Why couldn't karma be explained away by probability?
One of those questions that makes me think.
Well, thanks a lot.
No, I mean, it's a good question.
These are the kind of questions that are very difficult to answer.
Because, you know, I'm a very... We are all very poor in the wisdom faculty in this day and age.
So our ability to understand reality... The funny thing is that... The funny thing about reality is you can...
at the very core of your experience, misunderstand reality.
You can totally see things wrong.
You can actually experience something as pleasurable that is suffering.
What you are actually suffering, you can be totally experiencing it as pleasure.
And be clear in your mind that it is pleasure.
because you're not seeing clearly, because you're not looking carefully at it, and because you're not examining it.
So as a result, many things seemed clear to us.
Things like Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian physics seemed perfectly clear to us and seemed to be exactly the way the world works until Einstein came along.
And then Einstein himself rejected quantum physics when it came about.
And now quantum physicists are rejecting the natural next step.
of the existence of the mind and the existence of intention.
There's only one really good quantum physicist that I know of in the sense that he's outspoken and just incredibly bold in the things that he says.
who makes a very, very persuasive argument in my mind.
Of course, I'm not a quantum physicist, but he is, and he's an expert in something called Bell's theorem.
He's a known expert and has written many articles and explains how quantum physics...
something like points to the existence of the mind.
The point is that quantum physics doesn't take into account the mind and leaves explicitly in its orthodox, in the original form, the Copenhagen, whatever it's called, orthodox quantum physics that Bohr and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg and
Wolfgang Pauli and so on, that they came up with explicitly leaves the mind out and says that the mind is not in the realm of quantum physics or not in the realm of quantum probability.
So what it means is, according to this explanation of quantum physics, or explanation of how things appear, or how things work, how our observations work, require our observation.
The point was that the quote from Niels Bohr paraphrases something like,
science is no longer an explanation of what is out there, of entities out there.
It has now become an explanation of observation, of our observation, the human observation or the observer's observation, which presupposes the existence of the observer or the existence of an observation.
So the observation itself
what collapses the quantum probability wave or something like that.
I'm not a quantum physicist.
And I can only understand the general concepts of it.
But I really recommend looking at this guy's articles because the wonderful thing as a Theravada Buddhist that I like about him is he's orthodox.
That's us as well.
We don't go for these newfangled ideas that people come up with.
you know, unless they're well based on facts, but nowadays you have so many different interpretations of quantum physics and theories and so on, that people have lost the very philosophical and kind of down-to-earth, realistic, reasonable and brilliant, you might say,
formations of people like Bohr and Pauli and whoever, I can't remember, all of these guys who put it in this way where the mind was the beginning, the observation was the beginning of probability.
You can't even talk about probability until you answer the question, what is the mind doing?
What is the action of the mind?
Which experiment in their vocabulary, which experiment has the experimenter decided to look at?
Are they going to look at this slit or are they going to look at that slit?
Because if they look at this slit, they're going to see it go through this slit.
If they look at that slit, they're going to see it go through that slit or something like that.
No, this whole Schrodinger's cat, where he ridicules it and says that, well, then if you have this gun and so on.
Anyway, I'm not going to go into it all.
But the point was that even Einstein totally rejected this, that there could be any idea of probability, using the word probability here,
any randomness.
He said, God doesn't play dice.
This is his famous quote.
So we're even going further than that, right?
And saying that there is actually something outside of even probability.
You know, because really probability is a bit of nonsense.
And I think...
I think that's what Einstein was pointing to, is that it is kind of nonsensical to talk about probability.
Probability, I think, I mean, this is really a hardcore philosophical question, but it seems to me to be something that still presupposes Newtonian mechanics.
You know, it still presupposes...
some ability to calculate, some dice, or billiard balls, like for the lottery.
And so I guess for that reason, scientists kind of latch onto this sort of thing.
Yeah, well, probability, that's still something that we can get our minds around.
And they're not able to... Whereas the idea of a mind which you can't quantify, which you can't fit into an equation, it just drives them nuts and makes most of us, sets our heads spinning.
The whole idea of free will, for example, just totally impossible to fathom.
How can you imagine such a thing?
It's something that I've grappled with as well, as a Westerner who has this analytical mind.
So I'm going to get back to my own old dogma, or my own old spiel, which is that reality is experience-based.
This is the root.
It's not the ultimate conclusion.
It's where you have to start.
And this is the very powerful thing that quantum physics originally showed us.
and people like Niels Bohr and the people around him, what they showed us
was that this is where we have to start.
We have to start at experience, at the mind.
We can't begin to talk about the world around us, probability and so on, until we take into account the actions of the mind, or we presuppose, or actually until we take the mind out of the equation, until we say,
The mind chose this.
Once we say that, then we can, from a physics point of view, explain how the physical realm would react to that.
And this is what this PhD, his name is Henry Stapp, S-T-A-P-P, if you want to look him up on the internet.
Excellent.
He's got some excellent articles on the page and seems like a brilliant and wise individual.
He even goes so far, which may make people think him less wise than I do, goes so far as to talk about how, to express the belief that, or the understanding that quantum physics doesn't seem to negate the possibility of reincarnation or the transmigration of the mind or the continuation of the mind after death, let's put it that way.
So, given an understanding or my, you could say, belief, that's not really a belief, my way of looking at the world, that experience, is reality.
Probability doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't have any relation to experience.
Experience goes as it goes.
There are decisions made and there are results that come from those decisions.
And this we call karma.
It's actually
Karma actually doesn't exist either.
Karma is just an explanation of the natural laws of reality.
It's the scientific explanation of what is really real, which is experience.
How does experience work?
Well, it works in very, you could say, rigid ways.
It works based on very rigid laws of cause and effect.
You can't do a deed based on stressful mind states and not have it give rise to stress.
So greed, anger, delusion, these cannot possibly give rise to happiness or any good things.
Because by their very nature they are stressful, they are unpleasant, they are unpeaceful, they are disturbing the framework of reality.
So as a result they disturb.
It's just like if you throw a stone in a pool of water,
There's nothing it can do except make ripples.
That's what karma means.
Karma is cause and effect.
So you're looking at, I would say from asking this question, you're looking at things from the wrong point of view.
You're looking at it from the point of view of Western science that measures results and makes observations based on those results.
This doesn't have any basis in reality.
The reason why they do that is because they're dealing with physical external objects that don't really exist, that aren't real.
They're just supposed to be out there somewhere.
And as a result, they can't be experienced and they don't have anything to do with experience.
They don't have anything to do with reality.
And therefore one has to simply measure the experiences that one gets and extrapolate those experiences to explain away those objects.
So when you say karma versus probability, you're thinking, you know,
It's just a coincidence or as a probability that these people get this result and those people get that result.
Whereas karma isn't like that at all.
Karma just says our experiences change our later experiences.
An experience now will have an effect on an experience later.
The quality of a certain experience will affect the quality of a later experience.
So I hope that helps.
It probably doesn't totally answer the question, but it's some explanation.