Drops of Experience: Dogen, Whitehead, and Quantum Theory

Drops of Experience

Dogen, Whitehead, and Quantum Theory

Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) offer the image of the universe as a network of discrete present moments, each of which has its own aliveness, and all of which are connected to and contained within one another.

Quantum theory, with its notion of discrete units of time and the mutual entanglement of all units, points in a similar direction—at least when interpreted in a Whiteheadian way.

Thus, we have three invitations to recognize the primacy of the present moment and the mutual entanglement of all moments. This page is an invitation to consider that invitation in your own way.

Jay McDaniel

”In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being.”

– Dogen (Uji)

It is not only that there is water in the world, but there is a world in water. It is not merely in water. There is a world of sentient beings in clouds.There is a world of sentient beings in the air. There is a world of sentient beings within fire. There is a world of sentient beings on earth. There is a world of sentient beings in the world of phenomena. There is a world of sentient beings in a blade of grass…. Wherever there is a world of sentient beings, there is a world of buddha ancestors. Thoroughly examine the meaning of this.

—Dogen (Sansuikyo)

- both quotations are from Seth Zuino Segall in "Dogen's Universe and Ours", The Existential Buddhist

Dogen and Uji

Dogen developed a philosophical concept known as "uji." Uji is translated as "being-time" or "being-moment," Uji is the idea that time is not a linear progression of past, present, and future but rather a dynamic process of ever-changing and discrete moments of reality. Each moment is a unique and complete expression of reality, encompassing the entire universe: a "concrescence" of the universe, to use Whitehead's phrase. Therefore, there is no need to seek enlightenment or truth outside of the present moment because it contains the totality of existence.

For Dogen, reality itself is changing from moment to moment, and changing with each moment, but impermanence is not a cause for despair or nihilism. It is an invitation to fully engage with the present and appreciate the fleeting nature of life.

Practicing uji involves cultivating awareness and mindfulness of the present moment, letting go of attachment to past and future, suspending judgment and conceptual thinking, and immersing oneself in the vividness and aliveness of the current experience.

The Existential Moment:
I am a Quantum Event, Too

Drops of Experience

Quanta are discrete, discontinuous units of energy in the physical world. If you are influenced by particle physics, you may imagine them as very small, tiny, submicroscopic events. They are miniature pulsations of energy within the depths of atoms, protons, neutrons, and other small particles. They do not travel through space; they happen all at once, occupying a region but connected to other pulsations.

Quantum events are not 'things' but rather 'events' or 'happenings.' They bubble up with spontaneity of their own. While they have their independence, their independence is relational, not isolated. They are complex and interdependent, like Indra's net in Buddhism. According to the story, Indra is a powerful deity who possesses a net that spans the entire universe. At each intersecting point of the net, there is a radiant jewel. These jewels represent individual beings or entities, whether they are people, animals, plants, or even inanimate objects. Every jewel reflects the entire net in its entirety, and every movement or change in one jewel affects the whole net. Quantum events are nodes in Indra's Net. Quantum physicists consider them as the building blocks of the physical universe.

Whitehead suggests that these quanta are not simply objects devoid of interiority. They have a reality of their own; they are moments of experience or, in Whitehead's phrase, "drops of experience." Wherever quanta exist, and they are literally everywhere, even in empty space, there is a certain kind of subjectivity or experience, whether conscious or unconscious. Hence the idea of pan-experientialism: experience everywhere. The universe as a whole, or the multiverse if you wish, is bristling with subjectivity. It may be unconscious, but it is alive in a deep sense. It is filled with what Whitehead calls "feeling."

Human Experiences are Quanta, Too.

Process philosophers add that our own moments of human experience are also quanta. Our seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, thinking, feeling, remembering, and anticipating are all complex and interdependent drops of experience. These drops are not necessarily small and miniature. They may occupy regions of the space-time continuum, what Whitehead calls the extensive continuum, that are the size of a football or a football field, for instance. While we may think of our own experiences as housed within our brains, moments of perception, as experienced subjectively, spread out in space, extending to a distant horizon. For example, imagine someone looking at a mountain in the distance. Their perception includes the mountain, which is far beyond their body but within their visual perception. The moment is, or is made of, drops of experience. If we consider God as a drop of experience, we might imagine God as being everywhere at once, encompassing all regions of the space-time continuum. In this case, we would need to envision a drop of experience without boundaries, a boundless drop.

