Thoughts on Buddhism

[Angrboda]

There's a reason why people "restrict themselves to logic and computation," because several centuries of productive science as a result of doing so has yielded more useful truths than several millennia of navel gazing.

That's certainly true, and it would require a fool to not recognize that truth.

However, at the very same time there are equally logical reasons for recognizing the limitations and domain of the sciences.

If you stand back and look at science you can clearly see what it does. Science looks at the observable universe and describes how it behaves in terms of quantitative or mathematical relationships.

Period. That's all that science does.

Science does not explain, or even attempt to explain, why there exists a universe that obeys quantitative relationships in the first place. That is just assumed to be the case because that's what we observe. It doesn't need to be proven or explained, all it needs to be is experienced and that is sufficient proof that it exists.

However, science has now come to a place where it has actually shown us that this method of observation and explanation must necessarily break down at the quantum level. This is precisely the predictions of the most scientific theory to date - Quantum Mechanics. The mathematics of Quantum Mechanics demand via the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that we can never go beneath the quantum level. We even have reasons to believe that space, time, and even mathematics as we understand it may very well all break down beneath the quantum level. Yet we have sound reasons for believing that there exists some sort of 'reality' beneath the substrate of what we see as a physical universe.

(emphasis added)

It now turns out that even this renunciation is not entirely satisfactory. Even if quantum mechanics is considered to be no more than a set of rules, it is still in conflict with a view of the world many people would consider obvious or natural. This world view is based on three assumptions, or premises that must be accepted without proof. One is realism, the doctrine that regularities in observed phenomena are caused by some physical reality whose existence is independent of human observers. The second premise holds that inductive inference is a valid mode of reasoning and can be applied freely, so that legitimate conclusions can be drawn from consistent observations. The third premise is called Einstein separability or Einstein locality, and it states that no influence of any kind can propagate faster than the speed of light. The three premises, which are often assumed to have the status of well-established truths, or even self-evident truths, form the basis of what I shall call local realistic theories of nature. An argument derived from these premises leads to an explicit prediction for the results of a certain class of experiments in the physics of elementary particles. The rules of quantum mechanics can also be employed to calculate the results of these experiments. Significantly, the two predictions differ, and so either the local realistic theories or quantum mechanics must be wrong.

The experiments in question were first proposed as "thought experiments," intended for the imagination only. In the past few years, however, several versions of them have been carried out with real apparatus. Although not all the findings are consistent with one another, most of them support the predictions of quantum mechanics, and it now seems that unless some extraordinary coincidence has distorted the results the quantum-mechanical predictions will be confirmed. It follows that the local realistic theories are almost certainly in error. The three premises on which those theories are founded are essential to a common-sense interpretation of the world, and most people would give them up only with reluctance; nevertheless, it appears that at least one of them will have to be abandoned or modified or in some way constrained.

D'Espagnat, Bernard, "The Quantum Theory and Reality," target="_blank" rel="nofollow">

It would appear, at least to my untrained mind, that your beliefs are in conflict with known facts.