading of nagarjuna as under his uh dialethis logic which allows for certain uh contradictions to be true um [Music] i don't think that actually works in the

01:52:58

case of i think nagarjuna seems to presume the principle of non-principle of non-contradiction in order to run these kinds of reduction reductio absurdum type arguments um by drawing contradictions and incoherencies within

01:53:11

a given concept under analysis and then showing how it leads to contradiction so we should reject that concept um uh yeah do you have any thoughts about uh about

01:53:23

you know quantum physics is is sort of notorious for seeming to violate basic laws of of logic like say the law of non-contradiction or law of excluded middle or uh and so on and

01:53:35

so do you think that um our conventional logic you know it's like say classical logic is uh in if if there is no ultimate reality for madhyamako or for your your

01:53:48

understanding of uh quantum physics slash medium um then should the tools of classical logic what are the tools within conventional discourse broadly speaking as well for um

01:54:01

capturing um what madhyamaka is saying or what quantum physics as you understand it are saying so yeah let me answer specifically um uh

01:54:13

nagarjuna uh main negotiations from one perspective can be viewed as a logician right i mean it's a it's it's a his way of presenting things

01:54:25

uh uh it's it's a characteristic of somebody who's uh who's a legitimation you use logic uh but from from where's the perspective the first first of impact it sounds strange because uh his main tool is the

01:54:38

tetra of course which um somehow uh presents uh the impossibility of four alternative one being a something i don't know time exist uh one being non-a say time does not

01:54:57

exist and the third being um neither a nor not a and the fourth is uh both a and known a so it seems that wait a moment uh we we

01:55:09

we we are talked in logic 101 um that uh uh either a or not a and there is um beginning of logic so it seemed to be a clash here uh my

01:55:23

impression that there's no clash is that the known of non-a is not the same known as uh um as they restotelien known and we can uh we can think of innumerable uh everyday experience in which this whole

01:55:36

possibility it's exactly what we would uh we would consider so the exhaustive thing is the four there's four possibilities i don't want to go technically specifically but so it's not a an alternative logic here it's just a

01:55:48

different way of using known um so i don't see any clash between what we call logic uh in in in it's an interesting articulation but not

01:56:00

any any club it's not a mag logic um the same is true with quantum mechanics uh people been arguing that we can understand quantum mechanics by changing the logic i find it yeah but i find it

01:56:13

it's not really particularly clarifying um it's true i mean the particle doesn't go here normal goes there so if we think of these are two alternative quantum mechanics can be thought of can be

01:56:25

phrased if an alternative logic but all the alternative logic that i found they can be rephrased in terms of logic with different definitions so i don't i don't i don't think that this is the point um that's this is this is the

01:56:38

answer to your your question about logic you know the uh mutha madhyamakar karika his main treatise which we're talking about nagarjuna's text um

01:56:50

it's very short as you mentioned carlos and some of the things that are not there that are not written that are implied and also make it such a difficult text to understand is that he's refuting many different schools

01:57:05

of understanding an essence in reality and so when he does the tetralemma one of the usages is to be complete in terms of all the different you know

01:57:17

traditions or schools that are claiming some essence in reality to refute them and some do say that there's nothing you know not neither alternative and some say things

01:57:29

do exist and do not exist the both so i think he's using that more pedagogically if you will to um to refute all possible understandings

01:57:40

of an intrinsic existence and that's some of the beauty of his work and it's some of the difficulty in understanding it because you know unless you're really well read and really

01:57:53

understand fully all the different positions uh you it's hard to really know what he's doing at any one time um i could comment on this because it could be interesting um

01:58:08

so there is this uh sense in which barry explained that uh somehow answering 12 possible counter arguments at the same time and there's also a very simple way that you can see that this is not really

01:58:20

about a different logic so take the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics what's the point there that you try to explain a certain set of experimental data

01:58:32

by saying where does the particle go does it go through slit a does it go through slit beam let's go through both does it not go to neither and none of these four possibilities explains what you're seeing on the

