164. Uncle Tungsten - XVI. Fusion & the End

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Uncle Tungsten

What has confused me about "protonation" -- the donation of protons to another atom or molecule -- is that the term suggests to me that protons leave a nucleus much like a wife breaking free of the strong force of a polygamous marriage. But the reality is quite different. A hydrogen proton (really the nucleus so, technically speaking a protium or at least a positive hydrogen ion or, let's say, a hydrogen cation) departs one (acid) family and moves on to another (base) family leaving its electron behind. I'm sorry, having introduced the polygamous marriage idea it's now hard not to see the proton as a heartless mother abandoning her small (probability distributed) child. (So it can't even be said where it is with any degree of certainty. And it's probably left behind in a negative hydroxide ion or anion.)


So now I have all this but I still have no idea why the proton leaves it's old family behind and is drawn to the base -- thus turning it's old family into an anion and its new family into a cation. With ionic and covalent bonds I get how valency is the motivation, if you will, that brings atoms together. There's something essential about acids and bases here that I'm missing.

This includes a very helpful animation showing a particular kind of protonation in action. From reading the text, it would seem that I'm not the only one having a hard time visualizing how this works. 

The cationic forms of hydrogen are called hydrons and there are three types: proton, deuteron (with a neutron), and triton (with two neutrons). If you de-ionize them by giving them an electron, they become hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium. Unless you have a plasma (like in the sun, as we shall see) naked hydrons are very rare but what you will find in acidic water is hydronium ions H3O+. Or if the water is alkali you will find more hydroxide anions OH-.

And I'm going to leave it at that and not even get into salts.

Chapter 24 - Brilliant Light - Continued

...
p305 It was not until 1929 that another idea was put forth: [about what powered the sun] the notion that, given the prodigious temperatures and pressures of a star’s interior, atoms of light elements might fuse together to form heavier atoms -- that atoms of hydrogen, as a start, could fuse to form helium; that the source of cosmic energy, in a word, was thermonuclear. Huge amounts of energy had to be pumped into light nuclei to make them fuse together, but once fusion was achieved, even more energy would be given out. This would in turn heat up and fuse other light nuclei, producing yet more.  

The use of “light” in “light nuclei” is a little confusing since we are talking about “light” in the other sense as well. Also, Nothing here supports or explains his contention that “more energy would be given out.” This is obviously the case, but the details of it remain a mystery to me. 

At temperatures and pressures like this [20 million degrees inside the sun]. atomic nuclei -- naked, stripped of their electrons -- would be rushing around at tremendous speed (the average energy of their thermal motion would be similar to that of alpha particles) and continually crashing, uncushioned, into one another, fusing to form the nuclei of heavier elements. 

In the sun, they would actually be forming alpha particles, since that’s what a helium nucleus is. 

...
Converting hydrogen to helium produced a vast amount of heat and light, for the mass of the helium atom was slightly less than that of four hydrogen atoms -- and this small difference in mass was totally transformed into energy, in accordance with Einstein’s famous e=mc2... 

I have to pause here. We will return to this chain of thought below.

This finally sent me to Wiki for more information. Wiki repeats what he says about the four hydrogen atoms but this makes absolutely no sense to me. Here’s the way I would describe it: 

Two free protons collide, with enough energy that they overcome the natural tendency of positively charged bodies to repulse each other, and stick together. Only the impact also shakes loose a positron and a neutrino. And this is where we have to get into the (seemingly intentionally) confusing world of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). 

A proton is not a fundamental particle but is currently understood to be composed of two up quarks and one down quark bound together by gluon fields. (The mass of the proton comes almost entirely from the gluon fields and the kinetic energy of the quarks.) 

A neutron is described the exact same way except that it has two down quarks and only one up quark. According to Wiki, “A free neutron is unstable, decaying to a proton, electron and antineutrino with a mean lifetime of just under 15 minutes... This radioactive decay, known as beta decay, is possible since the mass of the neutron is slightly greater than the proton. The free proton is stable.”

That positron I said was shaken loose is an anti-electron so when a proton becomes a neutron it gives off a positively charged particle and when a neutron decays into a proton it gives off a negatively charged particle. 

Now, finally, that neutrino I mentioned is a type of lepton (like the electron) but without charge.

So to summarize, two protons (each a little less massive than a neutron) collide, knock off a positron and a neutrino, and one of the protons turns into a more massive neutron. And the only difference between the new neutron and the old proton is the lack of charge (that positron, I guess) and a quark has shifted from up to down.

If anything is clear in all this it is that when nuclear physicists talk about “particles” they have a very special meaning in mind. As with electron energy states, it would probably be more understandable if they just dropped the particle language and used a more musical metaphor since this is all really about energy states and fields. Neutrinos even travel at c so they clearly have no mass.

That’s the first step. And may I say that I blame (without any justification) Murray Gell-Mann for all this jargon.

Next, the two nucleons (the technical term for protons and neutrons as a class of particles), now form a deuteron, held together by the strong nuclear force (in what can also be thought of as a deuterium nucleus (2H), except that there are no electrons to round out the atom) and collide with another free proton. This time the proton is trapped by the strong force creating a helium nucleus wanna-be with an atomic weight of 3 (3HE), and at the same time a gamma ray is released. (“Gamma ray” seems to be a catch-all term for high energy emissions.)

Now for the final step, two of these 3HE things crash together. Two of the protons fly off, but the remaining two protons and two neutrons stick together in the form of a beta particle or 4HE nucleus. 

From beginning to end, six -- not four -- protons entered the process, two continued on as free protons while two turned into neutrons and ended up stuck together by the strong force to the remaining two protons. Also, two positrons, two neutrinos, and two gamma rays were released. 

