Physics, Hindu Cosmology, God and New Age Inspiration

[Confused Ape]

I thought this would be better in the General Religion forum because it's not really about science or philosophy. Is this going to be the basis for a New Age religion? Does being on the cutting edge of science cause insanity? If so, physics is a very dangerous profession because some of the scientists mentioned in this post are/were physicists.

I'll start with Erwin Schrödinger because I think that most people will have heard of him.

He had a lifelong interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, which influenced his speculations at the close of What is Life? about the possibility that individual consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe.

Fritjof Capra had a vision of Shiva and this relates to CERN (the Eurpean Organisation For Nuclear Research) and Carl Sagan. PREFACE TO "THE TAO OF PHYSICS

As I sat on that beach my former experiences came to life; I "saw" cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I "saw" the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I "heard" its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshiped by the Hindus.

There is a statue of Shiva at CERN

Carl Sagan drew the metaphor between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the 'cosmic dance' of subatomic particles.

Here is an article on Rational Skepticism.com giving more information on Carl Sagans views. Carl Sagan on Hinduism - Validated. It's validated as a metaphor which isn't the same thing at all as saying that Shiva is a deity. Here is a tribute to Cark Sagan on Richard Dawkins' website. Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Carl Sagan, who introduced many to the love of science and scientific inquiry, would have been 78 today.

Meanwhile, there's this idea from a scientist in a different field. The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself. I looked Robert Lanza up.

Robert Paul Lanza (born 11 February 1956) is an American Doctor of Medicine, scientist, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT)[1] and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

His specialities are -

Stem cell biology, cloning, tissue engineering,

I also found this - Robert Lanza Interview By Deepak Chopra. Nobody's obliged to read everything that Deepak Chopra says in the following quote. The interesting thing is that Robert Lanza agrees with him.

DC: You know what you say is just totally music to my ears. You know in the tradition I grew up in: Vedanta they had these beautiful expressions. I’m not in the world, the world is in me. I’m not in the body, the body is in me. I’m not in the mind, the mind is in me. As I curve back within myself I experience my mind in my consciousness I experience my own body in my consciousness and I experience my whole world in my consciousness. So that consciousness exists outside of space-time because it actually conceives and constructs space-time as well and therefore being outside of space-time, transcendent it has no beginning and time, it has no edges in space and therefore it has no ending in time as well. You know the whole goal of Eastern wisdom traditions has been to experience this as our identity. That even when I think about the brain that in thinking about the brain is in consciousness. When I mathematically conceive of the laws of nature they are still in my consciousness. You know you’re coming from a very scientific perspective but essentially saying the same thing.

RL: Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it any better than you just expressed it. We’re arriving at exactly the same point in the book Biocentrism, basically I’m taking all of the existing science and basically I’m arriving unequivocally at the same end point that you’ve just described.

So back to physicists. I found that Deepak Chopra had also interviewed Michio Kaku

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.[6] In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.[7][8] Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Here is a quote from the interview. He doesn't appear to think that some of his colleagues have gone nuts. Michio Kaku interview by Deepak Chopra

DC: So not only Neils Bohr, but I believe Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler. They all say…
MK: Many Nobel laureates.
DC: Are they saying the physical universe would not exist unless there were conscious sentient beings looking at it?
MK: That’s what it leads to. Their theory says that I exist because you look at me, somebody looks at you so you exist, so who looks at her? Who looks at us? Well, God. So Eugene Wigner who helped to build the Atomic Bomb, one of the founders of the quantum theory, in his autobiography said this is the proof of the existence of some kind of omniscient being i.e. God.

So what do people think?

[GirlyMan]

So what do people think?

Yeah, I'm gonna necropost this just 'cause I'm here and shit. Lanza's intuition of an intertwined relationship between consciousness and reality, between the act of observation and the act of realization and creation, between the idea and the reality, between the conception and the creation,
between the emotion and the response, between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, sits right in Girly's gut. His formulation though is philosophically weak. Like why did you even go there philosophically weak, go back to your stem cells old man. The fuck you doing in the deep end and shit.

[MindForgedManacle]

Yeah, if that's thethread I remember I rebutted part of Lanza's nonsense (there was a lot of it...).


The main problem is this: Quantum mechanics is hard and we don't really understand what it "really" means. There are some physicists - thankfully a clear minority - who hold wacky views on it. Some of them think that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave-function. I'd say that generally - and Deepak Chopra is an excellent example of the following mindset - I think they're working backwards from a conclusion they want to be true: They want consciousness to be special in the world at a fundamental level, so they often close themselves off from criticism of this view, largely by projecting via the claim of a "physicalist dogma" against them.

[Alex K]

Consciousness collapsing the wave function, that is so 1950...

It pains me a bit that in the OP Schroedinger is mentioned in the same breath with Chopra, Capra, and Lanza. As for Kaku, that man is seriously starting to piss me off, and I'm quite annoyed that he is present in popular science in the US so much.

On the other hand, and more to the point of the OP, I have Heisenbergs "Physics and Philosophy" at home and started reading it, and I had to put it down because of all the waffling about consciousness and so on. I just think that while QM is hard to wrap your head around indeed, the early proponents were a bit more confused about it than necessary. Who can blame them...

[Confused Ape]

It pains me a bit that in the OP Schroedinger is mentioned in the same breath with Chopra, Capra, and Lanza.

I included Schroedinger because he's one of those early proponents you talked about. He's very popular with people who share that world view because he was, and still is, a renowned scientist.

