Advaita Vedanta and Quantum Entanglement

Some thoughts borrowed from Erwin Schrödinger.

Adi Shankra is much in the news, with Modi meditating before his statue at Kedarnath.  Adi Shankra is credited with reviving “Hinduism,” or Vedic Brahmanism, in the 8th CE, after it had been all but lost to Buddhism, after the fall of the Gupta Empire.  He was basically an exegete of the early Upanishads, particularly the Chandogaya Upanishad, and derived his Advaita Vedanta from its hermeneutics.

To me, Adi Shankra’s Advaita Vedanta predates Martin Heidegger’s derivation of the notion of self, from first principles of awareness or consciousness, based on nothing but the fact of self consciousness, even though Shankra’s derivation is exegetical.  However, we should note that Arthur Schopenhauer had made Upanishads well known in Continental Philosophy, and many German philosophers had more than a passing familiarity with the Upanishads through German translations. Heidegger was no exception.

Be that as it may, the Central thesis of Advaita Vedanta is that the external world that one sees, is an illusion created by one’s own self, through one’s organs of perception, and not real.  Later on there were many variations of this theme, some of which consider the external world a manifestation of the Brahman, the universal Consciousness, of which one’s soul or Atma is a part. But in Adi Shankra’s Vedanta, there is no external world; only an illusion created by oneself. 

If that be so, what is your reason for being?  Why are you here?  What do you do with your life?  In Shankara’s exposition, your purpose in life is to pursue knowledge, in order to realize the fact of this illusion, and in doing so, to recognize your essential Brahman, where upon, you attain liberation, and become one with the Universal consciousness, or Brahman, even as you live out your life here, free from all pain and suffering.

Apart from the Brahman, the Universal Consciousness, there is no God, no creator, other than your own self.  Your self creates the illusion of a world.  No prayer, no ritual, will get you liberation other than knowledge, though there are certain ways to pursue this knowledge.  It is this knowledge, not love of any God, or devotion to any God, that earns you liberation.  It is the only philosophy that makes such a claim; apart from the Charvakas of course.

The deep question in this philosophy is whether a real world, outside of your consciousness, exists, or not.  Which is to say, when you die, does this world cease to exist, or does it continue as it is for others, who live on after you.  Trivial as it may appear, the question is not trivial at all.  Do we really have a proof that this world, as we know it, actually exists?

For a long time, we have been assured, in Vedic Brahmanism, and other system of Philosophy, that the objective world really exists because other people, just like you, testify to the fact that it exists.  People are born everyday, they die everyday, and the world goes on as before.  It can’t all be unreal.  There are other arguments about a real world, but all of them were brought into question by Martin Heidegger’s derivation of a self from nothing but itself.  His thesis shows the self bootstrapping itself from nothing but itself, using nothing but its own conceptions, that arise naturally from self.

Then came Ludwig Wittgenstein with his concept of language.  Wittgenstein showed how, once language has evolved, we accumulate a shared episteme, through which we learn to structure our consciousness, so that the world appears similarly structured to all of us.  Language makes it possible to create a shared illusion, which is useful, and enables us to live out our life in a “Matrix”, but what we see is just a self-created reality, with no way to step outside of it.

A combination of Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, brings us back to the purest concept of the self, that creates its own world, as an illusion for itself. Once you accept this concept of self, its eschatology is of little significance.  So I will confine myself to just the theory of self.

Now suppose, the world is real, but you are living in stimulation, much like Jim Carry in the movie “The Truman Show.”  How would you know that there is a real world out there that you cannot see, being confined in an illusion that prevents you from experiencing it directly?

In short given the impossibility of stepping out of your self-created cocoon of reality, if Advaita Vedanta is true, how do you prove that there is a real world beyond the one you have created for yourself?

Depressingly, not even Ludwig Wittgenstein has an answer to the conundrum.  But Erwin Schrodinger, of the famous cat named after him, who himself was a great fan of Advaita Vedanta, or at least that part that deals with the the theory of self, [excluding the eschatology] leaves us with some hints, though no proof.  [The arguments below are my own.  But I have used Erwin Schrodinger’s exposition of the subject.  Incidentally, his arguments are in direct contradiction to mine.]

So let us take one of the mysteries of quantum mechanics, an entangled pair of photons with opposite spins, but otherwise identical properties.

If you separate the entangled pair, and measure the spin of one, the other one immediately flips to the opposing spin.

Now since nothing can travel faster than speed of light, there is no way for 1 photon to tell the other, that it has been found to be up, where-upon, the entangled one should now flip down.  Any action at distance cannot be instantaneous.  But the flipping is in fact instantaneous.  An important law in physics, that there is nothing faster than speed of light, has been violated.

This instantaneous flipping on the part of particle has been tested on an ensemble of particles experimentally, and found to be true.  Such entanglement is the basis of quantum computing, wherein the ability of an ensemble of entangled particles to “communicate” with each other, [but within the ensemble only,] at a speed faster than light, is exploited for storing and extracting information from the ensemble.

How does a Vedantin explain quantum entanglement?

Since there is no real world out there, beyond the one created by self, it is rather odd that when it comes to quantum particles, all normal experience in this created world breaks down, when we approach the scale of quantum particles.  Since it is an imagined world, there is no reason for behavior to be so discontinuous at the quantum level.  If the world is indeed self-imagined, why would we introduces such quirks and discontinuities into the world we create?

If you recall the Truman Show, it was a “star” that fell out of the sky, that turned into a spotlight, that gave Jim Carry his first substantiative clue that his world, which he had supposed to be real, wasn’t really so.  Are the entangled quantum particles a similar clue for us that there is real world out there, independent of our imagination?

If quantum entanglement is a challenge to the Vedantin, Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty is even more difficult to explain.

Basically the principle says, if you try to measure the momentum of a given photon accurately, you can’t determine its position.  There are certain conjugate pairs of properties, like position and momentum, or time and energy, which you cannot know simultaneously, for any given quantum particle, with any arbitrary accuracy.  There is a well defined limit for each pair, and there is absolutely no way to go beyond the limit, as given by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

This should make any Vedantin sit up.

For if the world is merely an illusion of your consciousness, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot determine the position and momentum of any particle in it, to any arbitrary degree of accuracy.  After all, the world is your own imaginative creation. You are its master.   For you, there nothing about the particles that can remain unknowable.  No part of your consciousness can deny another part of it, the location and momentum of any particle in it.  You consciousness is a unity, a part of Brahman itself.

So here we have two quantum effects, that imply the world out there is not merely an extension of your consciousness.  It is possibly as real as it appears be.  The language used to describe it is of course still shared, and mere corroboration of your experience by others is still not proof of a real world beyond you consciousness.

There are very subtle phenomenon, at the edges of our consciousness, that are inexplicable by theory of Advaita Vedanta.   In time, more may turn up, to shred your fanciful theory that the world is merely what you imagine it to be.

Could Adi Shankara, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein be wrong?  Mind, in many ways Wittgenstein’s language argument spelt the end of Philosophy as we know it.  A absolute nihilistic despair loomed. But if the world at the quantum scale is to be explicable, we will have to reinvent the metaphysics of this world again.

What if the world is real?  There is hope still.