Science and the one who is looking

Foundations

Where the line falls

People put this line between the laboratory and the temple. That is the wrong place. It falls between 2 ways of knowing, and to see where it falls you have to be exact about what a measurement is. So that comes first.

What a measurement actually is

The source never says what a measurement is. Everything in the next 2 sections is this page’s own reasoning.

• Mass is a property of the rock. It is there whether anyone weighs it or not. The number you write down is something else, and that number is a comparison.
• A balance scale shows this in the open. The rock goes on one pan and known weights go on the other. The answer is how many of those weights it takes to hold the pans level.
• A kitchen scale hides the same comparison inside. It reads the squash of a spring, and that spring was set against the same reference kilogram.
• Age works the same way. A rock is not 400 million years old on its own. That number is a count of half-lives of an isotope inside it, measured against a decay rate someone else established.
• So a measurement needs 3 parts. The thing being measured, a reference to compare it against, and someone doing the comparing.

The blank spot

Name the 3 parts on the balance scale. The thing being measured is the rock. The reference is the set of known weights. The one doing the comparing is you, watching whether the pans sit level.

Now ask which of the 3 you can find in the answer.

• The rock is in it. The answer is a fact about the rock, which is the whole point of weighing it.
• The known weights are in it. The answer counts them, so the reference is right there in the number.
• You are not in it. Nothing in that number says who watched the pans, or where they stood, or that anyone was there at all.

Change the setup and the same thing happens. Drop a stone into a measuring jug and the answer is the stone’s volume, which is the thing being measured. The marks on the jug are the reference and you read the answer off them. The person reading the jug is still nowhere in the number.

So 2 of the 3 parts end up inside the result. The third never does. Call that third part the standpoint, meaning the place the comparison is made from.

• A thermometer in a glass of water. The water is measured, the marks on the tube are the reference, and the thermometer does the comparing. Its own temperature is nowhere in the reading.
• A camera in a room. The room is what it records, and the camera is what does the recording. It is the one object in that room missing from the picture.

The scene below is that argument built as a machine. A probe stands at the centre and turns to face anything on the ring. Point it at a rock, a star or a brain and it returns a reading about that thing. The last step turns on all 3 beams at once, so you can see the place they all leave from.

Why the blank spot moves instead of closing

You can measure the instrument. Weigh the known weights on a second balance scale. Take the thermometer’s temperature with a second thermometer. Photograph the camera with a second camera.

Every one of those works. Each one is also a new measurement with a standpoint of its own. That standpoint is missing from its own result. The blank spot does not close. It moves to the new instrument.

So the claim is not that an instrument is somehow invisible. Point a camera at a mirror and the camera does appear in its own photograph. What the picture shows is the camera as seen from where the mirror is. The picture is still taken from one place, and that place is behind the lens. The camera has turned into one more object being photographed, and the photographing is outside the frame as it always was.

Add probes to the chain below and watch the blank spot step backwards without ever shrinking.

The intellect, and how far it reaches

• The intellect is the reasoning mind. It compares things and sorts them into kinds. It also works out what follows from what.
• Duality is the name this philosophy gives to the split between the knower and the known.
• The intellect only works inside that split. Thinking about something means standing apart from it, which puts the thinker on one side and the thing thought about on the other.
• The thinker is the side that never shows up. Like the camera, it does not appear among the things it thinks about.
• That is the same blank spot as before, arrived at by thinking instead of by measuring.

What direct experience is

• Spiritual experience here means direct knowing. Belief does not count, and neither does a conclusion you reasoned your way to.
• The text gives its own example, and it is a headache. Give it to 2 people who have both had one and they can compare notes and work out what they share.
• Someone who has never had one cannot be talked into knowing what it is. “If a person has never experienced a headache, no amount of intellectual explanation will suffice for making him understand what a headache is.”
• The claim is that spiritual experience works the same way. It “involves more than can be grasped by mere intellect” and “cannot be born of unaided intellect”.
• The intellect is not useless here. “Intellectual explanation can never be a substitute for spiritual experience”, and “it can at best prepare the ground for it”.

Mysticism is the word for treating direct experience as a way of knowing reality. It is the same thing as spiritual experience above, under the name the text itself uses. The text lists 3 common complaints about it and answers all 3. Mysticism is “often regarded as something anti-intellectual, obscure and confused, or impractical and unconnected with experience”. The reply is that “true mysticism is none of these”.

• Anti-intellectual means opposed to reason. The text says there is “nothing irrational” in it, because at its best it is “a vision of Reality”. Seeing something directly does not contradict reasoning about it.
• Obscure and confused means unclear. The text calls it “a form of perception that is absolutely unclouded”, which is the opposite claim.
• Impractical means it changes nothing in ordinary living. Here the text gives a test you can apply. A real one “can be lived every moment of life and expressed in everyday duties”. An inner state that appears only during meditation, and leaves the rest of a life unchanged, fails that test.

Science found the same blank spot

Neuroscience walked into it from the other direction and gave it a name. David Chalmers called it the hard problem of consciousness in 1995.

• Go back to the red apple. Science has a method that reaches every step from light hitting the retina to the word “red” leaving the mouth.
• Not one step in that chain says why there is any seeing going on. A machine could run the whole sequence in the dark.
• Explaining what the brain does and explaining why any of it feels like something are 2 different jobs. No method in neuroscience even starts on the second.

The shape matches. Every item in that chain is an object out on the ring, and the seeing is at the standpoint. A science built to explain objects reaches every step and not the seeing.

This philosophy drew that line decades before neuroscience had a phrase for it. The agreement does not prove the claim. It does show that working scientists later ran into the same line on their own.

What follows

One thing, many words

The same discourse makes this move about religions. It treats identification with a creed or a sect as one more way of protecting a separate self. Forms and traditions are “in most cases fetters to the release of infinite life”. They help only while they stay pliant.

So a religion is a category. Categories are made by the intellect, and the intellect works by splitting things apart. Every category is a cut made by the thing doing the cutting. The scene below shows what that costs. One solid casts a rectangle on the wall and a circle on the floor. Both measurements are exact. Neither one is the cylinder.

Give 2 observers one wall each and they will describe different objects. Both are reporting honestly, and neither is holding the cylinder. That is the account of what religions do to each other. It is also the account of what science and spirituality do to each other. Science and spirituality are 2 such shadows. What they are shadows of is reached by the second way of knowing, which is direct experience.

This gives a test you can apply. When someone says science and spirituality conflict, ask which claim is on which side of the boundary. A claim about the measurable world can be checked, and religion has no standing to overrule the measurement. A claim about the one doing the measuring is somewhere no instrument reaches, and science overreaches when it says nothing is there. The observer is not the only such place. Why there is anything at all rather than nothing is another. Take the Galileo case. The church ruled that the earth stands still and the sun moves around it. That is a claim about the physical world, and measurement is the only thing that can settle it.