Modern Science & Buddhism | D1S1

[Music] good morning it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to the library of Tibetan works in archive a special thanks to all the distinguished guests from various organizations thank you all for being present here today it is a great honor for the library to welcome professor Mitchell who has accepted our director Gail Health Allah's invitation professor Mitchell is the director of national center for science and research in Paris he is also a researcher a scientist and a writer besides many books his book on quantum mechanics in French language was recognised and has received an award from the academy of moral and political sciences from France he's also a long-term interests in the philosophy of medea mecca school of Buddhism and has participated in 2002 3 mind and life conference which is a dialogue between science and Buddhism he's also was a speaker during the 2013 mind in life conference which was held in maan God in South India and today he is here and he'll be doing this three-day lecture series I hope and I'm sure that this lecture series will be of great interest and enlightening one for all the participants here and will be really an instrumental in promoting peace harmony and well-being of all sentient beings welcome you all to ltw thank you thank you it's played a really pleasure in the hand also to be with you you know that I've participated to several of these dialogues organized trying by the mind and life Institute between especially His Holiness and many scientists and I was the philosopher there I had the role of a philosopher and my role was to bridge between the scientists and the Buddhist scholars through I think through also the Western philosophical tradition but when I attended these dialogues I had the feelings that something had to be made clear what is exactly what I in fact the two disciplines we are comparing what is science exactly what is Buddhism and how does their aim converge is it possible to have such dialogue aren't the methods and aims of the two disciplines too different perhaps to have this dialogue so I had to enquire what is exactly the disciplines we are comparing so of course I will not teach you what is Buddhism this is not my role but I will try to let you know what is science and to what extent it can be compared with Buddhism another of my concerns was that the words that were used during these dialogues were not perfectly the same when they were used by scientists Western scientists on the one hand and when they were used by Buddhist scholars on the other hand for instance the word knowledge the word knowledge seems very clear yet I think it has very different meanings according to whether you are Western scientists and whether you are a Buddhist scholar knowledge for Western scientists means isolating something that can be treated as an object completely separated from the subject it's very dualistic you know instead knowledge Vidya in Sanskrit means something much more close to non droll awareness in Buddhism and also I think in many traditions of Indian philosophy so a word like knowledge means something that is not exactly the same between the two traditions another words that means very different things mind what is mind in for cognitive scientists modern cognitive scientists mind means a system of performing operations on information retrieved from the senses and and transformed in order to act on to the world so it's a very abstract meaning a meaning that has nothing to do with our feelings with our with our experience with our consciousness nothing instead in Buddhism when people speak of mind mind is completely different it's not only just a sort of mechanical system of mulling information it's really something that is lived and it's even the level of even maybe a deeper level of consciousness so you know even the meaning of words is a little bit difficult to reconcile so my first talk will be about what is science and how can it be compared with the kind of knowledge that is obtained in for instance in Buddhist contemplation okay I will speak of a little bit difficult issues here about what about philosophy about the history of science and all these notions maybe you don't have I don't know I don't know you yet but if there is anything that is difficult that you cannot follow that is you you never have heard of please ask and interrupt me okay so it will be easier like that okay so what what is the purpose of science first of all is the purpose of science to give a picture of nature you know a picture of nature this is very commonplace in the West saying that science is meant to give us a faithful picture of nature as it is independently of us this is you know almost a cliche in in the West you say that you want to obtain knowledge of nature and what is knowledge of nature it's giving a representation or picture of it in symbols and in symbols given by science and we call that a mirror of nature okay as you see this very idea is already full of preconceptions because that means that nature is something out there independently of us and we must try to get a picture of it okay as if here again we were separate from it object subject duality another possibility which has been also considered in the West but usually discarded is that science gives a projection of our mind onto something we don't know so we project something others onto nature here again there is some duality involved we are here nature is there and we give a projection okay but maybe also science is something in between neither faithful picture of nature nor a projection of our mind neither all given to objects no all given to the subjects but maybe something in between namely sort of middle way between everything's object everything is subject you know okay let's see how you can conceive to give a picture of nature how you can conceive to mirror nature there are two versions of the mirror of nature one is called realism and the other one is called empiricism according to realism you by science you want to give a faithful representation of something that is hidden from you but that explains what appears okay you don't just want to describe what appears you want to see the secrets of nature what is beyond the appearances and give a faithful representation of what nature is beyond appearances empiricism is more modest it just wants to give a faithful summary of observed phenomena of perceptions of experimental results and so on and so on just a summary not more not trying to go beyond these appearances because maybe there is no beyond after all it's a possibility who knows now so you see how you can think of this idea of a picture of nature either picture of something hidden behind the appearances or just a picture of what you see nothing more scientific realism is the dream of scientists actually I must say scientific realism is not just one doctrine about among many others is what scientists would like usually to achieve they would like to know the secrets of nature okay but but there are problems there are many difficulties in scientific realism and I will show you in further lectures that for instance quantum mechanics is very averse to scientific realism it's very difficult especially in quantum physics to think of nature as something completely separate from us that we try to understand from outside it's very difficult so in fact even before the advent of quantum physics many arguments have been given against the ideal of scientific realism for instance Karl Popper the celebrated philosopher of science German philosopher of science he said okay let's see how science