And, while he never mentions it, this fusion process in a star is known as Nucleosynthesis.

Sorry about this long digression. I will now resume the story about how the sun actually works,  


...To produce the energy generated in the sun, hundreds of millions of tons of hydrogen had to be converted to helium each second, but the sun is composed predominantly of hydrogen, and so vast is its mass that only a small fraction of it has been consumed in the earth’s lifetime. If the rate of fusion were to decline, then the sun would contract and heat up, restoring the rate of fusion; if the rate of fusion were to become too great, the sun would expand and cool down, slowing it. Thus, as [George] Gamow put it, the sun represented “the most ingenious, and perhaps only possible, type of ‘nuclear machine,’ “ a self-regulating furnace in which the explosive force of nuclear fusion was perfectly balanced by the force of gravitation. The fusion of hydrogen to helium not only provided a vast amount of energy, but also a new element in the world. And helium atoms, given enough heat, could be fused to make heavier elements, [carbon] and these elements, in turn, to make heavier elements still.

And I can’t help mentioning that the sun is the perfect place to put a fusion reactor. Trying to make one on earth is just silly. 


p306 Thus, by a thrilling convergence, two ancient problems were solved at the same time: the shining of stars, and the creation of the elements... Hydrogen, element 1, was not only the fuel of the universe, it was the ultimate building block of the universe, the primordial atom, as Prout had thought back in 1815. This seemed very elegant, very satisfying, that all one needed to start with was the first, the simplest of atoms. (Footnote: The universe started, Gamow conceived, as almost infinitely dense -- perhaps no larger than a fist. Gamow and his student Ralph Alpher went on to suggest (in a famous 1948 article that came to be known, after Hans Bethe was invited to add his name, as the alpha-beta-gamma paper), that this primal fist sized universe exploded, inaugurating space and time, and that in this explosion (which Hoyle, derisively, was to call the Big Bang) all of the elements were created.

But here he was wrong; it was only the lightest elements -- hydrogen and helium and perhaps a little lithium... 

I’m going to stop there because even that is not strictly speaking true. The result of the Big Bang was a plasma that took quite some time to cool down enough for even atomic hydrogen to form.

I would also like to point out that this is a reminder of -- if not exactly support for -- my argument against the existence of God as Creator. Things almost always start small and simple and grow in complexity. That everything would start with God is like suggesting that some super-transuranic element was the origin of chemistry. 


p307 Bohr’s atom seemed to me ineffable, transcendently beautiful -- electrons spinning, trillions of times a second, spinning forever in predestined orbits, a true perpetual-motion machine made possible by the irreducibility of the quantum, and the fact that the spinning electron expended no energy, did no work. And more complex atoms were more beautiful still, for they had dozens of electrons weaving separate paths, but organized, like tiny onions, in shells and subshells... [I’m not sure where he’s going with this, but I would rather imagine the electron shells as musical notes with more complex atoms generating chords. This reaches back to his original musical interpretation of the periodic table and forward to String theory.] Bohr’s atoms were surely close to Leibniz’s optimum world.

“God thinks in numbers,” Auntie Len used to say. “Numbers are the way the world is put together.” This thought had never left me, and now it seemed to embrace the whole physical world. I had started to read a little philosophy at this point, [uh-oh] and Leibniz, so far as I could understand him, appealed to me especially. He spoke of a “Divine mathematics,” with which one could create the richest possible reality by the most economical means, and this, it now seemed to me, was everywhere apparent: in the beautiful economy by which millions of compounds could be made from a few dozen elements, and the hundred-odd elements from hydrogen itself; the economy by which the whole range of atoms was composed from two or three particles; [prior to QCD] and in the way that their stability and identity was guaranteed by the quantal numbers of the atom itself -- all this was beautiful enough to be the work of God.

Chapter 25 - The End of the Affair

Like thousands of boys before him -- well, maybe a couple -- young Oliver finds he is growing out of his passion for chemistry and drifting towards other, and more social, interests. Here’s one of his reasons for this,  

...
p311 With the “new” quantum mechanics, developed in the mid-1920s, one could no longer see electrons as little particles in orbit, [sorry for jumping ahead last chapter] one had to see them now as waves; one could no longer speak of an electron’s position, only of its “wave function,” the probability of finding it in a particular place. [Nice alive and dead kitty.] One could not measure its position and velocity simultaneously. An electron, it seemed, could be (in some sense) everywhere and nowhere at once. All this set my mind reeling. I had looked to chemistry, to science, to provide order and certainty, and now suddenly this was gone. [This is an amazing recapitulation of Zen Physics!]  I found myself in a state of shock, and I was past my uncles now, and in deep water, alone. 

I can’t get over how perfect this is. What he doesn’t mention -- that was Darling’s focus -- is how quantum mechanics brought consciousness, the subjective, into the previously objective reality of science (the Socratic/Alexandrian perspective on reality). 

But Sacks wanted science to give him the truth about the world, certainty independent of what people wanted to believe. Instead it dumped him back in a place where cats were both alive and dead (and neither alive nor dead) until you peeked. What’s left then but philosophy and psychology? 


p312 This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis. . . . We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I like the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless mathematical world? 


As with Richard Dawkins, he saved the good stuff for the end. I see the sense of this, of course, it's the only way you can appreciate the position the scientists were in as chemistry progressed step by step. But, like those people, you can't really understand the underlying reality of the chemistry until who get those last degrees of electronic and quantal understanding. Fortunately, I have to re-read it for blogging so I get the best of both worlds. 