01:58:45

screen so what do you do there it's not that you've reached the conclusion that everything is wrong is that you uh throw away the presupposition what was the presupposition that the particle

01:58:56

is somewhere so this straightforward use of logic it seems to me that i don't see any [Music] weird logic going on there yeah

01:59:08

you also throw away the the notion of a particle then if particles are that which have to be somewhere no you throw away the doctor there is an intrinsic reality that's what nagarjuna does if you continue doing that then you throw away

01:59:22

everything i i don't agree with uh personally if you ask me i agree that there is no interesting reality um [Music] in the sense that whenever you assume

01:59:37

such a thing you're going to fall into contradictions i have another question perhaps for carlo um could you do you think that um could you say a bit more about like how uh how you view this uh

01:59:50

lingering insistence on intrinsic reality or intrinsic nature in contemporary physics uh like how how do you see it sort of inhibiting or you know either historically or even in uh in contemporary times inhibiting

02:00:04

current scientific progress on a given um subject do you think like it has you know uh you can you can pinpoint specific places where we actually need to

02:00:16

uh abandon this presupposition in order to make progress on a given scientific problem or is it sort of a general um uh sort of general obstacle right like where it's more out we we get a more elegant

02:00:28

uh theory of physics if we abandon it but uh or is there something like specific yeah well historically realism has played both roles in science i mean as a

02:00:41

an obstacle to go ahead uh i mean from antiquity the crystal sphere uh the particles that made so difficult to accept maxwell equations as they are uh and uh

02:00:54

and others uh but also has played a very useful role hanging on to the to the notion well what is the real stuff there has been very productive i mean think about uh kinetic theory of gases for instance

02:01:06

so it's it's it's a balance right it's not it's not useful to say okay get rid of your reality and study better i mean no i mean it's but that's that's that's the way the science promises of course we would

02:01:18

like to be um super open to all possibilities but we live within a conceptual structure we're gonna go out we cannot cancel it because then we silent

02:01:30

which is fine if we just want to meditate but not if we want to do physics we're using uh we're using a conceptual structure so i think the the research issue of balance i think that

02:01:42

specifically in the interpretation of quantum mechanics um exactly in the same sense in which uh uh you know i think of clarity about the the the

02:01:55

the lawrence transformation and these funny things about about the speed of light uh by just pointing out the wrong uh assumption about reality which you know simultaneity it's well defined

02:02:08

uh here the um the existing of an ontological state of things um between two uh relative events

02:02:22

is what um it's a wrong conceptual assumption so there's a certain specific notion of reality that it's uh that that that it's it's preventing us for for

02:02:34

digesting quantum mechanics better um this is not the whole negative criticism about ultimate reality of course um it's a very specific partial uh

02:02:47

use of it uh but i think it's uh it plays a crucial i you know i in my work on quantum gravity i i i i i wrote a lot about that

02:02:59

the notion of time as a primer and essentially from the mental aspect of the world the passing time it's another i think a lot of people are blocked on the idea that oh it's impossible to think about the world

02:03:12

unless i think about some objectively existing time flowing and the past being different from the future which is what barry mentioned in one of his uh last comments um

02:03:25

once again there is i find it wonderful and surprising that i i need to do what to gravity and to get rid of this distinction from past and future and uh there is a tradition of thinking that says look there's nothing wrong with that

02:03:37

it is compatible with our everyday view of reality it's not against that so these are the two of the of the key aspect whether we do have other metaphysical

02:03:50

assumptions uh that are wrong in thinking in doing science of course yes but who knows i mean maybe future i i don't think we can we can start from there we should start from

02:04:01

you know experiments what goes wrong and what when we're in trouble say well maybe there's something wrong in our way i think i have a another follow-up a more broad follow-up i don't know i i don't want to monopolize um

02:04:18

the discussion but uh so maybe it has other questions yeah by all means let's take one more question maybe from andrea i think we should yeah

