Energy and Emptiness

You cannot make something out of nothing.

This is a basic law in both Physics and Buddhism.

The key (particularly in Buddhism) is the some-thing. You cannot make a thing out of nothing, you must make a thing out of another thing.

This is the essence of the Law of Causation and Dependent Arising. Things no not arise without first the conditions and cause all being present.

Anyone who has tried to make a camp fire knows they need to get the conditions just right and then you apply the spark, or work if using a friction method to generate the initial heat. Fires do not just happen in space by themselves.

Now not all things are things. I like the every day example of baking a cake. No one would say a cake was anything like flour, butter, sugar, egg or oven heat. But put them all together just right with a bit of extra work and you have cake. You can sell the cake for more than the ingredients not just because you have added some extra energy, but because a "cake" is not like its ingredients and it has a completely different taste and look. A baker has apparently made something completely new out of nothing. One moment there is no cake in the kitchen, come back in an hour and there is magically a cake.

But we know there is some kind of illusion here because no cake was smuggled in secretly, and we also note that the raw ingredient mix has disappeared and in its place is a cake. So we say that the ingredients have "cooked" and turned into a cake. So we know that there is nothing new here, its still just the ingredients but they have changed.

Now how is change possible if you have the same ingredients before and after? Nothing new is made by the universe and yet things are always changing. What is change?

They call this emergent property in modern physics and maths. From simple processes you can get quite unexpected behaviours. These apparently new things were not baked into the system, they have emerged. Conway's game of life was one of the first to popularise this idea that simple rules applied to a field can create startlingly original results. It turns out that this simple game is Turing complete which means you can do anything with it. 

So if the building blocks are simple where does the complexity exist? I have written a lot about this in blog so won't repeat but it does not exist! In Buddhism and Hinduism they say it is in the "mind."

Now we might protest. When a lion takes down a gazelle this is not the work of an individual leg or jaw, this is the combined work of a complete entity working together. A whole lion must exist, and it must be different from its parts. Unless you have a whole functioning lion then the gazelle could just walk away. Say the heart fails then suddenly no threat at all! Now try and tell the gazelle that the lion is just an emergent property of atoms and basic processes.

And we can dive straight in to Buddhism there because of course the gazelle is just an emergent property! To which it protests I am a gazelle don't try and break me down into atoms and basic processes (I am thinking of of the inimitable James Hendry on WildEarth or AfriCams saying that). But this is the essence of the illusion of Self. You may try and put a solid entity into the emergent properties surrounding the area you think is yourself, but don't be mistaken there is nothing there beyond the ingredients! So when the gazelle gets eaten by the lion or indeed runs away and escapes no question this is all happening, but it's a mistake the imply from it that there is an ingredient call a Lion and another called a Gazelle. I mean if a Lion was made of a Lion then it would not be made would it, and all things are made: Genesis is right about that. A lion must be made from things that are not lion and so a Lion itself is not a fundamental entity of the universe. And neither are we!

So where does Energy and Emptiness come into this?

Well if all things are made, and are really no more than their ingredients then you can't make something out of nothing. You can only make something out of exactly the right ingredients and so there is never any gain.

I sometimes think its a bit depressing that something as extraordinary as a lion is really no more than the soil and sunlight that grows the grass that feeds the kudu that feeds the lion, along with an admittedly extraordinary process of evolution to fashion the DNA and other things that make a lion's egg and sperm: the seeds for a lion. But I think any depression we feel over this thought comes from the way the Sciences have separated the Material from the Living. Isn't it ridiculous that there is nothing in the Living world other than Matter and yet we divide the world into Living things and inanimate physical matter,. They are the same, it is just a play of words to separate them. So nothing less amazing about the soils in which plants grow than the plants themselves. All part of the system. And of course another angle on that is that Depression itself is just made, it is just an emergent property of ingredients that are not themselves Depression.

This idea that there is never any gain, and in fact all things are the same is Emptiness. The name "emptiness" stems from the idea that if the ingredients of a cake are no different from a cake then the cake itself has no substance or contents and so is empty. We say that the reflection of something on water is empty because it is an illusion. But if we can be tricked into thinking a reflection is something then are we not tricked by the thing itself into thinking it is something? After all a reflection is only possible because we normally use light to identify things and so when we reflect that light to take a different path to our eyes we get the illusion of the thing being somewhere it is not. If we really saw things then reflections would be impossible!