The general point here is that drops of experience need not be imagined as small, medium-sized, or large, nor as round, square, or octagonal. They can come in many shapes and, from our perspective, be quite amorphous.

Drops Observed and Drops Lived

It is easy to imagine these drops as objects we reflect upon and draw diagrams of from a third-person or spectator perspective. However, in truth, we ourselves are always already inside a drop, receiving and responding to the past actual world from a subjective perspective. Our own lived subjectivity, encompassing our feelings, thoughts, sense perceptions, memories, hopes, and fears, is the essence of drops as experienced from the inside. These drops are not objects we reflect upon; they are the very essence of our existence in the immediacy of the present moment, regardless of our actions or experiences.

In short, we are always already immersed in the immediacy of our experience. This experience includes the past actual world as something we remember and are influenced by, both consciously and unconsciously, but the subjective immediacy is always in the present. We are like riders on the crest of a wave of immediacy, where we ourselves are the crest. This means that we are constantly renewed in every moment, and our lived experience is characterized by this continual sense of newness. We are forever being reborn.

To imagine drops of experience from this first-person perspective, it is best to let go of diagrams and focus on what is happening in the present moment. As Whitehead wrote in "Process and Reality," "The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought, and the starting point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience."

A Vibrant, Pulsating Universe

Returning to the energy events within the depths of atoms, the question arises: Do they, too, possess something akin to interiority or subjective immediacy? One could argue against this notion, imagining that at some point in the history of the universe, there were only objects without subjects, with exteriors but no interiors. However, in line with Whitehead's perspective, process philosophers disagree. They believe that quantum events within atoms also have first-person perspectives. These events are momentary acts of self-enjoyment, to use Whitehead's phrase, as they exist among many. They have their own subjective aims and desires for satisfaction. They even exhibit something akin to emotion, which Whitehead refers to as subjective forms, manifesting as aversion or adversion. Therefore, feeling permeates the universe, creating an emotional realm. Pan-experientialism could just as well be termed pan-emotionality.

Living in a Quantum Universe

What, then, does it mean to understand ourselves within a quantum universe? In a way, nothing changes. We continue to live our lives, moment by moment, striving to navigate the complexities of our own existence and the entanglements of the world around us. However, we come to realize that these moments of our lives are our lives themselves. We are not mere spectators observing life from the outside; we are active participants, immersed in the ongoing flow of events. Imagine a river flowing with quantum events. We are not on the shore watching the river; rather, we are within the river, entwined with the series of events, inseparably linked to other occurrences.

This understanding invites a sense of uji, of being-time, in which we are fully present to the moments of our lives. It can also evoke a sense of inner calling to live with love and compassion to the best of our abilities. This inner calling represents how the divine Event, an inclusive quantum entity with its own feelings, resides within each of us, beckoning us toward a richer experience. Moreover, a similar calling exists within other living beings and within the depths of matter itself. Even the energy pulsations within atoms partake in the experience of the divine.

If we live in a spirit of uji, we also recognize that our universe is an intricately woven web of interconnectedness, constantly evolving and never repeating the same configuration. We transcend the illusion of absolute separateness. We acknowledge that, just as we possess feelings and emotions, so too does everything else in existence. The hills, rivers, trees, and stars all possess a certain kind of aliveness, mirroring our own experience of being. In the words of a Buddhist perspective, all beings, not only humans, animals, and plants, embody the Buddha Nature. Even celestial bodies like stars and planets possess it.

The Buddha Nature of each entity is its own internal vitality and spontaneity, accompanied by an inwardly felt becoming, originating from the divine Bodhisattva, with the aim of realizing its full potential, whatever that may entail. Buddhists assert that the potential for humans is to attain wisdom, compassion, and inner freedom. This is our potential in a quantum universe. Christians will see Jesus as an incarnation of this possibility, Jews will see Torah as guidance for living in this way, Muslims will see the Qur'an as a similar invitation. Buddhists do not have a monopoly on wisdom, compassion, and interior freedom. It is a gift to all humans and, who knows, perhaps to beings in other domains of existence, too.