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137. Zen Physics - XIII. The end... maybe

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Zen Physics

Chapter 14 - I, Universe
p171 One simple change in our worldview would have the most profound and dramatic effect on our lives. And it is this: to see, as Eastern philosophies have long seen, that the brain does not give rise to consciousness.
...
[Thoughts on the brain and consciousness.]

p172 Consciousness, in survival terms, is an irrelevancy. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a world inhabited by all sorts of life-forms... in which there never stirred a single conscious feeling or experience... It might appear to be full of diversity, sophisticated behavior, intelligence, and even wit and charm, and yet involve no subjective experience, no inner feeling of being, whatsoever. 

I can't see this, but I’ll have to take his word for it at the moment. 


Many attempts have been made by evolutionary biologists to explain why consciousness should have come about and what possible advantage it might have bestowed on its owners... Consciousness, it is sometimes said, helps us to see the world from each other’s point of view. But the circularity of this argument is readily apparent... [Only makes sense if] conscious feelings and experiences are already a fact of the world, but this offers no explanation of why consciousness should have come about in the first place. Exasperated by their failure to discern an obvious purpose for consciousness, some researchers have dismissed it as peripheral and almost accidental -- an inconsequential spin-off of the brain’s other activities.

The same problem that evolutionary biologists invent for themselves in trying to find a credible survival function of consciousness, neurologists face in their attempt to explain how consciousness stems from the workings of the brain. Consciousness-explainers are currently going to all sorts of lengths to weave a viable theory -- studying the development of neurons, tracing the precise pathways and stages of visual processing, drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence research, and, in the case of Roger Penrose and his followers, proposing that quantum effects inside the microtubes of cells will somehow do the trick...

p173 ... Life and nonlife... once considered fundamentally irreconcilable, were eventually seen to have a common basis thanks to the advent of molecular biology. In physics, magnetism and electricity were united by Maxwell’s field equations; mass and energy, and space and time, were linked through Einstein’s monumental work. But the divide between neural events and consciousness, brain and mind, is of a different order entirely. As Konrad Lorenz described in Behind the Mirror:

The “Hiatus” between soul and body . . . is indeed unbridgeable. . . . I do not believe that this is a limitation imposed just by the present state of our knowledge, or that even a utopian advance of this knowledge would bring us closer to a solution. . . . It is not a matter of a horizontal split between subjective experience and physiological events, nor a matter of dividing the higher from the lower, the more complex from the more elementary, but a kind of vertical dividing line through our whole nature.

There is an interesting parallel -- and it may be more than a parallel -- between the attempts of neurologists to explain how consciousness is produced by the brain and the efforts of cosmologists to show how the material universe was created or why it should even exist at all. At first sight, these programs seem poles apart. But in both cases, there is a persistent failure on the part of the investigators to recognize one simple truth beyond the complexity and ingenuity of their theories. And this simple truth is that what they are trying to do is not just difficult but fundamentally, categorically impossible. Even if physicists eventually discover... the... Theory of Everything -- it will not be possible to deduce from this why there should be an actual, material universe instead of the potential, abstract universe described by mathematical equations. Why should there be actuality instead of mere potentiality? Why should the equations have come to life? Why should there be both a script and a play? ….”
...
[More about the brain and consciousness.]

p174 ... the moment we stand back, shake off our conditioning, and look at the issue anew, we can begin to appreciate that the scientific tenet that matter -- the entire objective world -- is primary is an arbitrary and totally unsubstantiated claim. [I used bold there just to make the sentence easier to read.] There is no prima facie reason at all to go along with the assertion that mind is an emergent property of matter -- that, at some point, mind came into being when matter, in the form of brains, acquired some critical level of complexity. On the contrary, it is the material world which is very evidently conditional, for it is just one among many objects of our experience, and an object, moreover, that is not strictly given but known only through interpretation.
...
p175 ...quantum physics insists, consciousness has to be seen in a radically new light -- not as some quirky, local by-product of matter but as the very groundswell of creation. Only our stubborn, outmoded attachment to Newtonian reductionism [I think THIS is the sense of reductionsim he means... wait! No THIS is probably it] and Cartesian dualism -- an attachment that, not surprisingly, remains strongest among many scientists... is blocking the acceptance of this fundamental truth.

Consciousness is not new, isolated, and relatively unimportant; it is ubiquitous and essential. It is a permanent, inherent property of the universe, a fact that becomes most immediately obvious to us when we escape temporarily from our normal, egocentric state of mind during mystical or transcendental interludes. At such times, “we” vanish altogether and in our place is simply consciousness. As soon as the analytical activity of the brain is suppressed or circumvented, pure consciousness -- the background consciousness of the universe -- floods in. [A personal aside here, this is what so unsettled me during my sole experience with LSD. Hanging on desperately to my “self” became my focus, which made it impossible for me to sleep and lead to a very long (and colorful but) not very enjoyable night. This is also why I fear I could become one of those people who cling to life past the point when it makes any sense. I hope I’m wrong.] And of all the occasions when this happens none is more profound or revealing than at the point of death when, with the brain almost totally disabled, a condition of the most indescribably profound and expansive awareness takes hold. 

I’m surprised he doesn’t bring in the seemingly volitional aspect to dying (in some cases) -- people who seem to wait for a milestone or for people to leave the room before “crossing over.” This would seem to argue for the primacy of consciousness over sheer matter. 


p176 Without the brain, it is true, there cannot be selves. And our preoccupation with the self is perhaps the main reason for our long-standing confusion. In the West, we have tended to equate having thoughts and memories and, above all, selves, with being conscious. But this is a serious mistake. As long as the self is in residence we can never truly be conscious, for while ‘we’ exist we are trapped in a kind of fantasy -- Einstein's "optical delusion’"-- in which memories and conditioning cause us to put a private and false interpretation on the world. Only when thought and self come to an end, when symbolizing, analyzing, boundary-defining, and ego-building cease, can genuine, unfettered consciousness begin.

