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September 18, 2004
(Revised from the first edition published in 1998)
In the beginning there was nothing, nor was anything
lacking.
The paper was blank. We pick up the paint brush and
create the scene...
The landscape, the wind whipping water into waves.
Everything depends upon the stroke of our brush.
-- Master Hsu Yun
Some
thoughts concerning the nature of reality have teased my
mind ever since I first read the following statement by
Werner Heisenberg:
Werner Heisenberg, one of the Twentieth Century's greatest minds
in physics, turned scientific community upside down when
he convincingly demonstrated that an observer affects
what is observed. In 1927 he wrote: "If one wants to be
clear about what is meant by "position of an object,"
for example of an electron..., then one has to specify
definite experiments by which the 'position of an
electron' can be measured; otherwise this term has no
meaning at all. "
--Heisenberg, in uncertainty paper, 1927
"...
we have to remember that what we observe is not nature
in itself but nature exposed to our method of
questioning."
I read
this many years ago and its implications are to me both
mystical and magical. It would seem that we are not as
much observers of an objective reality that exists
"out-there", as we are the creators of a subjective
reality that exists "in-here". Let me elaborate a bit.
The tools
with which we are born and with which we come to know
the world are our five sense organs - our eyes, ears,
nose, tongue and skin. We often say that our eyes look
out upon the world. But what intrigues me is that it
isn't so much our eyes looking out as what is projected
onto us, followed by our interpretation of what we think
we have just sensed.
Let's take
our simple observation of a house plant. Light photons
of varying frequencies emanate from the sun and bombard
the leaf of the plant. Many of these photons pass
through the surface of the leaf and are absorbed by it.
The frequencies of light which the leaf does not absorb
bounce off, and into our observing eyes. This light
passes through the lenses of our eyes where it is
magnified, inverted, and then projected internally onto
a matrix of receptors called the retina. There, a
cascade of biochemical and electrochemical events soon
follow, translating these incoming signals into a format
that allows our mind to come up with the color green and
a contrasted image of the leaf. We use the historical
database of our minds to compare this leaf to others
that we have known before. We quickly ascertain that the
leaf is safe, it is not poison ivy.
Being
curious creatures, we want to know more about this leaf,
and so we gently touch it to find that its top surface
feels smooth, and its bottom feels rough. We hear how
the leaf sounds when a breeze comes by causing it to rub
against other leaves. We can smell and even taste the
leaf if we want. Ultimately, we use all our faculties to
create a fuller image of it in our mind. This Maya-leaf
seems so real.
Our first
impression is that this leaf sensation exists as an
external, independent and fixed reality because that's
what our senses would have us believe. But our five
senses were probably never meant to know the truth of
"what is". They seem to have evolved to allow us to
survive, procreate and to help our offspring to do the
same. But still we want to know more.
So, we
build microscopes to "see" near and spectrometers that
can "smell" and "taste" the contents of gas vapors and
liquids in the leaf. We have devices that can "feel"
surfaces for temperature and pressure, and we can use
sound meters to detect and "hear" loudness and pitch.
Now we are on a scientific path to the discovery of this
Maya-leaf in its totality. We think that by creating
more tools of increasing sensitivity that we will come
to know "what is", the essence of that leaf.
But this
assumption about reality seems to be at odds with our
understanding of quantum science. What we eventually
find on our scientific path though, is the discovery
that the underlying sub-atomic fabric of our world does
not behave in a way that our minds can easily fathom.
Fixed points of reality do not really exist in the
pre-observational external world. What does appear to
exist are only quantum probabilities everywhere. Upon
observation, these probabilities collapse and flash! --
we create and affect the nature of things simply by our
awareness of them. Particles seem to scintillate in and
out of existence before our eyes. It is as though we are
creating the world as we go, as we experience it. We
take input data and create a model of what we then
assume is an external and objective reality.
But
reality isn't actually known through our observations,
or senses. Instead, it would appear that all observers
are much more like artists. We dip our mind's brush in
the bucket of quantum probabilities around us to create
our world. It would seem that we are all Masters of Maya
from the very beginning.
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