Relational Quantum Mechanics and Nagarjuna
In the previous two posts, I introduced Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland and the concept of Quantum Entanglement or Quantum Coherence. This post is about the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics and its relationship with Nagarjuna.
I first heard about Nagarjuna in an Operations Strategy lecture taken by Prof. Saral Mukherjee at IIM Ahmedabad in 2021. By the end of the lecture he said that unless we read Nagarjuna, we don’t deserve to get our degrees. I got a translation of the Mulamadhyamakakarika, but then as it happens I got busy with other things. Later I had some time to read what this 2nd century philosopher had to say about the nature of the world.
I encountered Nagarjuna again in Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland. Rovelli calls this chapter – Without Foundation? Nagarjuna. But first a bit about the Relational interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This interpretation was delineated by Carlo Rovelli in mid 1990s. As Rovelli puts it –
“Quantum mechanics is a theory about the physical description of physical systems relative to other systems, and this is a complete description of the world.”
What does that mean? Let’s start with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle.
“We cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.”
We in this definition is the “Observer”. Is there always an observer observing? And if not, what happens to physical phenomena? What does quantum theory tell us, where there is no one measuring? Can it tell us about what happens in another galaxy?
Introduction to the Relational Quantum Mechanics by Rovelli –
“The key to the answer, I believe, and the keystone of ideas in this book, is the simple observation that scientists as well, and their measuring instruments, are all part of nature. What quantum theory describes, then, is the way in which one part of nature manifests itself to any other part of nature.
At the heart of the ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum theory is the idea that the theory does not describe the way in which quantum objects manifest themselves to us (or to special entities that do something special called ‘observing’). It describes how every physical object manifests itself to any other physical object. How any physical entity acts on any other physical entity.”
Essentially, I do not have an independent existence. I exist only in relation to you and in relation to the nature. History of philosophy and science is filled with the speculation and hypotheses on what is the substratum of all existence. What is “Fundamental”? The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the web of entanglement that I have with the nature around me is the foundation on which we exist.
And now Nagarjuna.
Rovelli mentions in his book, that whenever he started talking about the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, people used to ask him – “Have you read Nagarjuna?” Eventually, he read Nagarjuna. In his words –
“The central thesis of Nagarjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else …. If nothing exists in itself, everything exists only through dependence on something else, in relation to something else. The technical term used by Nagarjuna to describe the absence of independent existence is ‘emptiness’ (sunyata): things are ‘empty’ in the sense of having no autonomous existence. They exist thanks to, as a function of, with respect to, in the perspective of, something else.”
Nagarjuna wrote his Mulmadhyamakakarika or the Philosophy of the Middle Way, almost six centuries after Gautama Buddha. After Buddha’s nirvana, the Buddhist thinkers and philosophers promulgated multiple schools of thoughts in the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. Multiple schools of philosophy in India had postulated one or the other basis of worldly existence. Whereas Buddha had given a philosophy that was devoid of an ultimate reality. He never spoke about what happens when an ‘enlightened one’ dies. What is the nature of being freed from the cycles of samsara? However, the question remained and the Buddhist scholars tried to arrive at an answer through interpreting Buddha’s words in light of existing schools of thought such as Samkhya and Vaisesika.
Nagarjuna took it upon himself to bring clarity to Buddha’s words without resorting to the concepts given by existing schools of thought. He opens his karika with –
“No existents whatsoever are evident anywhere that are arisen from themselves, from another, from both, or from a non-cause.”
In this Nagarjuna negates the four causes of existence. There is no self existence, no existence caused by another, no existence that is caused by self and other, and no existence that is caused by a non-cause. Essentially, there isn’t a permanent cause (astitva), neither a permanent cessation (na-astitva).
Everything then is a result of “dependent arising”. The question is why do we need to find out whether it is dependent arising or independent?
For that we need to go six centuries further back from Nagarjuna. When Siddhartha came out of his palace and encountered the world for the first time, he saw the four sights – Old age, Disease, Death and Asceticism. Gautama Siddhartha asked what is the cause of the suffering that he had witnessed. And then there was an enquiry in to the causes. What gives rise to everything has been the central question of Buddhism.
Nagarjuna’s Karika opens with the dedication to Buddha in these terms –
“I salute him, the fully enlightened, the best of speakers, who preached the non-ceasing and the non-arising, the non-annihilation and the non-permanence, the non-identity and the non-difference, the non-appearance and the non-disappearance, the dependent arising, the appeasement of obsessions and the auspicious.”
Everything exists in relation to something else, and there is no independent existence. This was the core teaching of Buddha. When you look deep enough in search of a foundation of all existence, you find that there is nothing. The entire existence is essentially a web of interactions without having a fundamental basis. I am because nature is. If nature is not then neither am I. And here nature is not the fundamental substratum of all existence, rather it is part of the existence. This is where we get with Relational quantum mechanics and with Nagarjuna.
Rovelli closes his chapter on Nagarjuna with –
“I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic. And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nagarjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent of its manifestations.
But Nagarjuna’s emptiness also nourishes an ethical stance that clears the sky of endless disquietude: to understand that we do not exist as autonomous entities helps us free ourselves from attachments and suffering. Precisely because of its impermanence, because of the absence of any absolute, the now has meaning and is priceless.
For me as a human being, Nagarjuna teaches the serenity, the lightness and the shining beauty of the world: we are nothing but images of images. Reality, including our selves, nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which . . . there is nothing.”