Foucault's "unthought" once again. 

... the world is already integrated. It is already as perfect, whole, and well conceived, throughout all of space and time, as it will ever be. What the brain really does is to sample extremely narrow aspects of reality through the senses and then subject these to further drastic and highly selective reinterpretation.

To grasp the truth about the universe we need to adopt a new, broader perspective. We have to see that reality is an unbroken unity, and that within this unity are aspects of the whole that think of themselves as being separate....
...
p177 ...as Freud put it:

Our present I-feeling is . . . only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the I and the world about it.
...
...The only reality that exists... is right in front of us; nothing is hidden, nothing is beyond our ken. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.” 

I would have liked some context for Emerson as this could be read in at least two ways. But following the Wiki link above, it does look like he meant it as Darling would have us believe.


... The core message of the world’s great religio-philosophical systems, Eastern and Western, is to forget about yourself, lose yourself, and so, in the process, make contact with the much more important truth of the timeless awareness of the universe.

...Even a hardened pragmatist like J.B.S. Haldane felt moved to write that [I would have put a colon here and an ellipsis at the beginning of the next line] 

if death will probably be the end of me as a finite individual mind, that does not mean that it will be the end of me altogether. It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere byproduct of matter....

p179 But as regards my own very finite and imperfect mind, I can see, by studying the effects on it of drugs, alcohol, disease, and so on, that its limitations are largely at least due to my body.

Without that body it may perish altogether, but it seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind or something analogous to a mind which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature. How this might be accomplished I have no idea....

This is also, I believe, the Dionysian state Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) would have us understand the dithyrambic chorus achieved in it’s worship of/contact with the godhead. 


It may seem as if I have reached two very different and incompatible conclusions in this book. Earlier, I reasoned that after death the feeling of being a self continues. I argued that this can be thought of as a form of reincarnation: the death of one brain followed by the birth of another being functionally and experientially equivalent to a person in life forgetting who they are and subsequently remembering they are someone else. How can this conclusion be squared with the idea that at death we effectively rejoin the unbroken sea of consciousness that lies outside us? Surely, when we die, there can be only one outcome.

p180 But, in fact, there is no incompatibility. We simply need to appreciate that we are dealing with two complementary aspects of the universe. And I use the word "complementary’"here advisedly to highlight a comparison with the wave-particle complementarity of modern physics and the subject-object complementarity of Eastern philosophy. The cosmos exists en bloc and yet within it individual selves have evolved. The one does not preclude the other; in fact, the two appear to be in some kind of extraordinary, intimate symbiosis, the significance of which will doubtless become clearer as our species further matures.

This is the point I had in mind back when I said he was not being entirely honest about “really” believing what he was arguing. Still not sure if I’m satisfied about that.  


New selves emerge as new brains emerge, because what a brain does is to act as a funnel, a filter, a limiter of consciousness, and therefore a shaper of self -- a separator of subject and object. The brain effectively pinches off a little bubble of introverted awareness and stores and manipulates information relevant exclusively to the survival needs of the individual so created... And... the projected self not only feels itself to be tangible, but it fails to appreciate, or even suspect, that it is never the same from one moment to the next.

OK, I’m mostly on-board with this as it matches well with the Devi’s Dream way of looking at reality. I don’t see the importance of the “never the same from one moment to the next” part, but that seems to be important to the author. Because this is built on the foundation (not in Haidt’s sense) of what we learned about the brain/mind relationship earlier in the book, he is unable to include a “pure” form of reincarnation (like the Tibetan version). Memories and characteristics can’t migrate from brain to brain, consciousness to consciousness. In the pure Devi’s Dream interpretation, this is not a problem. What he said above about pinching off little bubbles of awareness still works, but there’s no reason that “little bubbles” of Devi’s consciousness can’t include memories of previous “little bubbles.” And, of course, it’s nonsense to speak of “previous” at all. 

...
p181 ...we appear to be far from the masters of our situation. Our brains are in thrall to the automatically encoded programs in our genes, and “we” are shaped not by our own efforts but by the influence of our brains and our environments. It is a sobering realization that, in an important sense, we don’t really own or exert will over our bodies and minds; we are simply part of an endlessly unfolding process... if we can embrace a... wider panorama [of the self], we can begin to see that the differences between us are so slight and the similarities so great that all of us alive today are really just minor variations on the same person. The fragmentation or plurality of consciousness is only an appearance, like the hundreds of little pictures that a multifaceted crystal reflects without multiplying the object in reality...

I'm still hoping the film Lucy will turn out to be an eventual cult hit, like Blade Runner, so I'm going to talk about it even though few people seem to have seen it. Your loss. The conceit of Lucy is that the protagonist has taken a drug that allows her to use more and more of her brain, up to 100% at the end. The consequences, in the movie, are that she is able to defy the physical laws of the universe, among other things. Luc Besson is like Michael Bay's intellectual twin... neither makes much sense, but at least Besson is interesting.

If, instead of the drug and the brain, you think of Lucy as transcending her self and merging more and more with universal consciousness (god), then the movie makes much more sense. The physical "laws" of the universe would be irrelevant to a consciousness that was dreaming that space-time reality. I may have to watch it again to see if Besson dropped any hints that that was what he was really talking about. 

...
We have a future, then, beyond death, as new individuals -- as participants in “I-mode” continuity, or what amounts to secular reincarnation. However, standing behind this is the unfragmented consciousness of the universe. And, in some ways, this is the ideal and only genuine state in which to exist. It is that to which we ultimately aspire -- the timeless, all-knowing condition in which subject and object, life and death, you and I, God and man, are one.