works science progresses by conjectures and refutations that means you do a hypothesis you attempt a hypothesis and you derive the consequences of these hypothesis then you compare between the consequences of the hypothesis and the phenomena the facts what you observe if it fits okay well you keep the hypothesis if it doesn't fit then you think oh maybe I should revise my hypothesis that's the way science works and therefore you you never reach a final final state of science it's always progressing by way of hypothesis tests and then withdrawal of hypotheses new hypothesis and so and so on so at this stage we cannot know that science has reached anything like a final stage and there are good reasons to think that it will probably never reach such a final stage of course about this there are discussions so the idea of popper is that since our science works this way namely by conjectures refutations hypothesis tests and so on then he said our science is not knowledge is not knowledge imagine it can never claim to have attained truth because according to the standard vision of knowledge in the West knowledge is just a set of true statement about the world okay so if you can only have hypothesis you never have absolute certainty then according to popper you cannot say that science is knowledge okay you say that it's very hard it's very far from the cliche the the prejudice about science when science is okay but on the other hand other philosophers of science who were very close to scientists said okay maybe maybe there are difficulties with with claiming that science reaches the truths about the world and that science gives a good picture of reality as it is independently of us maybe but look science has a tremendous success it works it transforms the world it has computers planes and so on it works and so according to Hilary Putnam realism he said is the only philosophy that doesn't make the success of science a miracle he said if science works maybe it's difficult to explain without thinking that science is getting the truth about the world now is it true that truth and success are always connected that's a question okay let's us except as popper sells that science doesn't give us a definitive picture of what the world is then how can we explain that science is so successful you see the problem okay so this is probably our main problem during this talk how can we explain the success of science without accepting that science is a faithful picture of reality okay now we try to get away towards sort of middle way the middleweight conception of what science is in the history of science there has been retreat with the usual aim of scientific realist namely giving good and faithful pictures of nature as it is independently of us there has been retreat for instance according to Sir Isaac Newton already in the 17th century science especially his science namely what is called now Newtonian mechanics or classical mechanics his science was not meant to discover for instance the ultimate nature of gravitation the ultimate reason why bodies fall when they are dropped ok according to Newton his science namely classical mechanics was just meant to organize phenomena as they are observed just make connections between phenomena what kind of connection I will tell you mathematical connections namely you can have the value for instance of the position and the velocity of a body at a certain point and you want to calculate what will be the velocity and the position of this very same body at a further time at at a later time this is the kind of information classical mechanics Newtonian mechanics gives you not more just connection between the position of a body at a certain time and position of the body at a later time nothing about nature nothing about the nature of nature I would say nothing about the nature of gravitation just just calculation not more so according to Newton science is about phenomena about observed phenomena not about the nature of nature okay but what is a phenomenon now what is a phenomena since science is only marginally a phenomenon is the byproducts of an interaction between what we want to know say the the moon or the or the earth or anything like that and our instruments of observation telescope our eyes also very important okay so phenomenon is a byproduct of an interaction between what is to be known and the Noah namely us in some way phenomena are just in between the two just in between the object to be known and the subject who wants to know phenomena are exactly at the middle of the process of knowledge now Immanuel Kant was as you you know and I will tell you more about him in later talk Immanuel Kant was a german philosopher of the 18th century and he was a very much inspired by what he knew about the scientific work of Isaac Newton so just one century less one than one century before him Newton Newton's Principia was in about 1680s and and cants worked was between 1750 and 1790 so Immanuel Kant was thinking what is the nature of science say the science is so successful and yet it doesn't disclose the nature of gravitation the nature of bodies the nature of anything how is it that is so efficient so this is this was Immanuel Kant's question according to Kant science is a quest for stable and inter subjectively and knowledged relations between phenomenon okay science is not a disclosure of the nature of objects science is just a way to relate to connect to make relations between a phenomena in such a way that this relation can be uh knowledged by any subject whatsoever any human being who would look at this phenomena would say oh yes I agree with you this is the phenomenon which is observed and this is the connection it has with a former phenomenon for instance this is a connection this velocity and position of a body has with a former velocity and position of a body everyone agrees about that everyone agrees why because they observe they do again and again the same observation and say oh yes Newton was right this is exactly what we observe we don't know anything about the nature of objects we don't know anything about the inflow of gravitation but we know a lot about the connection of phenomena okay and phenomena what is the phenomenon according to Kant I told you that already but I can repeat it phenomena are relations between us and what we want to know okay so now you know you you understand maybe the new picture of knowledge that emerged in the 18th century in Europe knowledge scientific knowledge is not about the intrinsic nature of things scientific knowledge is about the relations between phenomenon and phenomena are relations between what we want to know and ourselves so its relations throughout relations everywhere and I think here you already hear a connection with Buddhism you know own being is not the purpose of our knowledge we want to know the you know the interdependence between phenomena and phenomena are the interdependence between us and what there is so here again we we have a picture of knowledge that is coming much closer to Buddhism than the former picture of knowledge which was inherited by you know from Aristotle's Plateau and so on okay but before we we come there we want to know more about the success of science how is it that science is so successful even though it doesn't really bear on the own being of things how is it well as I told you scientific realism would like to say that science cannot be efficient if it doesn't give us a faithful picture of things as they are but can't say no it's not necessary you don't need to have a faithful picture of things as they are in order to be efficient why because because