The Intersection of Science and Spirituality

Explore the connections between science and spirituality in this journey through Max Planck's 'The Philosophy of Physics.' Discover how Planck's groundbreaking insights bridge the gap between quantum physics and metaphysical thought.

In this episode of 'Beyond the Book,' we unpack the ideas of Max Planck, the father of quantum physics. Planck's exploration of consciousness, reality, and causality reveals the intricate links between scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection.

Learn how the act of observation can alter outcomes and delve into the metaphysical questions that science strives to answer. We'll share personal reflections on the implications of Planck's work for our understanding of reality and the universe. 

Whether you're a science enthusiast, a spiritual seeker or someone curious about the intersections, this episode offers valuable insights and thought-provoking discussion.

Join our community at https://Kishar.org to further explore the intersection of science and spirituality

Follow us on Instagram for daily inspiration: https://www.instagram.com/kisharspiritual

For more resources and links, visit our Bitly page: https://bit.ly/m/Kishar

#QuantumPhysics #Quantum #MaxPlanck #PhilosophyOfPhysics #Science #Spirituality #Consciousness #Reality #Causality

Transcript

0:34

What do quantum physics, religion, philosophy, and spirituality all have in common? It's actually quite a bit, and we're going to get into all that in today's episode. A couple of years ago, I discovered this quote from Max Planck concerning his views on consciousness. It struck me as one of the most fundamentally important things that I'd ever read, and I went a long way towards reinforcing some of the views that I already had on this subject of quantum physics and spirituality. I found this school of thought consistently applies as relevant and most religious, spiritual, and philosophical books that I've read. And I'm going to be sharing a quote later in this video that really gets into all this. So stick around as we look into the depths of the crossroads between metaphysics quantum physics. Max Planck was the father of quantum physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918. His contributions to modern science are probably indescribable. Really important guy. I'm no expert in quantum physics or deep into theoretical science, but when I read that quote of his, I just had to know if this man had written anything that was approachable. I wanted to know more of anything. And on this hunch, I found this genius had written this book called The Philosophy of Physics, and it's super approachable. I encourage each of you to get a copy of this and go through it. Planck is firm in all the sciences, being very intricately linked and completely inseparable from one another, and that goes from quantum physics all the way to social sciences. He sees a fundamental tie between science, art and philosophy. And importantly, as noted in the introduction. Planck was attempting to show how science, philosophy, and society coexist in this kind of shaky balance that's needed to get to deeper understanding of this universe around us. Max Planck saw very clearly we could advance further as a civilization if we understood how interconnected everything was. And that's a lot of what this episode is about, how everything is interconnected. And this basic principle is a lot. But that goes to the core of this YouTube channel that we have here. It's why I want to have a discussion with each of you, and let me know your thoughts on what you think about all this in the comments. I'm really interested. According to Planck, there's simply no science practice independent of philosophy. Are we seeing what we think we're seeing? He gets in depth on the subject of both the scientist and then they're tools that they're using to measure things. This relationship between the scientist and their tools impacts what's being studied and what's being measured. It occupies a lot of this book. The very nature of how we approach a subject or classify a collection of things, completely changes the equation of what we see. The very act of observing something can and probably does usually change the outcome of what happened. The process of measuring something changes the subject of the experiment. it's really of particular importance. We're going to get into talking about all of this stuff in quantum physics, and how it relates to how we see the world in our reality. You can believe you know, something and how it will behave. And yet when you measure this, it doesn't behave quite like you thought it would. The equation we use may be mathematical. It could statistically show what it should do or what we think it will do, or what we think it should do, but we can't actually demonstrate it. In an example that Planck used was the measurement of an electron in attempting to determine its velocity, we have to illuminate the electron as we're watching it. But the very act of illuminating it changes its velocity. So who's making the prediction matters? What scientist is making the prediction matters? This alters the equation and potentially the result. And so what is reality? This is the ultimate metaphysical question. And I think it's probably simultaneously the ultimate scientific question. Planck calls the world. We're presented in the sense world. I guess the reality that you see around you, given that we're using our senses to carry out these various scientific endeavors to observe in theoretical physics, he points out that we can move to this world image. So it's like this alternate world where the theoretical physicists can take their thoughts, their equations, their perception of what should happen or is happening. And it's almost like it's happening in a simulator. So they can think about it theoretically, and they can say, here's how things should perform and