I’m not sure I agree with his belief in the continued existence of an “individual.” He seems to be contradicting himself in his eagerness to please everyone. Unless you want to view the new “all” as an individual, which seems disingenuous. There will be other selves, other individuals, but they are only related to us as we are all related to each other, as pinched off bits of mind (or god.) 

Also, as is so often the case, he doesn’t give any thought to the dream state as a more profound form of consciousness, a case of our being unrestricted by our brains even while we maintain a (sometimes tenuous) hold on our identities. Why people don’t pay more attention to their dreams in this sense is a mystery to me. 

...
p182 Death of the self is seen as the gateway to what Buddhism calls nirvana and Christianity refers to as heaven. Buddhism urges us to escape the Wheel of Life, the cycle of death and rebirth, by achieving enlightenment through meditation -- by becoming a new Buddha. Zen goes a step further and tells us, effectively, not to even bother trying to escape; we should simply stop thinking about it, because there has never been a time when we haven’t been free. [This sound very much like what I like about Tantra Hinduism, as covered HERE.] In Christianity, the same message is couched in different terms. All we need do, it says, is become like little children (whose selves are not yet well defined) in order to enter God’s kingdom.
...
The plain fact is we are already one with the universe; we have never really been apart from it. And only the presence of self prevents us from seeing this... As Bertrand Russell wrote:

p183 The best way to overcome {the fear of death} -- so it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly confined within banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks receded, the water flows more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thoughts of rest will not be unwelcome.

I'm thinking right now that I should go back and cite the age at which everyone quoted in this blog wrote or made their statements. I'm guessing Russell was not young when he wrote this.  

Death is not the end. In the truest sense, it is the essential prelude to change and new life. Death is the point where the individual and the cosmos meet, where differences are reconciled, and where physics and Zen, so long held apart in uneasy tension, merge effortlessly in a realm beyond words and thought.

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air . . .
. . . We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-Shakespeare, The Tempest


To die will be an awfully big adventure.

-James Barrie, Peter Pan
  

I was tempted to hold off publishing this, the ending of Zen Physics, until I also wrapped up The Righteous Mind. But it would have been strange to have such a long pause in the blogging of this book. Aside from the few reservations I've noted along the way, I don't have much of a problem with Darling's position here. I think it's very plausible that death will be like putting down a particularly engrossing novel, or coming to the end of a very good film. And if it isn't, no one will be the wiser.

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134. Zen Physics - XII. Transcendence

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Zen Physics

Chapter 13 - Transcendence

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

-William James

p163 Throughout history, and in many different situations, people of all backgrounds and beliefs have enjoyed spontaneous mystical experiences. suddenly the individual feels, beyond any shadow of doubt, that she is fundamentally one with the universe. Her sense of identity expands to embrace the cosmos as a whole.
...

[Account of one woman’s experience. Which starts with a long flight home to the UK after a holiday in the U.S.]
p164 ...At this time, I had been awake for over thirty hours. About half way through the book [M. Scott Peck’s Further Along the Road Less Traveled] Mr. Peck relates an anecdote... [he is unable to explain his latest book in a sentence] but then he went on to relate how Jesus encapsulated the Christian message: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy might and love thy neighbor as thyself.” Although these words were familiar; the depth of their meaning hit me then for the first time.

It was as though something clicked in my brain . . . I felt unbounded love for everyone and every living thing -- just an immensity of love, so that it was almost unbearable -- I totally abandoned myself to that feeling. What happened next is difficult to describe because words become inadequate. . . .

I felt overwhelmed by something, some pure clear clean cool essence . . . pouring into me . . then somewhere around this point the experience occurred. All I can do is list impressions, thoughts and feelings... The real thing is way beyond description or even logical recall. . . .

p165 Joy, ecstasy, love, I was immersed in it and saturated with it. Understanding of what was going on came intuitively . . . we are all in but not aware of this dimension all the time. We are all one light but separate also...

Material things and our desire for them seemed idiotic and unimportant. . . . All human defenses and facades we create to hide from each other are nonsense because we are all one. All the things we do to sustain our self-image are redundant here.

Death is release. Our body is anchoring us in space and time. . . . Life as we know it is only the tiniest bit of what comes after. . . .

I consciously decided to leave that mode (I thought I could get back again). . . . Afterwards, I cried a little, a combination of joy and shock, I think...

The pivotal moment in Tina’s adventure was when “something clicked in my brain,” because this was clearly the point of switchover from the normal dualistic mode of thinking to the selfless experience of transcendence. To a Zen practitioner it would be satori, the flash of lightning. A Muslim might have recognized in as “the Supreme Identity.” And there are other names: nirvana, Tao, enlightenment, zoning, bliss. So widespread is this fundamental mystical feeling that it has, along with the doctrines that purport to explain it, been called “The Perennial Philosophy.” For some, it comes only after years of asceticism, study, and devotion to some particular religious or meditation system. But for ordinary folk, like Tina, it arrives out of the blue, unbidden and unsought. In fact, the very act of seeking may block or hinder the experience of enlightenment. As Tina mentions later in her letter, “I haven’t yet been able to get into that mode again.” The problem is that she is now trying to rekindle the feeling through an effort of intellect and self-will, whereas the original experience arose spontaneously as a result of a freak series of events... which caught her reasoning off guard.

p166 ... The whole point about transcendence is that it is the experience of reality, pure and simple, without any of the symbolic interpretation normally placed on it by the rationalizing human mind. It is not something amenable to linguistic or logical analysis... It is also why so much superfluous dogma had become attached to what is basically a very straightforward message: stop thinking and start experiencing.
...
Every principle religion and moral code from around the world has this notion at its core: that we should aspire to be selfless. The admonition to “do as you would be done by” or “love thy neighbor as thyself” or “be as little children” is universal. To achieve the best, most natural, most worthwhile, state of existence we are urged to lose ourselves and merge with the whole...

p168 The true and sole aim of all deep religion and of all deep science is the same -- to point past the personal, survival-oriented self to the boundless reality that has always been there. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Buddha said, “Look within, thou are the Buddha.” And what they meant was the same.