02:04:29

this discussion has to continue but we should wrap up pretty soon okay so um it's hard to choose um so there is a question about so now we are good about um reality being

02:04:45

relational and so somebody is asking david sale is asking what is the relevance or perhaps the application of the concept of not one true reality in the context of

02:04:57

people trying to come to agreement on various different issues so i guess [Music] so the question was what is the relevance or better yet the application

02:05:22

of the concept of not one true reality in the context of people trying to come to agreement on various issues well i would say the interpretation of quantum mechanics is the big discussion it's a huge discussion which is open and

02:05:35

very very alive both in physics department and philosophy departments and uh within that specific discussion which which i think is crucial for the advancements of science we have to get more clarity about quantum mechanics to

02:05:47

do quantum gravity to do other things and and and by itself um and that's the notion of what we mean by real it's uh it's uh it's really what it seems to me so i think the question was in the

02:06:01

context of our polarized world where people don't talk to each other because they have different views you know they believe there's one true reality um and so you know if we can understand that there is no one true

02:06:14

reality that everything is relative that um you know we base our conclusions on what's real uh from the information that comes in uh you know if you watch certain news you get a certain

02:06:26

perspective on what's real you watch other news you get a different perspective on what's real so understanding that that um our our notion of what's real is very much informed by kind of what comes in

02:06:40

and if we don't have other things coming in we're going to have one view of a true reality if we have other things coming so just knowing that you know if the heart and the mind are even a little bit open you

02:06:53

recognize that it's all quite relative that it certainly depends on you know previous information input etc so therefore there is no one true reality and therefore you know if you were to

02:07:05

even go in that direction it would be love it would be compassion it would be kindness and so that people could actually sit down even with differences but have respect for each other and despite in spite of differences

02:07:18

and that would begin to change this very polarized world where we have so much us and them and hate and violence um and you know it's important to return to what's common and what's common is that

02:07:31

we all want to be happy and none of us want to hurt you know it's love it's compassion and so when we return to that you know the notion and getting stuck in one reality and i'm right you're wrong

02:07:44

begins to fade away and so it's very important that that be put into our education system throughout the world starting with kindergarten up and there are schools districts in some countries that are beginning to

02:07:56

do that um and uh i think it's really crucial for our survival as a you know civil society can i make a comment here uh marius

02:08:09

to what barry said i i i i fully agree um i i think people resist to that because people are afraid that uh um uh taking this this this position too strongly allows um

02:08:22

a wrong thing to talk too many wrong things to be and and and and loses any notion of any possibility of us discussing and coming to an agreement about things and i think it doesn't so i

02:08:35

think recognizing the difference of point of view doesn't mean that we should not or we do not have the possibility of comparing our views and learning from one another

02:08:47

and getting to a mutual understanding and a better uh a step ahead in other words um i'm i'm happy to respect people who have views different from mind but i also

02:08:59

want them to tell me why i think i'm wrong and be able to tell them why i think they're wrong and i am confident that more often than not this does bring us to um

02:09:12

historically that's what's happened uh constantly and in fact science is an incredible exercises of that accepting a different perspective but then through discussion and through

02:09:23

comparison to dialectic somehow um getting to to to a a better point of view that allows us to uh to say well that was wrong that was right um

02:09:39

i was wrong you were right and so on and and and and learning more and if we can do that in the spirit that you are saying that would be the best okay um i want to bring one last question and then i would like to give

02:09:57

you the chance to briefly commenting um whatever you have to say to all four of you so this question is from is from our director here at the ecokey

02:10:08

that carlo knows very well i think it's addressed more to carla but i'll try to explain it is there an operational way to distinguish between um inherent reality

02:10:22

and conventional reality so what the question is is there would there let's assume that this existed this um you know ultimate essence um

02:10:35

would there be any way to do an experiment and say oh that thing does not exist but the convention already exists that's sort of the question i think i would answer no could not you

