Consciousness
"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." Bertrand d'Espagnat's conclusion resonates with the Buddhist realization that ultimately, "form is emptiness and emptiness is form; form is not other than emptiness and emptiness is not other than form" (Heart Sutra).
That is not to say form does not exist, but rather that all forms (and sensory perceptions, mental processes, practices and consciousness) are generated from one inherent, singular and undivided reality - emptiness - by the existence of consciousness. Consciousness is the mode of the universe as we experience it. Consciousness unfolds the multiple forms of the universe in a similar way that a laser unfolds the spatial information embedded in every part of a hologram.
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The statement that the existence of objects is dependent of human consciousness is too strong a claim at least to me. What quantum mechanics has been indicating is that some of the attributes such as position, velocity or energy do not have the same meaning as defined in classical physics. All those properties (concepts) are generalized and can only be determined statistically when observations occur. To assume those properties exist with indefinite precision is meaningless. At meantime, we still believe that certain properties such as mass, time, space, electrical field etc. does exist regardless of human consciousness.
Furthermore, the importance of observation and in turn the importance of human consciousness is all based on the assumption of the existence of freewill. I am still not convinced that freewill exist. As comments mentioned in earlier posts, to me, a measurement is merely an interaction between one part of universe and another. Certain information generated from this interaction is perceived and processed by a third party called human while the process of perception is called observation in that name of consciousness. Again, this would lead to the discussion of existence of freewill.
If I understand it correctly, I think Buddhism suggests that emptiness and non-existence are not the same thing. An object continues to exist whether or not we consciously perceive it. But its inherent qualities ( permanence in time, mass, height and length) are illusions created by consciousness through the action of perception.
For example, take a realistic oil painting by Jia Lu. The image appears to have depth and volume. There appears to be a light source, shadows, skin and fabric and hair. Yet it is nothing more than gobs of paint on a flat canvas. The artist creates the illusion of space on an empty canvas in the same way consciousness creates the illusion of reality on emptiness. The image on the canvas exists: we can identify it as male or female, standing, sitting, in light or in shadow. But it has no meaningful reality in terms of the three-dimensional, moving reality that flows around us.
Another example: a motion picture presents a convincing illusion of motion. But we know it is merely a series of still images perceived over time. Nothing on the screen has actually moved from one place to another. A car chase may have happened once, but the car chase on the screen is really the projection of many still photographs of that now-extinct event. The images appear to move in away consistent with classical physics, but the screen itself is empty. In one sense the images exist. They can be measured. In a deeper sense they do not exist independently of the projector and the film.
I suspect time and spatial dimension exist only as a projection onto empty reality. The camera, or the artist, is our consciousness. Science adequately measures the observable temporal and spatial features of this illusion, but the illusion has no independent reality itself. It is dependent on consciousness.
I believe (and it seems this word continues to pop up throughout these posts!) that Quantum Mechanics has offered us a very close look at the canvas of reality; it has exposed the artist's brushstrokes, or it has detected the clickety-clack of the projector.
In other words, observed reality has no existence independent of consciousness. That's why we continue to puzzle over shoes in boxes, money in envelopes, cats in bags, trees in forests. When they cannot be observed their attributes are undefined, unknowable: neither left nor right, dead or alive, fallen or standing. The unobserved thing exists, but without features that are meaningful before consciousness becomes aware of it.
As for free will, one might as well ask if a character in a movie has free will. Of course we know that he is following a script, that he cannot stop the movie and turn back time, that sooner or later he will defeat the bad guy or be defeated.
But unless we've read the story we can't predict how the movie will end, or even what will come next. I don't know of any scientific method that would accurately predict the ending of a random selection of movies based solely on their opening scenes. Because we're aware the apparent reality we're watching in the cinema is only an illusion, we know that the characters can't change the ending of that movie: they cannot have free will, even if we are unable to prove it.
Wait a minute, some would object. The question is silly because the characters in a movie aren't real. They are only illusions.
Exactly.
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