When the brain is relaxed enough to take time out from projecting the self, we become, in those brief mystical interludes, aware suddenly of a greater world stretching away on all sides beyond our small, personal, finite lives. The writer Aldous Huxley frequently expressed his view that the function of the human nervous system is to filter and limit the amount and intensity of the experience that our minds have to deal with. To him the brain was actually an impediment, a “reducing valve,” that restricted what we would otherwise be able to see....”

Psychedelic drugs, most notably LSD, have been regarded by some as shortcuts to higher states of consciousness, as have the extreme states of exhaustion induced, for instance, by repetitive, anaerobic forms of dance. Nor is this a recent trend... people have been seeking artificially induced transcendent experiences for thousands of years. [Greek tragic chorus. Desert fathers & Sara Maitland. Sufi dancers? Raves, possibly Lizaveta in The Brothers K., “I love you man” followed by hurling. There is also a related desire for oblivion, as seen in drunks I see passed out on the sidewalk everyday. But then, again again, what is oblivion or “unconsciousness?” If they are seeking a particularly deep state of dream, then I can relate. Some of my best “moments” have taken “place” in dreams. And then there’s la petite mort. (Which brings up the topic of tantric sex and the symbolism of Kali and Shiva.)] For others, music, poetry, prayer, quiet contemplation, or a walk in the woods or the hills can trigger the same effect. In a remarkable variety of ways, it seems that we all at times try to break free from our normal mode of self-centered awareness.

One of the most interestingly consistent times at which a very profound transcendent experience is reported to occur is when people come near to death. Studies and surveys reveal that the so-called near death experience (NDE) is surprisingly common and, in its essential elements, is remarkably consistent...

p169 Among the most common elements of NDEs are the sensation of leaving and floating away from the body, traveling down a tunnel toward an intensely bright light, an all-pervasive feeling of rapture and love, and seeing one’s life recapitulated in vivid detail. Most significantly, NDEers often relate having had a most extraordinary feeling of unity, an acute awareness of everything being there all at once, with a concomitant loss of self-boundaries. Subjects sometimes recall having felt as if they were really alive for the first time. And this, remember, during a period when, objectively, their bodies and brains were totally inert. Indeed, in some cases, profound transcendent experiences apparently took place after the person had been pronounced clinically dead.

It is possible to explain some aspects of the NDE... in terms of hallucinatory-type events taking place in the distressed brain.... But conventional neurological wisdom is at a loss to account for the astonishing broadening and deepening of consciousness reported by people who have, albeit temporarily, crossed over the threshold from life to death... They entered briefly into that uncharted region where all of us are destined eventually to go -- but then, thanks in the main to modern resuscitation procedures, came back to tell their tale. Except that there should not have been any tale to tell. How can a brain in which virtually all neurological activity has ground to a halt be capable of giving rise to an awareness of unprecedented depth and acuity?

I like this account of NDEs but I have to point out a problem with it. And this goes back to that "apparently" I put in bold above. The NDE is not reported by the brain while it is clinically dead but after it is revived. Subjectively, the NDE took place during that span of linear time when the brain was dead but, given the minds ability to fill in gaps and to play outside time in dreams, how confident can we be that this was actually the case? I've already said that I'm not sure we are ever not conscious, even when asleep or when knocked out. But let's say I'm wrong. Let's say that in the case of a NDE a person is completely unconscious for a span of time -- say three minutes -- before being revived. Once revived, the subject would then have no awareness of those three minutes but his mind, in a semi-dream state, would construct, in a flash, a story to fill in that gap. It would be this, post hoc (to borrow Haidt's term) dream that he would relate to anyone who would listen. Because I often fall back to sleep to radio news, I know how quickly the dreaming mind can back-fill a story to explain random noises or even dimly heard statements. 

The more reasonable explanation is that the unity feeling which is the central mystery of the NDE is not a product of brain activity at all. It results instead from the removal of the brain’s restricting influence. For the first time in a person’s life, at the moment of death the selecting and limiting effect of the brain is eliminated, the psychological walls of the self are broken down, and the individual is set free to meld again with the whole unbroken field of reality.

p170 ...The simple materialistic notion that consciousness can continue only as long as there is a brain to support it is becoming increasingly untenable. Quantum mechanics and our modern conception of space-time has made nonsense of the Newtonian mechanistic cosmos in which man was effectively divorced from the processes going on around him. We now know... that we are deeply, intrinsically bound up with reality as a whole. Subject and object are one. The only reason we see it differently is that the self puts up artificial barriers, and creates the feeling of difference and distance between itself and the rest of nature.

 ...At any moment, for one reason or another, a person can suddenly come into direct, unmediated contact with the cosmos -- can, to all intents, become the cosmos.

I think this is as close as he ever gets to the Devi's Dream cosmogony. 