first of all you must understand that this aim of giving 1/5 faithful picture of reality is not verifiable you cannot be sure that you will ever have a faithful picture why let's read a little bit about God's thoughts there is he said he said in a book on logic there is no way to compare knowledge with reality except if we know reality but then what we compare with knowledge is another piece of knowledge okay if I want to know that my theory is a faithful picture of reality then I have to compare this theory with another piece of knowledge maybe an experimental piece of knowledge but I don't compare my very directly to reality just my theory which is a piece of knowledge with experimentation which is another piece of knowledge and therefore according to God we compare knowledge with knowledge and therefore we cannot really reach to reality and we never we are never sure that we are faithful so realism is a dream maybe of certain scientists realism that that may that means that science can reach the truth about reality as it is independently of us this really is dream but it is it cannot be checked it cannot be verified so if there is no certainty about science being a faithful picture of reality how it is that science is so successful you know this is a late motive because it's a real question it's very difficult question according to Kant Kant had had an answer and it's a very interesting answer that can be just realized modernized in order to catch the motor SATs according to Kant science captures the general features of phenomena that are necessary for us to ensure one their repute reproducibility namely that if we do an experiment again and again the same phenomenon comes again and again this is a first condition for a good science you know I have been a scientist and I know how difficult it is to set an experiment in which you get reproducible result because results sometimes you know the purpose is not no longer well set and then you you see different results and you say oh how it is then that you have different results then you have to to set again their practice so that once again youth you see the same result when you see that that you have a right procedure to retrieve again and again the same results you say oh okay this is a phenomenon that is reproducible and can be observed by everybody then you say this is an objective phenomenon that's well that's good but it's not you know you have not reached the old nature of things by this you just have reached a reproducible phenomena and you are very happy about that when you're at a scientist second condition that these you know features of phenomena are inter subjectively valid namely that anyone seeing the same apparatus would see also the same phenomenon for instance I remember his own leanness was using a telescope one day when he was in NASA and and he you know he saw that the moon has mountains and so on and he asked one of his senior Lamas to come and see through the telescope and the senior lemma say yes you are right there are mountains and shades on the moon so you know this phenomenon is a phenomenon that can be shared with other human beings and therefore you can be there is a criterion of intersubjective agreement about this so if you have this reproducibility and inter subjective agreement then you can say that your knowledge will be efficient across time irrespective of the place in which you do science can be here in their arms a light can be in Canada or anywhere it will be the same kind of result and irrespective of subjects what whoever observes through the same type of a purchase will observe the same type of phenomena so here is the criterion of success of science not reaching the true absolute truth about the own being of things but just reaching universal agreement about propositions that are used to predict phenomena that's it okay that was a British philosopher Harrison Pemberton who went and meet some Buddhist monks and he he did more or less what I am doing here namely giving an exposition of Western philosophy and especially Western philosophy of science and try to see what kind of agreement or disagreement with there was with the Buddhist monks and he saw that the theory of knowledge of count was amazingly relevant to the concerns of a Buddhist monk why because yet because can't accepted that science is not more than kind of conventional knowledge or conventional truth and yet this kind of conventional truth can be amazingly efficient because you reach some criteria of universal agreement about this phenomena among all the subjects cat that can use it so every engineer in the world can use the same formula because they have reached agreement and this is the secret of the success of science not more okay another way to say similar things is to rely on Francisco Varela theory of cognition you know cognition is not exactly like knowledge because cognition means that we try to understand the way living organisms not necessarily humans but living organisms can cope with their environment they can use their own environment in order to have food and avoid threats and this treatment of the information they get from the environment is called the cognition and according to the theory of an action that was developed by Francisco Varela knowledge is not a faithful image of nature as it is independently of us nor projection of our mind it's just the expression of her fruitful interaction between us and nature according to according to Francisco Varela there is a kind of dance it was his expression a dance between the living organisms and nature in such a way that there Co emerges a system of mutual adaptation namely the behaviors of the organism become adapted to their environment and the environment is progressively modified in such a way that it adapts to the organisms so there is mutual and adaptation there is mutual chorusing between the environment and the organism and now you can easily understand the reason for the success of science in these terms in terms of biological adaptation okay when an organism a living organism is adapted to its environment this doesn't mean that it has a faithful copy of the environment inside the brain it just means that it has developed behaviors that have efficiency with respect to a state of the environment that it has itself being modified by the action of the organism you know for instance when an organism adds when a be act in in a field of flowers when a bee acts in the field of flowers it it takes some of the nectar of flowers in order to make honey okay but by doing that the bee is not just using the flower for its own purposes it modifies the life of the flower because when the bee goes from one flower to another it transpose pollen from one flower to another okay and then the life of the flowers is modified by the be just as much as the life of the bee is modified by the flower so there is Co rising of a new pattern of mutual adaptation from the interaction between the B and the flowers okay so it's exactly the way you can understand the efficiency of science it's not that science Sibley takes like you know if you take a camera click and you take a picture of nature as it is independently of a camera it doesn't work flat this way in fact science intervenes it adds it makes experiments you will see that later and and and nature answers these the questions that are raised by the experiments so nature is modified just as much as we are modified by you know our approach of nature here again there is co-arising of what nature answers and what we ask to nature so you can here again you cannot say that there is just picturing of