how we believe that they do. And it's happening in this simulation where there's no interference. There's no interference of an observer. There's no interference of things external to the experiment. But things here on this theoretical stage perform like they're supposed to, because there isn't any interference. And when the issue comes to moving this work back into the sense world or this real world, there's this loss of fidelity and some of these cases in some of these experiments. And so the problem continues to persist. And as we discussed previously on this channel, we create our reality around us. We literally form it. You know what we think, what our consciousness is bringing in to the world. That's our reality within us is this ability to shape the world in our image. Depending on how powerful our view and our belief is, this is that deep, perfectly natural magic that's available to you every single day. Beyond the experiments and observation mentioned above, we start to get into causality. I've touched on cause and effect in a big way in one of our previous episodes. It reviewed my reading of Averroes in The Metaphysics of Causation by Barry Kogan. We'll put a card up in the upper right hand corner of this video. If you want to watch it. I noted in this review how important cause and effect were in so many things. It's been particularly important to philosophers and theologians because it gets into the mechanics of our everyday reality. It also means that the creation of the universe really hinges upon cause and effect. It gets into what God did or didn't create. So did the universe get created or was it always there along with God? To some extent. And when I say God here, you can take it to mean one of many, several things. It could be your literal God. It could be the esoteric divine, the Hindu Brahman, Christ consciousness, nature, or your highest self or any number of other name. You may simply think of it as the universe itself, as this divine or even original thing. causality is also really important to science, which is interesting because the work I referenced above goes back to four of the greatest philosophers of the Islamic golden Age, hundreds of years ago. This is a question as old as time itself. It goes all the way back, and therefore it's always going to be important. Something that's really hard to tackle and resolve even as it's touching your life every single day. If science has a hard time getting behind consciousness, it also has a really hard time getting behind causality and cause and effect. Let me quote Max Planck here. To this we might reply that a rigorously exact prediction is never possible of any natural event, so that the validity of the law of causality can never be demonstrated by an immediate and exact experiment, since every measurement, however exact, inevitably involves certain errors of observation. So when it comes to those observations of experiments we were talking about earlier, that's complicated. Just the observation of it. You introduce cause and effect and everything that came before all the way back to beginning the universe. It creates this really complicated situation every time we're coming in and observing something in our reality. He's saying that we can never be sure when it comes to cause and effect. Obviously, we can theoretically understand cause and effect, even if we can't necessarily fully contain it via measurement or observation. But it's theoretical. You can know something even if you can't prove it. And you could spend a lot of time pondering that last in it. It's almost as if there is an element of faith in any scientific endeavor. This may come across as anti-science by me, but that's in no way my intent. I have a deep belief in science. This action is worth a great deal of thought and reflection. So what are your thoughts on the butterfly effect and science and how they interact? Hit me up in the comments. Can you see the future? Use your knowledge of cause and effect. You can see something this cause and know, or at least postulate with some degree of certainty that something else which is in effect, is going to occur. So is that predicting the future? And we may laugh about that, but think about it. We do this every day with weather, with financial markets, any number of things that you can think of and put into this category of thought. So we're predicting the future. And that's a yes. That's definitely the more esoteric and mystic side of me. Then ask, what may you see in the future? If you look at current causes. earlier we were talking about you creating your own reality that your consciousness and your thoughts are creating this reality around you. So at the same time, you have all these data points right at your fingertips that you can use to predict the future. So what can you predict? Anything. Everything. A few things. And that's a rabbit hole that we won't completely go down right now. But it's worth keeping in mind that the world isn't always what it seems. Even science is more philosophical than I think the majority of people would acknowledge. You might look at this as the equation that explains precognition, or the psychic ability in certain people. Maybe it's because they're able to see causes and be able to postulate or predict the effects that come after. That's pretty interesting to think about. We could even get into intention here to an extent. How does intention related to an experiment impact that experiment? there's a desire for a certain outcome or energy focused on that project have an impact on that project or experiment itself. It probably does. Planck touches on free will as it's associated with causality. If science solves enough equations and can forecast a large number of causes and effects, what does this say about our free will? Can the very nature of what we do or will do be determined by science? Could theoretically map out exactly what a human will do, or be, or