Since publishing this, I ran into something interesting about the use of drugs in therapy. Here's a quote, 

"As a party drug, MDMA is well-known for making people confess their love to their friends while gently demanding a head rub. Which led Danforth to hypothesize that MDMA might help autistic people deal with their social anxiety... Now she’s piloting a new line of treatment known as MDMA-assisted therapy by examining how MDMA compares to a placebo when given to autistic adults with social anxiety in two therapeutic sessions.

"Danforth’s study is benefitting from the current renaissance in research exploring new, medical uses for drugs beloved for their recreational high: ketamine for the severely depressed; psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and LSD for the terminally ill; and marijuana for children with extreme forms of epilepsy. To that end, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the organization funding Danforth’s work, wants to turn MDMA into an FDA-approved prescription medicine within the next six years."

And here's the source. I think giving people facing death drugs that can promote transcendence is an interesting idea.

Jump to Next: The Righteous Mind - VIII. "organized in advance of experience"

132. Zen Physics - XI. Now and Zen

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Righteous Mind - VI. Ethics of autonomy, community, & divinity

Zen Physics

Chapter 12 - Now and Zen
p151 Zen is... difficult to talk about. So alien, indeed, is Zen to the analytical Western mind that it is perhaps easier to say what it is not. Zen is not a faith because it doesn’t urge the acceptance of any form of dogma, creed, or object of worship. Nor is it antireligious or atheistic; it simply makes no comment on the matter. Zen is not a philosophy or even, to the Western mind, a form of mysticism. As we normally understand it, mysticism starts with a separation of subject and object and has as its goal the unification or reconciliation of this antithesis. But Zen does not teach absorption, identification, or union of any kind because all these ideas are derived ultimately from a dualistic conception of life. If a label is needed that best approximates to the spirit of Zen then ‘dynamic intuition’ is perhaps as close as we can come.”

p152 ... Living in a world of words and concepts and inherited beliefs, says Zen, we have lost the power to grasp reality directly. Our minds are permeated with notions of cause and effect, subject and object, being and nonbeing, life and death. Inevitably this leads to conflict and a feeling of personal detachment and alienation from the world. Zen’s whole emphasis is on the experience of reality as it is, rather than the solution of problems that, in the end, arise merely from our mistaken beliefs.

Because it eschews the use of the intellect. Zen can appear nihilistic (which it is not) and elusive (which it is). Certainly, it would be hard to conceive of a system that stood in greater contrast with the logical, symbol-based formulations of contemporary science. More than any other product of the Oriental mind, Zen is convinced that no language or symbolic mapping of the world can come close to expressing the ultimate truth...

...before trying to appreciate its final flowering, it is worthwhile digging down to examine Zen’s roots -- roots which are set firmly in Indian soil, in the fertile ground of Mahayana Buddhism.

The Indian mind was, and is, different in character from the Chinese and Japanese. It is expansive, more austerely intellectual, less concerned with practical, everyday affairs, and more inclined to complex exposition and exploration of ideas... the monk-philosopher Nagarjuna... [was] the founder, during the second century A.D., of the Madhayana (“Middle Path”) school [of Mahayana Buddhism]. Nagarjuna wrote two key treatises, Madhyamika Sastra and The Discourse of Twelve Sections, in which he probed the nature of reality... he argued strongly that the basic quality of existence is relational. There is no soul, no thing, no concept independent of its context; all things are devoid of absolute reality and exist only relative to conditions. In Nagarjuna’s view, the universe is a true unity of interpenetrating processes: a continuous, interpenetrating flux.

p153 ...The data for... [the resulting] theoretical studies came from what might be called “subjective empiricism” or, alternatively, “participatory observation” -- that is, a methodical, progressive, introspective inquiry into the domain of direct, nonsensory experience.

Parallels may be discerned, then, between the goals, the rigorous application of technique, and the lively skepticism of Buddhist “researchers” on the one hand and, on the other, modern scientists... But we Westerners are not so inclined to give credence to the results of subjective inquiry -- in fact, we instinctively react to them with downright suspicion. In the West, the emphasis is almost exclusively on objective methods, on the primacy of what is taken to be an independently existing outer world, and on the dualistic logic of Aristotle as later formulated by Descartes and Galileo...
...
p154 Among the notable features of Buddhist cosmology is the doctrine of Dharmadhatu -- the Universal Realm or Field of Reality. In this scheme there are no dividing boundaries between things, no separation between subject and object; every entity is seen to interpenetrate every other -- a view strikingly in keeping with the ideas of interconnectedness that have emerged from modern quantum mechanics....

p155 Buddhist belief is also remarkably in sympathy with our modern, macroscopic conceptions of space and time. Eastern philosophy, unlike that of the Greeks, has always maintained that space and time are constructs of the mind. A passage in the Madhyamika Sastra, for example, reads:

{T}he past, the future, physical space, . . . and individuals are nothing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities.

The French physicist Louis de Broglie, outlining the new view of the universe as revealed by relativity theory, holds out a similar concept:

In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time, which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble constituting space-time exists prior to his knowledge of it.

Both these commentaries point out the essential unreality of the present moment and the passage of time. There is no ‘now,’ no real barrier between the past and the future, and no flow of time outside the observer’s ego-centered awareness. These are concepts relevant only within the context of our personal, I-focused existence. Upon this, both Buddhism and the General Theory of Relativity agree, and both espouse a much grander, four-dimensional scheme of the universe in which all of space and time, in a sense, already exists -- past, present, and future laid out in complete topographical detail for anyone who can command the vantage point from which to see. [I originally was going to end this here and skip to the next section on Buddhism in China; but I notice, the second time through, that this next bit relates to our ongoing examination of individuation and man’s separation from nature -- or semi-divinity, however you choose to look at it.] Einstein himself well understood our personal limitations in coming to grips with the true nature of reality. Indeed, he might have been acting as a spokesman either for mysticism or for physics when he said:

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

I wonder if there isn't also a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut's being unstuck in time (from Slaughterhouse-Five), in addition to Zossima's Christian mysticism here. 