nature you must say that the success of science is explained by the fact that there is a mutual adaptational the knower and the know a mutual co-writing of the knowledge and what is to be known ok here yes there is an example living organism as I told you I'm not a picture of nature they are adapted to nature now it's also interesting to see some history of the conception of science and some histories some history of the conception especially of physical theories it's very interesting if you go from the past to now to the present it's interesting to see that in fact the more you go in time the less you expect from science the less you expect from physical theory so it's very strange because the more you go from the past to the present the more science is efficient clearly the deficients of modern science has nothing do with the efficients of past science for instance in the 17th century we've say Newtonian mechanics you could do basically two things only two things make clocks you know with with gears clocks and pendulum or calculate the trajectory of ballets with guns so very little very little was done and maybe a little bit of machines you know machines for extracting water and so on and so on okay now what you can do with modern science namely quantum mechanics relativity and so on is amazing it's computers it's GPS ins so the amount of efficiency of modern science is hugely bigger than older science and yet strangely the ambition of modern physical theories is much less than the ambition of pasts physical theories so it's it looks it sounds like a products how can it be modern physical theories claim to know less than all physical theories it's strange but let's see a little bit how it happened Aristotle Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist of the third fourth century before our era so two thousand and five hundred years ago about according to him science is a statement of first causes of things and essential properties of things so this was the basis of the birth of Western science but as you see these aims of physical theory according to Aristotle very very ambitious very far from buddhism because according to aristotle that can be you know every event has a cause okay he accepted that as a buddhist which every event has a cause but a buddhist would say there is no end to that okay but Aristotle said there is an end to that and there is the first cause of everything and he said the first unmoved calls to any caused motion okay and then you know the Western thinkers of of later centuries for instance Christian thinkers so okay what can be this first cause and they said God first cause is God okay but the idea that there is a first goes almost you know appeal to God instead if you don't say there is a first cause no need for God also essential properties essential properties means properties that belongs essentially to that substance it's the own being of the substance you know two words that is are almost banished by in Buddhism okay own being there has been the criticism of all being and substance means an enduring thing a thing that is permanent and here Kenter is a strong criticism of permanence so you see Aristotle set the standards of Western science by appealing to first causes and enduring things and essentially own being properties but then in later centuries in the West there was a criticism of that so probably you know this progressive criticism of the original conceptions of the Western science explain why nowadays it's much more easy to have dialogue okay for instance decant Connecticut the French philosopher he said that we we cannot claim to have knowledge of essential properties and first causes we just observe that there are collisions between bodies and a collision of a body onto another body explains the motion of the other body one body arrives then collides with the other bodies and the other body moves that's explanation it's called a mechanical explanation and only the gut criticized Aristotle for his idea of first causes and essential properties and say no there is just the interplay of causes and effects by collision so it's closer to put this message closer but not yet exactly you know because this is called the conception of efficient causes and efficient causes were criticized in the famous chapter of mula Mathematica Rica by Nagarjuna so it's yet an intermediate stage then Newton Newton say no I cannot even say the mechanical reason of motion for instance when I I I take a body and leave it and it falls okay what is the body that impinges on it and explain the motion of freefall what is this I cannot see it there is no body so according to Newton you should not stick to the purely mechanical explanation by collisions you have just to formulate a mathematical formula that describes the fall of the body . you know don't try to explain anything you just describe the phenomena by a mathematical formula okay so you see that here the aim of the physical theory is lower than the two former exceptions Newton's conception is more modest than knickers or Aristotle okay and here you can say what what was Newton advocating he said just he was advocating the idea that science is only about regularities of Succession when something happens something else happens when something doesn't happen that something else doesn't happen maybe you hear something familiar here I think this is familiar because it was Buddhist texts I think it was some some young nicaya in which you find the idea of dependent arising when something happens this happens when something doesn't happen this doesn't happen nothing more so lower ambition more modest conception of science in Newton and then you have the final maybe not a final but the present one which was the conception of Niels Bohr Niels Bohr the one of the creators of quantum mechanics said that science is not even meant to describe phenomena why because phenomena are not yet existent they are not existent without us without our intervention a phenomenon doesn't exist in itself it doesn't have own being not even a phenomenon has own being and therefore what what you can do with that is only predict that if we do something then a certain phenomenon will appear with a certain probability that's it you don't even describe phenomena as they occur in themselves so the ambition of physical theory according to Bohr are even lower than the ambition of physical theory according Nutan the cotton aristotle and here we are now at this stage in in in the present days with a very very modest claim from physical theories and from science in general at least when scientists are lucid i must say because some scientists are not exactly as lucid at that as Bohr for instance but but then you have a very modest claim of science and yet a very powerful capacity of transformation that is so interesting fact and products of modern times now let's come back again to the history how was science how did science appear from what kind of processes and social forces did did it appear there was a famous philosopher and sociologist in Germany called max Scheler who tried to explain very cogently the birth of science and he said science was born of the meeting of two people who usually didn't meet and I think this is the secret of of Europe for the birth of science if I could say why well science born just at that time in the 17th century in Europe not in in other countries because of course there were versions of science but not not the same kind of science not as theoretical and not as practical as the European science of the 17th century so I think the event is that two kinds of people met who were these two