Much Ado About Nearly Nothing
With the demise of our spacetime foundational background—the physical space/place where stuff happens—goes pernicious Scientific Imperialism: doctrinal Realism/Materialism that has colonized the Western mind. The “naturalness problem”: cosmologists admit that 96 percent of physical cosmos is metaphysical—spooky, utterly ineffable dark matter and dark energy. Merely 4 percent of cosmos is physically “real” atomic matter! The mechanistic cognitive architecture for local realism and monistic materialism has been blown asunder! The ontic seed for a centrist metaphysic—perhaps a Dzogchen/quantum emptiness proto-idealist panpsychism—has been sown. A Kuhnian paradigm busting shock to four centuries of Baconian/Cartesian Modernity, to be sure. “All that can be shaken shall be shaken” (Dōgen Zinji).
In the beginning was the universal wave function Ψ, cosmos itself. Eugene Wigner’s “consciousness causes collapse” of the indeterminant superposed probability states of Schrödinger’s non-physical ĤΨ into physical, objective, determinant eigenstates seems required. That a conscious observer is requisite is the prodigious “quantum measurement problem”. Who is it, this observer before conscious beings evolve to observe and measure things? Theists use the concept of a theistic creator God observing His separate creation. Non-theists find such dualism troubling. The notion “observer” presumes a relative duality of an observer, and something else observed. Yet, from a nondual ultimate view there is no observer and no thing observed—no subject/object split. The yogi contemplatively surrenders such adventitious duality. From a trans-conceptual nondual wisdom view primordial awareness—boundless whole, consciousness-being-itself (in which possible conscious beings are self-reflexively instantiated)—is the observer. Here there is no “observer problem”. The cognitive coupling of observing subject with its apprehended object is a prior yet present nondual ontological unity.
Physics’ Promethean epistemic challenge is this: that greatest of human intellectual achievements, the Standard Model of particles and forces with its Concordance ΛCDM Cosmology, still strains against its intrinsic quantum uncertainty, clinging to the orthodox classical paradigm metaphysic—the deterministic Scientific Realism of a bygone Newtonian cosmos.
Again, the furniture of this “inflationary hot Big Bang universe” is presumed to be observer-independent, objectively real physical objects existing in a causal, local spacetime reality. “Locality” is place, spacetime location, physical support/ground state for arising stuff. Subtle non-locality transcends, yet embraces this foundational background. Indeed, apparitional material spacetime cosmos naturally emerges from non-spatiotemporal kosmos, a more fundamental ontic substrate (alaya vijnana), spacetime’s primordial matrix base (gzhi rigpa) ontologically prior even to the zero point energy vacuum ground (ZPE) continuously arising herein.
