Having studied physics, chemistry and mathematics, I have always been intrigued by what is the nature of the natural world.

Conventional science would have us believe that science is about “discovering” the Laws of Nature that have governed the Universe since its creation. If you are religious you probably believe that God laid down these laws and they are divine and inalterable by Man. Or if you are a scientific determinist you would argue that there is an underlying rationalism in the material universe and that the principal task of science is to discover the laws that govern the Universe.

Classical physics was based on the study of matter and its interactions. It was based on the assumption that closer examination of the physical universe would inevitably lead to a greater understanding of the natural world.

As a relatively young boy I read how Ernest Rutherford had discovered that atoms, which were once considered the basic building blocks of matter, were themselves composed of even more elementary particles, electrons, protons and neutrons. Regularly reading the scientific literature after that, it seemed that new sub-atomic particles seemed to be discovered at such a regular frequency it began to be difficult to keep up!

Sometimes you might wonder whether this more detailed understanding of matter actually made a difference. But in my latter years of studying electrical engineering a major development occurred that assured me that it certainly did. It ushered in the world of semi-conductors. This theoretical physics was applied to make transistors. This in turn revolutionised electrical control circuits and opened the way to the development of computers.

Now at a gross level classical physics was very successful in expanding our understanding of the Universe. The physics of Newton and his contemporaries ushered in the Industrial Revolution resulting in more productive societies and huge increases in standards of living. And as I have related the subsequent development of the understanding of particle physics has produced enormous benefits to Mankind.

But despite the huge benefits accruing from our better understanding of the physical world, the efficacy of classical physics is challenged by the so-called “observer effect”.

The observer effect is the phenomenon where the act of observing or measuring a system changes the system itself. This occurs because interactions are necessary for observation, and these interactions inherently cause a perturbation, such as a photon hitting an electron or a thermometer absorbing heat from an object.

There are many simple examples of this phenomenon and so consequently you don’t have to be a theoretical physicist to understand it. For example if you have a pressure gauge and want to measure the air pressure in your tyres, in the process of measuring the air pressure you release a tiny bit of air which results in a minor reduction in the air pressure of your tyre. Or when you hold up an anemometer to test wind speed in making the measurement the wind speed is slightly reduced because energy is lost in turning the fan that provides a signal to the measuring device. Or if I want to measure the current flowing in an electrical circuit the measuring device adds impedance which results in a minor reduction of the current flow.

In quantum mechanics, this effect is particularly pronounced, where observing a particle can force it from a wave-like state into a specific, particle-like state. It seems the act of observation is required to finally determine the location of a particle.

[The effect also exists in social sciences, where people may alter their behaviour when they know they are being observed. For example, they are more likely to adopt social conforming behaviour when under observation.]

In essence the impact of the observer on the observed has a deeper foundation. It stems from an act of separation. Buddhists have traditionally called this “dualism”.

Literally the Universe is a notion that seeks to encompass the totality of everything. Dualism occurs when an observer separates from that totality in an attempt to understand it. In this act of separation, a conscious part of the universe is extracted from the rest and assumes the position of “subject” to try to understand the rest, which becomes the “object”

Now if you pause to think about it you will see the logical dilemma here.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was an English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. Eddington surmised:

Nature thus provides that knowledge of half the world will ensure ignorance of the other half.

He was implying that regular scientific observation might only illumine the world sans observer!

This problem intrigued the English polymath, George Spencer Brown, He wrote:

…we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to (and thus in such a way to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing. Not so much of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect that it can see at all.

But in order to do so evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state that sees and at least one other state that is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world is undoubtedly is itself (i.e., is indistinct from itself) but in any attempt to see itself as an object must equally undoubtedly act so  as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

Traditionally when the sages taught their pupils about dualism they would ask the provocative question, “Can the eye see itself?” And no, obviously the eye can’t see itself directly. It can see itself indirectly by the use of a mirror for example, but all it sees is a reflection.

Or they might ask, “Can the knife cut itself?” And no, the knife can’t cut itself.

Once we sever the world into subject and object the subject is necessarily discrete from the object.

