To be clear you are quoting the book.
Okay, yes it is bigger than us.
Now, on to chapter 5:
A conversation with Steve Daut’s Buddha Science
Book by Steve Daut, ©2016
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Chapter 5, Buddha Science, Chaos and Complexity
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I continue my virtual dialogue with Steve Daut’s written words in “Buddha Science,” chapter 5. As mentioned in the previous introduce I will also skim over this chapter because it stands by itself. Background matters and I encourage anyone who finds this interesting to invest in your own copy of Steve Daut’s book (mail@stevedaut.com) so you can read the rest of the Buddha Science story.
Here I’m all about trying to highlight where my Earth Centrist, bottom-up-evolutionary, outlook differs from his summary of some current thinking. I’m in agreement with the fundamentals he presents and don’t “take issue” with Daut’s book per se. It’s all about my particular Earth Centrist interpretation of the facts shared.
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Chapter 5a, Chaos and complexity, At the movies
¶a4 “… Scientists have found that chaos is virtually everywhere, connecting things in astonishing and unpredictable ways.”
¶a5 ““But chaos is only the beginning. …
These pages were interesting to read but since I don’t have anything worth adding to this discussion regarding chaos, I won’t try.
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Chapter 5b, Chaos and complexity, Movies, schmovies
¶b2 “In fact, as the study of complexity has gained traction, chaos has come to be defined as a very special type of behavior that contributes to the complexity of systems. The study of complexity seeks to understand the functioning of whole systems that have many component parts. It seeks to discover and describe how these parts interact, and how the behavior of he system relates to its parts. These efforts lead to a third subject, emergence. Emergence is simply the observation that the behavior of a system is more than merely the sum of its parts. … the three general topic of interest in this chapter are chaos, complexity and emergence. …”
¶b5 “Karma is the Buddha Science moral analog of the butterfly effect. …”
¶b9 (Edward Lorenz and pioneering weather modeling work and chaos effect)
¶b16 “So the concept of a strange attractor is basically a rigorous way to describe a system that never exactly repeats itself. …”
¶b19 “… the Mandelbrot set …”
¶b20 “The very concept of fractals seems like magic. Many systems exhibit patterns that repeat themselves past smaller and smaller scales, which results in many questions about our concept of space and dimension. …”
¶b21 “… in other words, the object itself defines the space rather than the space define the object. …”
¶b23 “…(the two dimensional sheet that gets crumbled up into a ball, what is it now . . .)
“… The concept of fractal dimensions is another way of looking at the relationship between objects and the space. As a Buddha Scientist would say, these concepts have no meaning from the perspective of non-dual Reality.”
This is interesting enough, but it’s all part of our imagination. I believe getting to terms with ourselves and the challenges this Earth bound physical life tosses at us requires something more down to Earth and intellectually tangible.
Starting with a deeper appreciation for our biological selves.
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Chapter 5c, Chaos and complexity, Complex but not chaotic
¶c2 “Yet the human body functions as an integrated system. All of the various parts work together for the benefit, or failure, of the whole. This is a complex system with some chaotic elements, but it cannot be considered chaotic as a whole. The study of such systems has become the focus across all areas of scientific study, …”
True enough, and the beauty of those hard sciences studies, especially these past couple decades, is that they clearly show a biological route to understanding consciousness, even if details remain shrouded in mystery. No amount of rhetorical logic games, and impossible expectations, changes that bottom line. The questions we ask, foreshadows the answers we can arrive at.
¶c3 “… This quality is call emergence, because it emerges as a system reaches certain levels of complexity. …”
¶c5 “The property of emergence is a key concept at all scales and systems, up to and including Reality itself. After all, Reality is the ultimate complex system. As a Buddha Scientist might observe, non-duality is the emergent quality of Reality itself.
As an Earth Centrist might observe, human mind is an emergent quality of the biological Reality of our human body. The duality that matters is the one between our minds and physical Reality.
It’s real, yet as mysterious as the origins and details of electricity.
The duality between matter and living biology is tricky, lost in a maze of manmade constructs. We know a fair amount, but the boundaries get fuzzy, too fuzzy for us, earth bound, time bound, human beings to puzzle out.
¶c6 “… (consistent) with Buddha Science that the presence of a separate observer and observed is merely a concept, and has no meaning with respect to non-dual Reality.
I can relate to much of what I’m reading in these pages, but this “non-dual” Reality doesn’t sit right with me.
I know I’m repeating myself, still, the most important duality I’m aware of is the divide between Physical Reality and our Human Minds.
The duality between non-living matter and biology is fascinating, but once removed, like quantum weirdness, and not so interesting as biology creating awareness, and with increasing complexity, increasing levels of consciousness spring forth.
¶c7 “… This leads us again to the two approaches discussed in this book: the empirical observations and inference of the Buddha Science; and empirical observation, conceptualizing, and testing through the scientific method. So now let’s begin to take a look at some additional areas of scientific inquiry, keeping in mind that the principles of chaos and complexity may apply to any and all of them.
No doubt.
From here it’s on to the slippery slope of the quantum physics landscape.