kinds of people craftsmen namely people who do things who you know they arranged machines and tools and so on on the one hand and what we call clocks many people who think you know you called them geishas maybe or okay people that who think about our condition about the world about you know the purpose of our lives and so on so on and the others the craftsmen do things they try to to you know to make our lives easy by building houses you know bumps or mills and so on so these two people met and strangely the the meeting of them was fruitful why because you know the clogs gave hypotheses about the workings of nature that guided the craftsman they said okay we could try to to make better tools by using the hypothesis of of the people who think you know and on the other hand the quest men made tools in order to test the hypothesis of the clocks all the thinkers you know and so there was an interplay between them very experiment very experiment thinking and making thinking and making and with this interplay of thinking and making modern science was born so here is an example first of all there is a very strong theoretical element in modern science very theoretical and inspired from Plato who said that everything the world was you know the very real nature of the world is pure ideas set maybe in some upper sky upper heavens and these pure ideas have the form of mathematical concepts so it's very strange I think for Buddhist ears it's a very strength built real it is not what we see what we can smell and touch and so on it's something that we can think it's pure concepts pure concepts that were called ideas by Plato and Galileo the founder of one of the major branches of modern science and especially modern physics was inspired by Plato here is what Galileo said we cannot understand the universe if we don't know the language and the characters in which it is written it is written in a mathematical language and the characters are triangles circles and geometrical figures okay so that means that the very nature of the universe is mathematics the truth of the universe is mathematics so this of course believing that was a very strong incentive to use mathematics in order to predict phenomena okay so maybe here again we can think of this amazing event that explains the onset of science in in Europe in the 17th century you know the true thing that was done by these scientists was to use mathematics in order to construct machines in order to check the theory and in order to also to transform the direct environment of mankind but what they believed was very different they didn't think that mathematics was just a tool to transform the environment they thought that mathematics was a picture of what the universe is you know that's amazing but the fact that they thought so the fact that they thought that mathematics was a picture of what nature is was an amazing push for them it was maybe an illusion but it was the driving force in order to apply mathematics these tools okay they said I think this is a very crucial point because sometimes if there is an exaggeration of the you know of the significance of mathematics in science many scientists even nowadays would say yeah mathematics gives you the truth about the world who knows maybe it's true maybe it's not true i well we can discuss about that but what is certain is that for scientists believing that is a push ok sometimes even if it's an illusion it can be push now here is I told you that the birth of science in the 17th century was due to the meeting of crack craftsmen and thinkers or people who do and people who think now no the people who who think finally tried to use the knowledge of Christ man in order to test their theories how did they do that they did that by setting experiments that are already informed by the theory for instance here is an experiment done by Galileo in the 17th century it's you know it's slope and if you put a ball on the slope then the ball with will roll and since the ball accelerates it goes faster and faster then the little bells that are on the path of the pole will ring one after another now if you observe carefully the this projection you will see that the bells are situated not to say at the same distance from each other but at an increasing this and increased distance between each other what does it mean that means that Galileo was already pretty the result he knew that the ball would accelerate at a certain rate that it had he had calculated by his mathematics and that if the ball followed his low then the ball would ring the bells exactly at regular times tick ding ding ding ok even though the bells are more and more distant from each other the bell will ring at regular times so in certainly at a certain rate I would say Galileo introduced his theory his mathematical theory in the very fabric of the experiment you know the fabric of the experiment shows the mathematics of the theory so this is the amazing intermingling between thinking and making between theory and experiment you know and this I think is the secret of the birth of science now Immanuel Kant was the philosopher as I told you German philosopher later and he understood a lot about this he was very clear minded and Hindus - the meaning of this connection between theory and practice in a single item which is an experiment of this type and he said that when Galileo rolled balls of a way chosen by himself down an inclined plane a new light dawned on all those who study nature the understood that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design ok that's very interesting this sentence is very interesting reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design reason the reason of thinkers have an insight only if they produce the machine that is able to test the okay reason is so to speak inscribed in the tool now reason has to be instructed the last sentence reason has to be instructed by nature not like a pupil who has recited whatever the teacher wants him to say but like a judge who compares witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them okay the standard pattern of science before Galileo was just comparing ideas but ideas abstract ideas made by Clarke's made by thinkers with observations unprepared observations we see things we observed things instead but passively we don't do something to observe things instead from the birth of modern science things were very different the theories the ideas were no longer compared with observations they were compared to experiments okay experiments means doing something in order to catch the process according to the patterns that are fixed by the theory namely according to the patterns that are fixed by reason so reason asks the question and it receives an answer but Lanza has been preformed by it you know so things are very different and I think here again we will discuss later about the relations between science and Buddhists but I think this is a major difference but we will discuss maybe you have another idea this wave of using experience in an active way rather in the passive way is very different now let's do let's think about how we discover theory how is it that theory is formulated how that do thinkers do in order to formulate a theory but for first idea that comes to mind is just to say ok theory is just an extrapolation of the past what the future for instance I've ever seen that when I make you know I I drop an item it will fall I don't do that because I think it's glass I always see that and therefore it will ever happen the same way this is the first idea that comes the fact that things have happened in the past means that we will