The attempt to know the universe as an object of knowledge is thus profoundly and inextirpably contradictory. But oddly enough this type of dualistic knowledge wherein the universe is severed into subject vs object is the very cornerstone of Western philosophy, theology and science!

So the mechanism of dualism is to separate the universe into observer and observed. It is immediately obvious that this must inevitably produce only a partial picture of the universe because that which is observing is naturally excluded from that which is observed.

A corollary to this is the fact that in this manner we cannot ever understand the universe completely because part of the universe has withdrawn to be the observer of the rest. Traditional science and mathematics have been based on dualism but in the last century we have begun to see that, at its limits, dualism results in difficult quandaries. Science and mathematics have had to be modified to accommodate the uncertainties of dualism. (I have argued in previous essays hat this indeterminacy is reflected in mathematics in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and in physics by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem.)

Now dualism had become such a substantial platform for science that empiricism emerged, Empiricism insisted that everything in the physical world need to be measured. Empiricism required that nothing might be accepted as scientifically valid unless it could be validated in repeated experiments.

But as physics evolved to study subatomic particles, the certainties that empiricism required could no longer be realised. At the sub-atomic level phenomenon were no longer predictable on an absolute basis but only in terms of probabilities. This was at the core of quantum mechanics and which led Einstein to declare that he could not believe that God would “play dice with the universe”!

To summarise my thesis then, when the universe is severed into a subject vs object, something always gets left out. In this condition the universe will always partially elude itself.

As Ken Wilber, the inspirational writer on transpersonal psychology wrote:

No observing system can observe itself observing. The seer cannot see itself. Every eye has a blind spot. And it is for precisely this reason that at the basis of all such dualistic attempts we find only: Uncertainty, Incompleteness!.

There came a realisation that physics, and for that matter, most Western intellectual disciplines were not dealing with “the world itself” because they were operating through the dualistic mode of knowing and hence were working with symbolic representations of that world. Mind you this approach resulted in a highly sophisticated and analytical picture of the world itself, which you must confess advanced our knowledge of the world. But as we have seen such a picture is only a partial revelation of the world because something is excluded from the observation and that is the observer itself!

The Polish American philosopher, Alfred Korzybski, had hinted at this problem with his famous aphorism, “The Map is not the Territory”! The “map” is a true but limited symbolic representation. As far as it goes, a map is a true, but necessarily, incomplete representation of the territory.

There is no doubt that this partial view of the world has provided a useful insight as classical science has proven. From the eighteenth century the world had made great strides using this symbolic, dualistic map of the world. This success however should not allow us to fall into the trap that this map is anything other than an approximation of reality. In essence our understanding of the physical world is a helpful map but it is not the territory!

Taoism is sometimes called the “way of liberation”. Alan Watts wrote:

For us, almost all knowledge is what a Taoist would call “conventional” knowledge, because we do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics.

William James has often been acknowledged as the Father of American psychology. In1968 John McDermott published a compendium of James’s work titled The Writings of William James. James acknowledged that there was an alternative to the dualistic way of knowing. He wrote:

There are two ways of knowing things; knowing them immediately or intuitively and knowing them conceptually or representatively.

He goes on to explain:

To know immediately, then or intuitively is for mental content and object to be identical.

The Vietnamese Zen Master and poet, Thich Nhat Hanh put it this way:

When we want to understand something we cannot just stand outside an observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it to truly understand. If we want to understand a person we have to feel his feelings, suffer his sufferings and enjoy his joy. ….To comprehend something means to pick it up and be one with it. There is no other way to understand something. In Buddhism we call this kind of understanding as non-duality. Not two,

Ken Wilber explains that when dualism is put aside we are again reunited with the Universe. When that happens:

…suddenly you do not have an experience you are every experience that arises, and so you are automatically released into space; you and the entire Kosmos are one…

You are not in here, on this side of a transparent window looking out at the Kosmos there. The transparent window has been shattered, your bodymind drops, and you are free of that confinement forever. You are no longer behind your face looking at the Kosmos – you simply are the Kosmos. You are all that.