- Jay McDaniel

Whitehead's Philosophy
as a Quantum Philosophy

Here are a few key links between Whitehead's philosophy and quantum mechanics:

Process Philosophy: Whitehead's philosophy is often characterized as process philosophy, emphasizing the dynamic and interconnected nature of reality. Quantum mechanics also describes the world in terms of processes and interactions, rather than fixed entities. Both perspectives recognize that reality is a dynamic and evolving network of relationships.
Concept of Events: Whitehead's philosophy centers on the notion of events as fundamental entities. Similarly, in quantum mechanics, events play a crucial role. Quantum theory describes the world as a series of discrete events, where particles interact and measurements yield specific outcomes. This aligns with Whitehead's emphasis on events and their influence on the unfolding of reality.
Indeterminacy and Creativity: Whitehead's philosophy emphasizes indeterminacy and creativity as inherent aspects of the universe. Quantum mechanics, with its principle of indeterminacy and the probabilistic nature of quantum phenomena, also highlights the role of chance and creativity in the behavior of fundamental particles.
Relational Ontology: Whitehead's philosophy embraces a relational ontology, asserting that reality emerges through the relationships and interactions between entities. This aligns with the quantum mechanical perspective, which emphasizes the relational nature of quantum systems and the entanglement of particles, where the properties of one particle are intimately linked to the properties of another.
Quantum Measurement Problem: Whitehead's process philosophy offers a way to interpret the quantum measurement problem, which is the challenge of understanding how the act of measurement collapses the quantum wavefunction into a definite state. Whitehead's concept of "prehension" can be used to interpret this collapse as the process of a quantum system prehending or incorporating aspects of its environment during measurement.

While these connections exist, it's important to note that Whitehead's philosophy predates the development of quantum mechanics. Whitehead himself did not explicitly discuss quantum mechanics, but his philosophical ideas have found resonance and interpretation within the context of quantum theory. The links between Whitehead's philosophy and quantum mechanics provide fruitful avenues for philosophical exploration and offer alternative perspectives on understanding the nature of reality and the behavior of the quantum world.

Whitehead and Quantum Theory

In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on his metaphysics. This ambitious book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between quantum mechanics and Whitehead's philosophical cosmology.

Moving systematically--concept by concept, phase by phase--Michael Epperson illuminates the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work, and details Whitehead's attempt to fashion an ontology capable of coherently accommodating the current and future trajectory of modern physics.

But going far beyond this exploration, Epperson also makes important new contributions to the conceptualization of Whitehead's theory of quantum events ('actual occasions'), addressing the considerable attention paid by philosophers and other scholars to Nature's fundamentally quantum character as described by modern physics.
__________

"Quantum mechanics is one of the empirically best confirmed physical theories ever. Moreover, it has been and still is an important instrument in planning and evaluating new experiments in many areas of physics and an indispensable tool for the development of new technologies. However, despite its extremely wide and successful range of application, some important questions concerning its proper interpretation are still not settled. In this context one of the most important questions is clearly to which ontology quantum mechanics gives rise, i.e., of what kinds of fundamental entities the world probably consists (e.g. particles, fields, events, processes, spacetime regions/points, etc.), if one assumes that quantum mechanics is telling us a true story about the world.

"Epperson has done a wonderful job in showing what one of the most detailed (and surely, one of the most difficult) metaphysical theories of the 20th century--Whitehead's philosophy of process--contributes to the ongoing debate about the proper ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics. Therefore, the book is highly recommended to anybody working on or being seriously interested in the ontology of quantum physics. Moreover, it is a "must read" for students of Whitehead's philosophy, since it will deepen their understanding of Whitehead's quite abstract scheme, to see quantum mechanics as a specific exemplification of some of the central structures of the philosophy of process."

Frank Hättich - Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics

Quantum Gravity

Melvyn Bragg examines Quantum Gravity. Early in the 20th century physicists were startled by the realisation that the smallest things in the universe do not obey Newton’s laws of gravity. Ripe apples fall from trees, billiard balls roll mostly on the table and the moon orbits the Earth in thrall to its gravitational pull, but there is no such force of gravity at work in the world of very small things. It seems there is one set of rules for the realm of every day objects, and a very different set of laws for the quantum world - where tiny particles actually form the building blocks of all those larger things.But how can this be? It doesn’t appear to make sense. Physicists decided that there must be another theory - a much larger theory - that unites, incorporates and finally makes sense of these divided realms. And this has been the Holy Grail of physics ever since.

With Dr John Gribbin, Visiting Fellow in Astronomy, University of Sussex; Lee Smolin, Professor of Physics, Centre for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, Pennsylvania State University and Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London; Dr Janna Levin, Advanced Fellow, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University.