happen the same in the future and so you set a theory that says exactly that that says ok the rules of the falling of future objects is the same as the rule of the follow of the falling of the past objects ok it is a very weak form of formulation of theory and also we could say the very very project of deriving future from the past is not very credible why because you have observed only a few phenomena you have observed maybe 100 faults of objects and then you want to predict that it will ever be produced this way it will ever happen this way and therefore you predict things about not only 100 but about an infinite number of events so it's not very credible because you you deduce much more than you know so how can we save a little bit of this process very simple product process of so-called induction namely deriving the future from the past first point is to accept that the propositions obtained by this process have no truth value they are not neither true nor false but they are likely namely when you know that things have fallen 100 times it's quite likely that they will fall the same in the future in the future time so this is just likely not more we could say that these propositions have practical function namely they help us to try to formulate ideas about the future but they are not real knowledge of nature they can serve as hypotheses so the idea of child sanders peirce an american philosopher of the 19th century was to combine a little bit of all these processes induction for first induction which means inferring the future from the past deduction that means inferring a consequence for from hypothesis and try to combine it and maybe if you combine it you give a good idea of the process by which a very new theory is formulated the purpose of what Perce called abduction which is a combination of induction and deduction is to identify universal propositions from which the singular propositions corresponding to observed facts could be deduced for instance here is the process we noticed the surprising fact F for instance you you notice you notice that mass the planet mass is going a little loop okay we noticed that on by observing the sky okay but we don't explain that why does mass 6 undergo sort of route across the sky now this that if the universal proposition you were true this fact would inevitably be observed for instance we accept like tal mi Tony maws in the ancient times that mass goes in circle around the earth but have a sort of epicycle and that this epicycle around the cycle explains that sometimes mass goes this way sometimes it goes this way and therefore it performs a loop so here is nigh potus's the hypothesis can allow us to deduce the facts namely the loop of mass and therefore we should maybe adopt our purposes but now you notice that it's this process is a little bit weak why because the hypothesis that explains the fact is not unique there are many other hypotheses that can be better from other point of view for instance the hypothesis of totally mouse who explained so to speak the strange loop of mass on the sky is weak because there are other facts that it doesn't explain and moreover it's explained by nothing so we must be careful and we must know that it's only a hypothesis and maybe we can change our thesis and more and and by by improving our apophysis we can deduce more and more facts so here is the process you see that it's very very you know back and forth hypothesis test hypothesis test hypothesis deduction of effect and test of the deduction against observed fact and so on and so on then you you have more and more facts to account for and if the hypothesis doesn't account for all the facts but only one fact then you want to bet hypothesis what is called a unifying hypothesis and so on and so on and here is how science progresses and precisely what we want from a good theory is certainly more than just deducing one effect or one fact we want it to as I told you to unify predictions under a small number of hypotheses it's called economy or maybe beauty of theory because if a theory can derive lots of facts from lonely to hypothesis it's elegant it's beautiful also also maybe I skip on on the other conditions but you can have predictions that no other theory would have done yet testable by experiments all the known theory have not done these these predictions but the new one has done these predictions and these predictions are checked so the new theory is better than the former one because the former one have known not done this prediction for instance you could say the prediction of of well many predictions that can be done but the prediction that two plates in vacuum two metallic plates in vacuum are pressed on one to the other no classical theory can explain that or predict that why because there is nothing in vacuum there is nothing so what can exert the pressure on the metallic plates only quantum field theory can predict that by appealing to what is called virtual particles not not existent particles but virtual particles and virtual particles that are created and annihilated so they are very important by the way according to Khan visions of wave agreement between the two plates so here is a prediction that can could never have done been done by any other theories and quantum field theory but this one does the prediction the prediction is checked and observed and therefore the theory is retained as the best we have at the moment there is you know in modern physics especially there is a weak mode of prediction which is called probabilities I think probabilities are not very familiar to Buddhists because that means that you know you know maybe I'm wrong but you know the idea is that events can happen by chance with apparently apparently no cause so I remember when when we discussed with his own led to dilemma he didn't like very much the idea that event might have no cause of course but here again it's not a statement it's just something that we can say about events that look like they happen without ghosts let's suppose that indeed these events look like they have no cause they happen by chance there can be an event here and event here anything there without any rule any apparent rule so what can we do as scientists should we just renounce and say nothing and not try to predict scientists are not very happy when people say yes you could you should stop doing anything and not trying to explain or predict they want to do something and then they do something by using probabilities namely they predict not the individual event but but they try to predict the statistical distribution of events when there are many many many events then they advance distribute not in a cop you know all the less way the the order of themselves so we can predict something on a mass of events even though we cannot predict anything on a single event this is probability now what is the reason why we have to use probability is it because nature is completely unruly is it because nature is indeterminate that namely that events have truly no cause okay so you remember here again and discussion between our Buddhist scholars and scientists in which they say no no we cannot accept that an event have has intrinsically no cause said well science cannot prove that it just says some events look like they don't have cause but it that cannot prove if they have really no cause okay so another reason is that we ignore course causes but just because we don't have enough knowledge and in the future we'll be able to know more and know the causes and this was the idea of some founders of probabilities in France especially Laplace who said okay in fact if