Day 3: Buddhism, Physics, and Philosophy Redux: Panel 6 

Buddhism, Physics, and Philosophy Redux
Workshop | April 3, 2022 | Alumni House, Toll Room
Sponsors: Center for Buddhist Studies, Tianzhu Global Network for the Study of Buddhist Cultures, Glorisun Global Buddhist Network, Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, The Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation
Video segments:
Panel 6:
00:00 Start
00:00:12 Chair: Jay Garfield Ph.D | Smith College and Harvard Divinity School
00:00:27 Francesca Vidotto Ph.D | University of Western Ontario
00:57:48 Adam Frank Ph.D | University of Rochester
01:50:42 John Dunne Ph.D | University of Wisconsin, Madison
The philosophical problems that emerged with the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century are still very much with us. Issues like the measurement problem, entanglement and nonlocality, wave-particle complementarity, and so on, force us to ask: do the formulations of QM refer to a real, mind-independent world, or are they merely a means of predicting what appears when we go looking? Do concepts like “wave-function,” “particle,” “field,” “time,” and so on reference things that exist in and of themselves, or are they merely nominal or pragmatic constructs? Much has been written on these questions over the last century, yet there is still nothing like consensus on the issues.
Curiously, many analogous philosophical quandaries emerged in Buddhist thought centuries ago, as Buddhist philosophers struggled to understand the relationship between how the world appears and how the world is, as well as the status of our theories about the appearance-reality distinction. Buddhist notions of “dependent origination” (pratītyasamutpāda), and “discriminative construction” (vikalpa), for example, raise issues that are structurally analogous to the problems raised by the measurement problem and wave-particle complementarity, and the competing Buddhist approaches to these problems parallel, in many respects, competing theories in QM.
The early attempts in the 70s to initiate a conversation between Buddhism and theoretical physics are now widely disparaged. The problem, in part, is that the participants in those early conversations, while knowledgeable about QM, often lacked a sophisticated appreciation of Asian and Buddhist philosophy. This workshop will bring together a small group of physicists, philosophers, and scholars of Buddhism to see if it might be possible and fruitful to restart the conversation.
Thumbnail Photo Credits: Buddha statue in Langza, India | Photo by Yash Raut unsplash.com/photos/lKFR8Ho3jYw