I thank Steve Daut for writing out these concepts and allowing me to share them in this virtual discussion with his book. I encourage you to read his complete book.
Buddha Science, ©2016, Steve Daut - mail@stevedaut.com
A conversation with Steve Daut’s Buddha Science
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Chapter 6, Buddha Science, Physical Science
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Chapter 6a, Physical Science, It’s all relative
¶a1 “… one of the early lessons instructors often teach in basic scion e courses is that trying to apply common sense to scientific study introduce bbias into the results.
¶a3 “… now it’s time to tackle the other two recent and revolutionary discoveries of science, relativity theory and quantum mechanics, …”
¶a27 “… All of this may contradict common sense, but the problem is not what the world does. It is the concepts we form around it. The universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not. My basic scientific training was correct - let go of common sense. The Buddha would approve. Common sense is only the boat that allows us to deal with the day-to-day world. To gain a deeper understanding of the world, we must leave that boat at the shore.”
That does sound very romantics, but let’s not forget we live on this shore, four dimensions and bodies that confine us - not in the netherworld of quantum reality and Shrödinger’s Cat. That land only our imaginations can visit.
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Chapter 6b, Physical Science, Buddha meet Shrödinger’s Cat in a Bar
¶b2 “At the broadest level, the world of quantum physics show us two very distinct levels of reality - that of the day-to-day observations where things seem definable and solid, and a reality of undefined potential, where individual things do not exist, and even the ideas of space and time are only illusions*. Once again, this is a realm that we can only try to understand by forming concepts, (that simply allow a glimpse of this reality.)
“… This quantum Reality underlies and is included in everything we know, measure, understand and experience. …”
Right. At the level of the absolute tiniest of tiny, right at the boundary of matter and free energy. Shouldn’t we expect things to be very strange down there?
The exact size of objects in the Quantum Realm is unclear, but it’s shown that reaching it requires characters to shrink smaller than a proton, which has a diameter around 1.7/10¹⁵ meters. That’s around 10 million times smaller than the smallest virus.
¶b3 (Introducing Erwin Schrödinger and early days of physics., … ¶4 Max Planck … ¶5 quantum physics, the mystery of light, ¶6 effect of heat on metal, discovering quantized electrons and photons, waves particles, ¶9 superposition, quantum computers, ¶11 Schrödinger’s Cat makes its dramatic obligatory entrance.
Schrödinger’s Cat consists of a few imaginary atomic particles, there’s never been a cat.
Scale matters!
Quantum Weirdness makes for great mind-experiments and storytelling, but not so much for constructive clarification of our fundamental human questions.
If you’re not an expert, it’s all mind candy and putty for your preconceptions.
¶b12 “… a good description of the Buddhist view of two levels of Reality. Non-dual a state of unlimited and formless potential, is collapsed by our concerns into the dual world that we experience. …“
¶b13 “… entanglement… that pairs of particles can act as a system . . .”
¶b17 “There is no mathematical reason that time needs to only move forward, but probability theory strongly points to a tendency . . .? ¶19 Why does time always move forward? After all the underlying laws of physics work the same forward or backward in time. …”
For me, this is an example of what it means to get lost within the mindscape.
It’s a mathematical challenge, a mental game.
From its inception this universe has done nothing but move forward and expand. How could time do any differently then move forward, even if the speed isn’t constant?
Reversing course can only happen once the pulse expends itself. Even then, to say that means time will then be running backwards is a guess, it’s not like the spin of atoms will suddenly reverse.
¶b22 “… Higgs boson, … gravity waves, … ¶24 Buddha Science, no beginning no end, … Big Bang, … ¶24 Something from nothing, … ¶26 dark matter and energy, …¶27 David Bohm, …”
¶b28 “Even though the two fingers, science and Buddha Science, may be pointing toward a common view of what our universe is and the basic building blocks that underlie it, we need not go soaring into the universe or shrink down to subatomic size to find mystery. One of the most profound mysteries awaits: that of life itself. Trying to sort out the distinction between matter and energy and mass, time and space is one thing, but how do we understand life? What is life, exactly? How did it come about, and how did it become what it is today? In the next chapter, we will begin pointing our finger toward the mystery we call life.
Don’t let my short shrift fool you. This was an interesting chapter that did a good job of covering a lot of bases and it’s worth a focused read.
Thing is, with me, I started earnestly learning about this history of physics & quantum philosophy and various lines of arguments during the seventies.
Since then geology and biology and astronomy have kept regularly blowing us away. But the philosophical side feels like it’s been stuck dancing around the same old May Pole.
Instead of debates that are important to understanding ourselves and what we’re doing to our own life support systems, the brainiacs are debating the End of Time and Reality because some complex mathematical formulas break down, meaning they can’t figure out what’s inside the tiniest crevice of the tiniest particle, which isn’t even a particle, it’s a smug of energy spinning at crazy speeds.
All the while we haven’t developed the common sense to recognize and slow down our own self destructive tendencies, nor how to nurture each other, let alone this planet.
I thank Steve Daut for writing out these concepts and allowing me to share them in this virtual discussion with his book. I encourage you to read the complete book.
Buddha Science, ©2016, Steve Daut - mail@stevedaut.com