Einstein grasped what other visionary minds have done before: that a principle aspiration of mankind should be to see beyond ourselves, beyond the parochial self-oriented here and now, to a wider, cosmic panorama. But how to do this? The very reason human thought has progressed as far as it has is by virtue of having access to a sophisticated language. And all of human language, Oriental and Occidental alike, hinges on the use of words, names, labels, and symbols -- the purposeful fragmentation of the whole and the substitution of tokens for the pieces into which we have broken reality. [So now he have, not only the “gifts” of Prometheus and the Serpent to think about but also that semiotic bit at the beginning of Goethe’s Faust where he uses words and then symbols to transcend his ennui or anomie.] Removal of the wall between ourselves and the cosmos at large, dissolution of the subject-object barrier, can only come with the cessation of thought based on language. [Hello, Foucault’s “unthought”] Yet, try as we might, we cannot stop thinking. The very act of attempting to shut out thought involves thought, so that this approach is defeated from the start. If we apply our intellect to block our intellect we only make matters worse -- we simply end up distancing ourselves further from an innocent awareness of how things actually are.

p157 All human beings the world over face this same dilemma. Evolution has made us into inherently self-centered individuals bent on survival. But our conscious experience of selfhood, of our individuality -- which is ultimately the creation of language and rational thought -- can lead to suffering and anxiety and, in particular, a preoccupation with death... in the West, our difficulty is made more acute [than in the East] by the belief in the supremacy of the intellect. Our immediate reaction to any problem is always to try to think or reason our way to a solution: an approach that, being predicated on the notion that the self is separate from the world, can never in itself lead to the experience of selflessness... [I think this passage could have appeared in either of these two books.] ...although we have discerned... [that “all divisions and boundaries imposed by us on the universe are... illusory...”] at an intellectual level, we still feel ourselves to be apart from -- rather than a part of -- the universe as a whole.

...although Buddhism has a rich intellectual base and body of philosophical teachings, it uses these not as an end in itself but as a way of pointing to the greater truth that can only be attained by a suspension of logic and symbolism.

As that branch of Buddhism known as Mahayana (Sanskrit for “Great Vehicle”) spread out of its original homeland into neighboring China, two main developments took place. On the one hand, the translation of the Buddhist sutras, or expository texts, stimulated Chinese thinkers to interpret the Indian teachings in the light of their own philosophies. On the other hand, the more pragmatic Chinese mentality fused abstruse spiritual disciplines -- the meditation techniques -- of Indian Buddhism with Taoism to give birth to the system known as Ch’an. [Footnote: Ch’an is the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit word “dhyana,” which signifies the mystical experience in which subjectivity and objectivity merge. Zen is the transliteration into Japanese of Ch’an.] This, in turn, was acquired by the Japanese around 1200 A.D. and reached its final fruition in Zen.

p158 In a sense, what modern physics is to the history of Western thought, Zen is to the development of the Eastern worldview: the ultimate refinement of more than two thousand years of incisive debate, discussion, and critical development... Zen uses language... to point beyond language, beyond concepts to the concrete.
...
[I’m skipping the account of the two major schools of Zen in Japan.]

p159 ...The sole purpose of studying Zen is to have Zen experiences -- sudden moments, like flashes of lightning, when the intellect is short circuited and there is no longer a barrier between the experiencer and the reality [satori, like Paloma seeing the flower fall in her silent kitchen]...
...
Zen uses language to point beyond language, which is what poets and playwrights and musicians do. But, less obviously, it is also what modern science does if the intuitive leap is taken beyond its abstract formalism. The deep, latent message of quantum mechanics, for instance, codified in the language of mathematics, is that there is a reality beyond our senses which eludes verbal comprehension or logical analysis. And this is best exemplified in the central idea of ‘complementarity’ -- an idea introduced by Niels Bohr to account for the fact that two different conditions or observations could lead to conclusions that were conceptually incompatible. In one experiment, for example, light might behave as if it were made of particles, in another as if it were made of waves. Bohr proposed, however, there is no intrinsic incompatibility between these results because they are functions of different conditions of observation; no experiment could be devised that would demonstrate both aspects of a condition. The wave and particle natures of light and matter are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually inclusive -- necessary, complementary aspects of reality. Bohr gained his inspiration for this concept from Eastern philosophy, in particular from the Taoist concept of the dynamic interplay of opposites, yin and yang. And so, one of the central principles of modern physics is coincident with, and actually derived from, one of the most basic doctrines of the Eastern world-view.

p160 Intuition has ever been the handmaiden of science. And although science presents its theories and conclusions in a “respectable” symbolic form, its greatest advances have always come initially not from the application of reason but from intuitive leaps -- sudden flashes of inspiration very much akin to Zen experiences.


Zen and physics, then, seemingly so different, are not so different after all... the branch of physics that is closest to the bedrock of reality, quantum mechanics, now appears to be as profoundly paradoxical and enigmatic as Zen. Physics even poses riddles that, like koans, make a mockery of our logic: “Does a particle that is not watched exist?”... Physics and Zen, pragmatism and poetry, conceptualization and creativity, meet at such points -- and become one. 

But what does this mean for the ordinary man and woman? ... How can we, in our everyday lives, discover our true place in the universe? How can we see beyond the narrow confines of our individual existence to the timeless, deathless, frontierless place that, the sages of both the East and the West now tell us, is the one true reality?

Jump to Next: Righteous Mind - VII. Moral Foundations Theory