we were only science beings then we would notice the causes but we are just human beings and therefore we are limited and we don't know the cause okay but there is another option and I think this one is very interesting also and can be the right one for quantum mechanics is the the idea of necessary you in ignorance of causes why why should we necessarily ignore causes even though they may exist why there can be many reasons and here is here are some reasons expressed by hippo in Catalan care they said that we cannot know usually all the causes of an event because the causes are too small possible all because the causes are too complex and we don't have enough knowledge for understanding their complexity all they have are very distant for instance maybe something very distance far away in the universe causes a little disturbance here in this room and can make a huge difference even though we cannot see the cause because it's very distant it's just the gravitational influence of a faraway galaxy in the universe so here are ideas of why there might be causes but we don't know them okay so this another reason I like actually of that I like very much is that the causes and I will tell you more about that in my talk about quantum physics the reason why we don't know the cause of certain events is because we are involved in them because we are so closely involved in them that we cannot see ourselves as part of the causes and in quantum physics it's a case because in quantum physics we we cannot completely separate what we do in order to know and what we know and therefore we are involved in the process of knowledge and therefore we cannot know the causes because we are part of the causes ok now I told you science needs tests experimental tests is it enough to do a thorough test to truly verify a 13 name they say oh it's true this theory is true because it has been confirmed by all the facts this would be the dream of a scientist having a true theory that is confirmed by all the facts but it's not possible in fact it's not possible and the only thing we can do is pacify hypotheses we cannot check it we falsify it according to popper and according to the history of science the history of science have shown that minutes of friends and classical mechanics has been satisfactorily you know agreed upon by many of the facts that were known but to a certain extent to a certain amount of precision and one day suddenly some facts have appeared some new facts have that have completely wiped out - the theory and falsified it so verification was not obtained only falsification of it of this theory was really convincing okay verification was not convincing only falsification was convincing and that's why circle papa this celebrated lots of flow of science said that science is not a system progressive towards a final state of certainty science can never claim to have reached the truth okay because there is no way to verify absolutely but there is only ways to falsify in a very convincing way okay but maybe this idea that theories can never be verified that we can never be sure about theories is a little bit counterintuitive because we have the feeling that when many facts have you know come in a very good agreement with a theory we are almost completely convinced and therefore we say oh yes the theory must be true so in fact there are cases in which we are usually convinced for instance if the number of predictions of the theory is finite if the very predicts only to say ten facts and all the facts are in agreement with the theory we say okay the theory is verified we accept that but this is a very special case of very usual theories predict not only a finite amount of facts but an infinite night amounts of facts so the second case in which a theory could be felt as verified is if the number of theories accounting for the facts were limited let's suppose there are only two theories different theories that predicts two different sets of facts and at a certain moment you'd see a fact that falsifies one of the two theories then you discard this theory and only one is left and this one you can say it's verified fine I adopt it because the other one the only possible other one is discarded okay but when do you have when when is that you have only two theories possible it's quite rare in order to do that you have to have a sort of previous prejudice of what the theory should be what we call a logical framework of any theory and then you say okay in my logical framework only two theories are possible and therefore I can discard one and retain the other one but beware even the logical framework is a hypothesis and even this logical framework can be discarded in turn so the idea that have that you can set a logical framework and then have only a few theories and then discard all the theories but one is very shaky in fact I can give you examples you could ask okay there are two theories about light either it's made of copper skulls all made of waves there is no third possibilities because either is punctual or it's XL extended there is no third possibility let's check we test we say oh this experiment discards the idea that it's corpuscular because there are wave-like effects this other but this other test discounts the possibility that right is pure way because there are copies too like effects and therefore the very logical framework of either wave or copper scoop is not good so so this idea of two theories that as are proposed by a common logical framework is weak also because the logical framework can be wrong okay in you know that in quantum physics we cannot say that photons are either way it's all particles probably you cannot say either that the photons are both waves and particles I will show you that later but that generates the idea that there are either one or the other is wrong plainly wrong okay now now in practice even though a theory is never verified according to Papa even though it's a case scientists often behave as if their theories were good were true and they need that because their theory is a guide for their research and also a guide for their technological achievements so even though it's not true in the absolute sense they retain it and treat them as if they were true and what are the conditions in which scientists feel confident enough to treat that there is as it were true there is what Papa calls cooperation cooperation expresses the extent to which the hypothesis has with withstood severe tests and has thus proven itself resistant against its these texts namely for instance a modern physical theory such as relativity or quantum physic physics have withstood plenty of tests even tests against the best of our common-sense intuitions and always quantum physics have proved better than any other hypothesis okay maybe one day quantum physics will be superseded but until now it has withstood a number of tests that is absolutely impressive and therefore scientists think that the theory has been corroborated and they use it as if it were true that's that's the way it works in practice ok so lack of refutation means confidence and confidence means that sightings are are prone to take the theory as true at least for the time being okay now Papa's idea of science is clear and simple a theory is never true it can only be falsified and when a test comes and falsifies the theory then the theory is discarded here is the very simple idea but of course other philosophers of science have come and said different things for instance in Iquitos have said nuances to this idea because according to lack Atos who studied the history of science he said okay but look when