become for the rest of its life. Planck asserts that free will may very well be independent of causality. So there may be this cause and effect happening there for you. Free will can still be separate from that. And that's an interesting conversation that probably could be its own episode. And I can accept that. But it generates absolutely massive questions. What does that say about our position in reality? And what does that say about our consciousness connected with the real world around us? And this really gets into the association between science, philosophy and spirituality, including religion. A lot of this goes back to how you see, think back to that reality that you're creating for yourself. We know that our reality and consciousness are fundamentally intertwined. On this, Max Planck said, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates, consciousness. So here he is saying that consciousness creates matter. Consciousness creates reality. And 100 years later, here I am talking to you in science hasn't gotten any closer to solving consciousness. Metaphysics is probably thousands of years ahead in that regard. We're talking about spirituality, and here's a quick exercise on our reality and perspective. Draw a line on a page and you look at it. It's obviously a line. But what if you zoom out or move a long distance away from the line? What is it? Then it becomes a dot. Is there a difference between a line and a dot? It's complicated. Science can't simply break something down into smaller parts and then declare understanding. We know each and every part of the thing that we study is a part of a whole part of a larger system. What we know isn't what we know. If we don't fully understand and see the interoperability of the whole, and we know we don't see the whole. You could argue here that complete spiritual enlightenment is the knowledge of the whole or seeing the whole. So maybe when you have that moment of clarity or understanding, some people call it an awakening. Maybe that is, you know, maybe that is complete understanding of the whole. I think this actually fits into this part of the overall puzzle of universal understanding, as the system is potentially infinite. And so we may have many blanks to fill in. Planck affirms. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts. He's saying that. We have to be able to look and try to find the whole. We can't just be so focused on the parts and say, this is the absolute truth here, because the equation says it is, or the experiment says science is truly important. We should embrace science, but metaphysics and philosophy is equally important in how we look at the whole. And here you have to use your imagination and intuition. He talks about imagination being important to new ideas. Being open and receptive is a core value. I believe imagination is critical to everything. Being open gets into reciprocity. and this is a fundamental truth for me. In a truly enlightened the world. Planck acknowledges the truth or falsity of an idea isn't really what's important. It's whether it gives rise to useful work. So I'm going to repeat that. It's not about whether something is true or false. It's about whether this idea leads to something useful. So when you're having a conversation with yourself, when you're having a conversation with someone else, think about that. It's that you have this desire to learn and grow and reach a greater understanding of the universe, of the whole. He points out that people have a passionate desire to understand and comprehend the philosophy of the world. It's the burning question through time. What are we? Who are we? Where do we come from and where are we going? Planck acknowledges that these are questions potentially best left to religion or spirituality. He rightly points out that the fallibility of religion is due to ecclesiastical overreach. We're talking about manmade dogma and these human touch points that obscure the truth in religion and spirituality from people, from individuals. He goes on to say that science is unlikely to get us where we want to go. Beyond. And I'd again remind you, this is coming from the father of quantum physics. He once said, what is learned in school is not as important as how it is learned. This again talks about our perspective and our approach to think. How are we approaching? How are we looking at things? How are we open to think? Look at your reality and beyond. And see the whole piece of art. Ultimately, this book struck me in a way that we must all look at this together as a whole. Science, art, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and history can guide us to a partial answer. If you want to understand, you should probably be open. Planck aptly wrote, the material must therefore be completed, and this must be done by filling the gap. And this in turn is done by means of associations, of ideas. This is his map to truth, associations of ideas. That's what open minded exploration of the universe is all about. But definitely heed this warning if you're closed off the whole sections of ideas and thought, you may never get to see the whole or even get close to a relative approximation of it because you're closed off. You're not open to these other ideas. Planck said, those who are ever striving forward, them we can save, these forward thinking people, these open minded people, those people that are striving forward, those are the people. Is what he's saying. Everything you do impacts what you see and what you believe. It changes. What you have decided is fact. We're all part of a tribe or tribes, and our tribes impact everything about us, our thoughts, and even our scientific endeavors. It permeates our reality. So consider how the people you surround yourself with change your reality. Also, consider what your inner space is telling you. And check out our video on Intuition’s Secret Path. And until next time I wish you peace on your journey.