This is part 2.3 of a 3-part series. In part 1 I tried to answer the question “What is Detachment?”. In part 2.1, I discussed whether awakened people can work miracles and began to describe what a genuinely scientific temperament is. In part 2.2, I went deeper into the basis for that mindset and how it’s related to earnestness of quest, which is essential to seeing the path ahead for an awakened soul. In this final sub-section of part 2, we’ll beat that drum a little more, since it’s such an important point. And then talk about genuine seeking.
In the forthcoming part 3 of this series, I’ll describe Maya in a way that only true scientists can appreciate (whether or not you’re a professional scientist).
In part 2.2 of this series, I talked about how we all have “causal expectations” of Nature (regardless of whether Nature itself is causal or not at its core).
A wonderful passage in one of Erwin Schrodinger’s little books illustrates this mindset lucidly:
Once, Werner Heisenberg, the famous quantum physicist, and Grete Hermann were discussing Heisenberg’s work. Heisenberg was trying to describe his finding that sub-atomic events appeared to be truly acausal. Hermann was a young neo-Kantian philosopher at the time, and, I might add, temperamentally truly scientific (my opinion).
“…But we cannot — and this is where the causal law breaks down -” said Heisenberg, “explain why a particular atom will decay at one moment and not the next, or what causes it to emit an electron in precisely this direction rather than that. And we are convinced for a variety of reasons, that no such cause exists.
“That is precisely,” Grete Hermann countered, “where so many people think modern physics has gone wrong. The mere fact that no cause for a certain effect has yet been discovered does not mean that no such cause exists. I myself would simply conclude that atomic physicists must go on searching until they discover the cause…In other words, you will have to keep looking.
“No, we think that we have found all there is to be found in this field,” Heisenberg insisted, “for from other experiments with Radium B we know that there are no determinants beyond those we have established.
The significance of this exchange cannot be overstated. To empathize with Hermann’s exasperation in this dialogue or Heisenberg’s sense of wonder and exhilaration at his discovery we must understand the gravity of the matter they are debating.
Causality is no trifle, and to think it out of existence is no small undertaking. The very notion that reality may be fundamentally acausal at its core implies a deep cognitive dissonance between the is and the ought — what we perceive (if acausality were true) and what we somehow, curiously, believe to be the truth.
So much so that we are often driven to extremes like madmen to find causes for things that seem mysterious.
Humans don’t take kindly to the ground suddenly disappearing beneath their feet. And scientists especially so.
Again, it’s important to reiterate that a person with a scientific mindset does not have to know the cause of something. But it is emphatically the case that she believes that there IS a cause. Even if there really isn’t one. Even if causality turns out to be untrue.
I have to be careful here. Note that I’m expressly NOT taking sides between determinism and acausality. Unlike Einstein when he said that god doesn’t play dice.
I don’t care which of these is actually true. Well, actually I do, but what I mean is that I’m open to the possibility of either being true, but I frankly admit that swallowing the pill of acausality is enormously harder for me, infinitely even. If it’s true, then I can bring myself to live with it, but never to truly believe it or accept it.
All I’m saying, therefore — and this is crucial to understand — is that regardless of the truth value of determinism, we humans are innately deterministic creatures. We are wired to find comfort in causality.
Acausality shakes us to our very core because it ought to. This profound dissonance between what we “expect” and what we “observe” is, in fact, the very foundation of genuine curiosity. It is the basis of real science.
But this doesn’t mean that scientists are consumed by trying to explain every little thing that happens. That would be a boring and unproductive kind of life.
Rather, we’re just confident that there is an underlying cause for everything and that if we looked deep enough, or thought hard enough, we’d find it.
Our confidence in this is unshakeable enough that we hardly think much about trying to identify and note precise causes for mundane events.
In order for us to explicitly hunt for a cause, the event must be mystifying enough to make us suspect that our current mental model of a deterministic universe may not apply to it.
So here are three possibilities:
- We know that there must be a cause behind something we observe, but we don’t care enough to find out what it is because we’re confident that some model of our deterministic universe will fit it. (We ignore these events)
- We know that there must be a cause behind it, but we aren’t quite sure what it could be. So we search for the cause systematically (Empirical Science)
- We encounter something which does not seem to have a cause. And try as we might we can’t fit the thing into a universe in which there could be a probable cause. This kind of thing is like a thorn in our shoe. It’s deeply disturbing. The most we can do, if we encounter such an event, is to grudgingly accept it, while doubting it at every possible occasion. You may think there are no such things in the world. But in the next article of this series, I’ll show you just how many of these kinds of events surround us. Uncountably many. That is why the fact of existence (not existence itself, mind you) is literally hell to a true scientist unless she deliberately turns a blind eye to certain things.
Now I believe that all humans are born with above mindset, or it comes about naturally as the brain develops. Especially #3 — our discomfort with things that appear to have no cause. Every child I talk to seems to possess that quality. Isn’t that part of the beauty and deep satisfaction we get from watching a curious young mind try and figure something out?
Yet it seems that not all adults have this mindset. Why? I can only assume that these adults were somehow brainwashed during their early lives into losing that wonderful scientific temperament.
The culprit, I find, is a certain kind of answer we give young minds when they come asking. These are what I have called “satisfyingly wrong answers” in a previous article — Memetic Viruses.
A genuinely scientific mindset refuses satisfyingly wrong answers. It knows that they don’t solve the underlying problem.
It’s important to nurture and preserve this genuinely scientific mindset with which we are born. It’s this mindset that’s crucially important to uncover truths.
Including spiritual truths.
.oOo.