there were discrepancies between classical mechanics and observed facts of astronomy these you know scientists didn't immediately discard called classical physics they said oh maybe we should try to to improve it or to to look for new facts more carefully or to make new explanation within the framework of of classical physics and so on so for instance take an example normally according to Newton's physics the the orbit of planet Mercury should be and an ellipse around the Sun stable ellipse around the Sun this is the Sun and this is mercury now what was observed by astronomers was that the orbit of mercury was not exactly an ellipse it was a little bit different it didn't make this regularly it makes first this and then this and then this and then this and then this and so on it's so the ellipse was drifting like that the lips were drifting and people were saying well maybe there is an explanation within the framework of classical mechanics and they we are looking for another and scene planet that would disturb the motion of mercury and and explain why the planet Mercury was drifting no one really found such a planet but no one said we should abandon Newton's mechanics because Newton mechanics was the whereas American said the only game in town the only theory that was known how can we discard the only theory that usually works but not exactly for some cases so before Newtonian mechanics was discarded one needed a new theory the new theory came it was Einstein's general relativity theory of gravitation and Einstein immediately accounted for the drift of the orbit of mercury so people said oh that's it now we know we abandoned Newton mechanics and we retain Einstein's general relativity you see so a theory is not abandoned due to an anomaly it's abandoned because there is a better one this is what Imre Lakatos said now what is the phenomena you you know I've been a little bit maybe shaky when I said okay theory must be compared to a phenomenon but maybe you have grasped but that the phenomenon according to modern science is not something simple it's not just a perception a better perception it has to be interpreted for instance well this is an example I gave in one of my talk to his holiness I work in tonight across the streets of tarantula and I see that the moon is following me and I claim the moon follows me when I want to go across the streets of tarantula is it a phenomenon or is it a bad interpretation that's the point maybe I can give better interpretation of the same observation and I can say no it's not that the moon is moving it just that the angle between me the buildings and the moon is changing okay so this will be would be a new statement of the phenomenon so the phenomenon is already interpreted the phenomenon is full of concepts so to speak that's the point a scientifical phenomenon is full of concepts already even before it has been compared to the concepts of the theory so this also shows you that what science is science is not a direct inference from from perception is a huge building of concepts between the theory and the concept that enable us to interpret phenomena for instance Newton when you know he said I want to account for phenomena what were the phenomena for Newton well they're just lights in the sky just starts here and there by no way they were highly structured highly conceptualized observations in fact the phenomena of Newton were Kepler's three laws of planetary motion nothing less Kepler was an astronomer of the beginning of the seventeenth century and he observed the planets and he showed that the planet underwent orbits that had the form of an ellipse but you know the Sun around which the planets go is not in the center of the ellipse it is at one of the two focal points of the ellipse this is the first load of Kepler's second law of Kepler that when a planet moves around the Sun at the time it takes for going to a certain trajectory close to the Sun is much quicker than the time it takes to go on another piece of the orbit far from the Sun the rule of Kepler was that the surface that is covered by the radius between the Sun and the planet in a certain time is the same for the closer part as to the distant part here it here is though you know this area must be the same as this one in a definite amount of time okay this is the rule that explained why the planets goes much farther when it is close to the Sun much much faster sorry much faster when it it's close to the Sun then when it's far from the Sun so and so on so you see Newton retain the phenomena that were already conceptualized by Kepler you understand that observations and so and phenomena for scientists for if you like Newton are not only perception they are highly elaborated ideas on top of these perceptions and you know Newton did that he took his own laws of motion then he added Kepler's laws and he derived the famous inverse square law of gravitation the law of gravitation namely the fact that bodies are attracted to one another according to the inverse of the square of their distance so Newton used phenomena but phenomena in a sense that is much more elaborate perception okay so I think well I have so many other things to say but maybe in instead of going quicker and quicker I should stop a little bit and let you ask questions and maybe we'll have occasions to to see the further material maybe it's better to have discussion questions and so on so thank you very much for your attention you said before according to the census significant point there's no course when we're talking about the probability you know probability then what is defense in probability and protection according to the Buddhist viewpoint there's the there's the course in when we're talking about probability or protections have vertices then when we're talking about alternative viewpoints or why there's no course in probability okay as I told you probability is just a tool for human prediction so it works as if events had no cause but in fact maybe they have costs that we ignore that's the point so probability could be well could be a reflection of our ignorance about causes not about the absence absolute absence of course we don't know in quantum physics we can use only probabilities we have no other tools and probabilities to work so it's very important and it's very powerful because it works once again but there is no clear idea about the reason why we should use probability is that is that because there are no courses at all that would be called indeterminacy of nature or is it because we don't know the causes which it would be called uncertainty about nature in the termination C or uncertainty we don't know maybe something in between I like the idea that it's sort of something in between it's something in between because we are so much part of nature we are we are so interdependent with nature that we cannot disentangle ourselves from the system of causes and therefore we are bound to in ignore causes that could be an explanation of the reason why we use probability even though it doesn't rule out the idea that everything has a cause so I I hope it's a it's a balanced view I think of this problem thank you

Channel: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives

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Length: 96min 21sec (5781 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020

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Prof. Michel Bitbol (M.D, Ph.D) gave a series of talks on Modern Science and Buddhism for three days at the conference hall of Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Dharamsala. Day 01 Session 01 6th Jan 2020