Ever eager to cram together two seemingly highly separate subjects into a profound (or pseudo-profound) blog post, here's my take on relativity theory and Zen.
I got to pondering the connection after two events in my life today tilted me in that direction.
Event #1 occurred when I read an article in the August 6, 2022 issue of New Scientist that I'd dug out of the bottom of a forgotten pile of unread magazines. In it Chandra Prescod-Weinstein, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire, described why general relativity is known as a background independent theory.
In Einstein's special relativity, which came before general relativity, she says that while now space and time were no longer separate, but merged into space-time, "This theory did share something with the Newtonian perspective: while space and time were no longer absolute, they remained a stage on which events unfolded."
Prescod-Weinstein then says that to understand what this means, it's like a ruler that never changes shape. This is because rulers, like other objects in everyday life, are background dependent -- the background being our familiar notion of time and space as the backdrop against which events unfold.
The situation is different in general relativity, which includes gravity in Einstein's more comprehensive theory. She quotes theoretical physicist John Wheeler as capturing the essence of general relativity with "Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to...curve."
This means that general relativity is a background independent theory, for there is no background against which the curvature of space-time occurs. The way I understand it, general relativity is the background of our universe. She writes:
Now imagine if your ruler stretched out when you put it near a more massive object. In other words, how you measure distance depends on where you measure and whether you are near an object that has mass. Your ruler, the metric, now depends on its location in space-time and what is inside of space-time.
This was the radical revision in our understanding of space-time necessitated by the merger of special relativity with gravity, which we call general relativity (or "GR" as physicists call it).
...To make this more concrete, let's return to the stage. It is now very weird! It is no longer fixed and unchanging in the background. The very shape of the stage itself depends on whether an actor is on it, where they are on the stage, and what they are doing -- for example, if they are rotating, walking across the stage or simply standing still.
Their presence shapes the stage and, of course, the shape of the stage will affect how someone or something can move across it. Events now happen to space-time too, not just inside of it. This is the meaning of background independence.
The notions of background dependence and background independence got me to wondering where philosophical, religious, mystical, and metaphysical discussions such as what we engage in on this blog fit in.
Using, or some would say, misusing, the metaphor of general relativity, it seems to me that one reason why discussions of that sort never end up with any firm conclusions agreeable to everybody is that when human thought is divorced from a grounding in the physical world, there's no unchanging background against which the reality of those thoughts can be assessed.
Meaning, it's as if (as in the case of general relativity) the "ruler" used to measure a thought was changed by that very thought. For example, someone's belief that God exists typically leads them to view arguments for God's existence more favorably than, say, an atheist's view that God doesn't exist.
After thirty-five years of embracing supernatural notions about God and higher regions of reality, I've become more and more attracted to meditation approaches that are grounded in actual here-and-now reality rather than hypothesized there-and-then reality.
Which brings me to event #2, my cancellation of the 14-day free trial of Loch Kelly's Glimpses app that I'd downloaded to my iPhone and mentioned in my previous post. After listening to more of what the Glismpses app offers in Kelly's approach to meditation, it struck me as too other-worldly for my taste.
Instead, after reading the third message from Oshan Jarrow's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation, I decided to try out an app mentioned in that message, a Zen meditation series called The Way.
It looks enticing. I get twelve free guided meditations before I have to fork out some money for the full deal, which entails about a year's worth of training from Henry Shukman, the Zen teacher who came up with the idea for The Way with help from some talented friends and colleagues.
Check out descriptions of The Way on Reddit, TechCrunch, and Medium. Today I got one day closer to my upcoming Zen enlightenment. And I won't have to be hit on the head with a stick or sit for hours on an uncomfortable cushion. All I need is my iPhone and a VISA card.
I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness
I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring.
However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements.
Here's an example.
A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.
Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness.
I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.
OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness.
Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.
So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced.
However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such.
And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.
I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.
I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.
Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India.
I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.
The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.
Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.
If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Comments, Reality | Permalink | Comments (44)
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