So what does it all mean? In my opinion it means that scientists are as human as the rest of us and have different world views. Religious people can find religious scientists, atheists can find atheist scientists and mystics can find mystic scientists etc. etc. Understanding science doesn't automatically turn humans into atheists. They can go on to adapt scientific discoveries to fit their personal world views including religious ones.

[Ben Davis]

So what do people think?

That peddlers of woo will find any excuse to stick their metaphysical cocks in any gap in human knowledge.

Pseudophilosophy porn.

[Alex K]

So what do people think?

That peddlers of woo will find any excuse to stick their metaphysical cocks in any gap in human knowledge.

Pseudophilosophy porn.

If that were a genre of actual porn, I'd really like to see it.

[Confused Ape]

That peddlers of woo will find any excuse to stick their metaphysical cocks in any gap in human knowledge.

Pseudophilosophy porn.

And it''s amazing how many peddlers of woo are scientists or people with medical degrees.

Have to admit I have my doubts about this one -

Proof Of Heaven doctor faced a $3million malpractice lawsuit when he fell into a coma

Others, however, seem to genuinely believe in the world views they are promoting.

[Ben Davis]

And it''s amazing how many peddlers of woo are scientists or people with medical degrees.

Smart people are better equipped to exploit credulity & ignorance?

Others, however, seem to genuinely believe in the world views they are promoting.

Keyword: seem

[Mudhammam]

I thought this would be better in the General Religion forum because it's not really about science or philosophy. Is this going to be the basis for a New Age religion? Does being on the cutting edge of science cause insanity? If so, physics is a very dangerous profession because some of the scientists mentioned in this post are/were physicists.

I'll start with Erwin Schrödinger because I think that most people will have heard of him.

He had a lifelong interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, which influenced his speculations at the close of What is Life? about the possibility that individual consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe.

Fritjof Capra had a vision of Shiva and this relates to CERN (the Eurpean Organisation For Nuclear Research) and Carl Sagan. PREFACE TO "THE TAO OF PHYSICS

As I sat on that beach my former experiences came to life; I "saw" cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I "saw" the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I "heard" its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshiped by the Hindus.

There is a statue of Shiva at CERN

Carl Sagan drew the metaphor between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the 'cosmic dance' of subatomic particles.

Here is an article on Rational Skepticism.com giving more information on Carl Sagans views. Carl Sagan on Hinduism - Validated. It's validated as a metaphor which isn't the same thing at all as saying that Shiva is a deity. Here is a tribute to Cark Sagan on Richard Dawkins' website. Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Carl Sagan, who introduced many to the love of science and scientific inquiry, would have been 78 today.

Meanwhile, there's this idea from a scientist in a different field. The Biocentric Universe Theory: Life Creates Time, Space, and the Cosmos Itself. I looked Robert Lanza up.

Robert Paul Lanza (born 11 February 1956) is an American Doctor of Medicine, scientist, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT)[1] and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

His specialities are -

Stem cell biology, cloning, tissue engineering,

I also found this - Robert Lanza Interview By Deepak Chopra. Nobody's obliged to read everything that Deepak Chopra says in the following quote. The interesting thing is that Robert Lanza agrees with him.

DC: You know what you say is just totally music to my ears. You know in the tradition I grew up in: Vedanta they had these beautiful expressions. I’m not in the world, the world is in me. I’m not in the body, the body is in me. I’m not in the mind, the mind is in me. As I curve back within myself I experience my mind in my consciousness I experience my own body in my consciousness and I experience my whole world in my consciousness. So that consciousness exists outside of space-time because it actually conceives and constructs space-time as well and therefore being outside of space-time, transcendent it has no beginning and time, it has no edges in space and therefore it has no ending in time as well. You know the whole goal of Eastern wisdom traditions has been to experience this as our identity. That even when I think about the brain that in thinking about the brain is in consciousness. When I mathematically conceive of the laws of nature they are still in my consciousness. You know you’re coming from a very scientific perspective but essentially saying the same thing.

RL: Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it any better than you just expressed it. We’re arriving at exactly the same point in the book Biocentrism, basically I’m taking all of the existing science and basically I’m arriving unequivocally at the same end point that you’ve just described.

So back to physicists. I found that Deepak Chopra had also interviewed Michio Kaku

Kaku has had over 70 articles published in physics journals such as Physical Review, covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics.[6] In 1974, along with Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University, he authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.[7][8] Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory.

Here is a quote from the interview. He doesn't appear to think that some of his colleagues have gone nuts. Michio Kaku interview by Deepak Chopra

DC: So not only Neils Bohr, but I believe Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler. They all say…
MK: Many Nobel laureates.
DC: Are they saying the physical universe would not exist unless there were conscious sentient beings looking at it?
MK: That’s what it leads to. Their theory says that I exist because you look at me, somebody looks at you so you exist, so who looks at her? Who looks at us? Well, God. So Eugene Wigner who helped to build the Atomic Bomb, one of the founders of the quantum theory, in his autobiography said this is the proof of the existence of some kind of omniscient being i.e. God.

So what do people think?

Have you read any Robert Anton Wilson? I think Eastern/New Age Philosophy is fascinating but ultimately I'm not well acquainted enough with quantum physics (Feynman once said something to the affect that if anyone claims to understand it, they're lying), though I suspect much of the New Age movement is less grounded in philosophy or physics and more in pseudoscience. For example, quantum healing... total bullshit. Psychosomatic illnesses undoubtedly exist and our reality is probably structured in such a way due to our brains but the Universal Consciousness or the Observer Created Universe theories take it too far in my opinion. Why would the world be the shit hole that it is if everything was ultimately created by the observer(s)?