Quick attention to the possible sophistry there. So context is everything. A reflection is a reflection and seeing the source of the reflection is not a reflection. Looking at the Moon is not a reflection, but seeing it reflected in water is a reflection. These are the normal meanings of the words in usual context, and not everything is a reflection. However it gives us a useful tool for analysing the experience of vision. A reflection looks like the source object, yet it has no substance to it. You put your hand into the water to pick up the moon and it disappears in ripples. You have been tricked into thinking something was there when it wasn't. Now obviously you send a rocket to the moon and you can walk on the real Moon. This is not a reflection like the one in the water. This is the normal context of these discussions. But look again. Once we have been tricked we realise that the image is not by itself proof that something is there. This means that the "look" of something is empty! The image is empty and we need do some more investigating to decide if it is backed by a real thing. Now on deeper investigation we come to see all phenomena through all the senses as empty. They are just pictures or feelings of the world and we need do more work to find out what the world is really like. This is the process of Science taking data (seeing the Moon) and turning it into solid facts like landing on the Moon. But now the question of which is the authority. Do you believe what you see or what you are taught or know? And we see we are not clear of trouble yet. Abandon seeing the Moon and turn to Science and we then have to trust people and we are still in an uncertain shadowy world. Funny that even after landing on the Moon many people think this is an illusion created by NASA. So it turns out you can't ever get Solid Facts. Everything is uncertain to some degree. So we return back to the senses. When you are seeing the Moon, whether it is reflection or not, we have an image of the Moon. This image, reflection, phenomenon, vision whatever it is, that is Real. It is there and it is manifest before us. But it is empty. We don't feel too happy with empty things to begin with because we are grasping beings and we like to profit and to possess (maybe just because we live under the doctrine of Capitalism?). But with practice we realise that empty or not makes no difference to phenomena: they are there whatever we think about them.

But the Emtpiness of phenomena is their power. Being empty they can change. And this gives us the richness of experience which is always changing and alive. Because a Cake is not different from its ingredients the actual "Cakeness" that we like is empty and has no substance to it. And this means that it can change. The grasping person may struggle with this because the like cake and they want it to exist in some permanent way and last forever. And then it is eaten and gone and they no longer have any cake and they must let go of it. But without the emptiness of that phenomenon we would be stuck with the solid matter of if and we would have to take that sensation of cake and take it down the tip at some stage to dispose of it. But we are lucky. As soon as the conditions change the sensation of cake is completely gone with nothing left and we are experiencing something else.

This fact that nothing is ever really created, that the substance of the universe is the same yesterday as it is today (the cake is no different from its ingredients) and the change is just empty phenomena means that at root the universe does not change, and the change we experience is just an empty reflection occurring on this static universe. We have the best of both worlds in this reality, all the vibrancy of a changing world but set upon a stable and permanent stage.

Now where is all this in Physics. Well Noether observed that symmetry in the universe turns up as Conservation Laws.

https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Classical_Mechanics/Supplemental_Modules_(Classical_Mechanics)/Conservation_of_Mass_and_Energy/Noether's_Theorem_for_Energy#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20Noether's%20theorem%20says%20that,ll%20call%20this%20time%20symmetry.

And all the above is an exposition of a conservation Law that nothing is every made or destroyed. This is the same as the Conservation of Energy. The sum of energy before and after is always the same. This is the same observation that the Cakeness of a cake cannot be any different from the ingredients. The origin of this in Physics is the observation that the Laws of physics do not change. When Newton devised his laws in the C18th he did it in a Universe that works the exact same way today. In this sense Physics is saying the same that the Universe does not change. So if the Laws are constant, and the Energy is constant then how do things happen?

Well its the same issue as Emptiness. There is no energy in the happening itself. Happening does not itself exist. If a Planet orbiting a Star manifested as a new Planet at each instant then very quickly the whole orbit would be filled and it would crash into itself. The Planet must manifest and then transform into the New Planet perfectly with no left over so in fact nothing really changes. We may go well its moved I can see that, but we are ignoring the gravitational acceleration to keep it in orbit and a weird thing that movement itself is relative. You can't see a thing move by itself. You must look at it in relation to something else.

When Newton says in his 2nd Law that a body continues in a constant state of motion until affected by a force he is saying that our state of motion does not change. He does not stay we "keep moving." To be "moving" we need measure that state of motion against something else. If we measure against something going one way we will be going the other and vice versa. There is no actual "movement" only a state of motion that does not change, although what it is depends how we measure it! So we don't actually ever have a fixed motion, and we we see things moving they are not inherent to the thing but a feature of the difference between things. In a universe with just 1 thing it would have no motion! It could experience acceleration and speeding up and down and we could keep track of that in our mobile phone accelerometers, but since we could not measure our starting motion we could never infer absolutely what our motion was, only the change. It is weird to think that motion is only ever relative. Seeing the planet move around the Sun we think that motion is somehow fixed and solid, but its only relative to the Sun and how that is moving we don't know. This is why the Galaxy Song in Monty Python's Meaning of Life feels so unintuitive. True we are travelling incredibly fast relative to galactic centre etc but we are not really "moving" as motion is not real, only ever relative. You can chose how fast you are going just by picking your point of reference. It is acceleration that is real. So going "well it moved I can see that" is not so absolute as we think. It is actually an empty, relative phenomenon like the reflection of the moon.

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Actually acceleration is dv/dt. So it is still relative just relative in time. We look at the motion at t0 and then at t1 and measure the change is relative motion and we have the average acceleration. The only thing in all this that is supposedly fixed is time and space in that you can fix a moment in time and a point in space. But you can't all you can do is decide that a particular measurement is your starting measurement. Quite what they is in "reality" you have no idea.