02:10:48

could not do an experiment if things existed inherently intrinsically because there could be no relationship no experimenter no no experiment uh things could not function at all i think

02:11:01

that's yeah please no i would agree entirely so i would say no this is not the point right you just both think i didn't say the name it was

02:11:14

just left bruckner right so there yeah the the answer is no for both of you um but why would comment there's no experiment that can check whether the earth is the center of the universe or

02:11:27

not nobody can think of the experiment that could ascertain whether the the earth is a center of universe if not right it's and yet

02:11:39

i don't think anybody in their mind would think that this is a bad scientific question it's a good scientific question that within science has a good answer which is this is not the same for the universe but

02:11:51

it has good answer not because we make an experiment there's a good answer because uh uh the conceptual structure that we use by taking uh the earth not to be the end of the universe

02:12:04

works far but much better allows us to understand more things so science is not about uh you know what i can measure or not measure it's also about how to think about things that's why i think uh

02:12:17

there are interesting questions inside like is the first essential universe which don't have a a direct way of checking them empirically

02:12:29

science is more than just checking things simply right we talked about we talked about the double slit experiment in the schrodinger you know thought experiment that the cat showed him schrodinger's

02:12:42

cat thought experiment and those two could to some extent i think operationalize the question of you know conventional versus ultimate existence because they're showing some observer

02:12:55

relativity so they're you know refuting the notion of something being objective and independent um so i think those could partially operationalize the distinction between

02:13:07

conventional and ultimate reality yes or another way if i may add something another way of seeing it the distinction between conventional and ultimate reality is conventional reality

02:13:21

and if i'm reading lagarzuna correctly and the the very distinction is very skillful means when we're talking about ultimate reality it's not something we can talk about so everything that we are actually

02:13:35

verbalizing is very much within conventional reality there's no way to get there's no way that we could use verbalization or speech or conceptualization really to to discuss

02:13:47

something that's beyond conceptualization beyond duality right i mean if that's my my take on it so it's a very interesting uh again i think i think we must hit on a

02:14:00

guardian's warning that if we turn emptiness into a theory uh we're incurable there is no cure for anyone who will

02:14:11

take these teachings these insights and turn them into a moral of reality and there will be no cure for that person and i think that's a very interesting comment that the guardian makes

02:14:23

[Music] that's a very beautiful understanding i i would argue with one small point um i mean i think it's it's a wonderful understanding um from my perspective

02:14:44

we can talk about ultimate reality but that's not real ultimate reality it is conventional reality just one fine thing difference there uh georges

02:14:56

yes thank you barry that's you're refining it much better yes i may be right i may be wrong but anyway that's kind of from my perspective yeah

02:15:09

is there any final comment by anyone i i personally found this uh very interesting and i think we could go on for hours whatever that

02:15:21

two hours and 15 minutes it's a good point to stop and reflect and i hope there is going to be something a follow-up of this of some kind yes i'm very grateful

02:15:34

i'm very grateful to barry to all of you thank you very much for this i'm also very grateful to you carlo it's been really wonderful to get to know you this way and exchange ideas this way

02:15:45

i've learned a lot and marios thank you very much for moderating and coordinating all of this and and georgios and amit and andrea for joining in uh you know adding your uh expertise

02:15:58

and your your brilliance i think it you know rounds it out into a very beautiful discussion and it does need to be continued i agree can the questions be saved on a file marius so

02:16:11

yes you can get to read them okay yes i wanted to say that but i'm sorry to everybody that asked questions and we didn't take them but i will send everything to carl and barry and if they have the time they can get

02:16:22

back to you so thank you all for joining thank you very much it was lovely and hope to see you in some island again soon or somewhere else i hope you come to visit us mario yes

02:16:36

i will try yes or in that we will see yes you're very welcome in dharms salah so take care everybody thank you take care bye bye

02:16:51

thank you very much thank you andrea also for the questions bye you