Book Reviews - Review 131

As books go that attempt to reconcile science and spirituality, this is much better than most, though ultimately the scientific "justification" that it offers for enjoying an optimistic and spiritual approach to life fails fully to convince me (but then I'm a miserable b*****d).

Gupta is certainly in a good position to contemplate the interface between the two world views, being the physicist son of a Hindu yogi. He struggled for years attempting to make a name for himself in materialist physics, but several chance meetings with open-minded people from both within and outside his own field finally led him to conclude that he in particular, and physics in general, was barking up completely the wrong tree by trying to find an explanation for both quantum mechanics and consciousness in terms of a reductionist, materialist paradigm. In short, Gupta ended by turning the whole thing on its head, and positing that mind, and not matter, is the fundamental "stuff" of the universe. This is the notion of monistic idealism, and it's been around at least since the time of Plato, although of course since the Renaissance, it hasn't had much of a following in Western thought.

Many would sneer at this very idea, but if one analyses one's preconceptions honestly, one has to acknowledge that there's no logical reason to reject it. Given the apparently intractable mystery of the relation between matter and mind, we should be open to looking at it from the opposite point of view from the usual one. After all, a lucid dream can conjure up an apparently material world out of "nothing". The idea that the whole universe could be one giant, impersonal dream may not necessarily follow from this observation, but the acknowledgement that what we perceive is not necessarily what "exists", in an absoluate sense, must do so.

At the heart of Gupta's argument is the paradox of Schroedinger's cat: that quantum indeterminacy can, in principle, be amplified up to the macroscopic level so that in the right circumstances, it's theoretically possible for a cat to be both alive and dead at the same time, as long as no one is actually observing it. If I understood correctly (and it must be said the author's train of thought is not always easy to follow), Gupta thinks the act of observing effectively "collapses the past" - that after determining the current state of the cat (which may or may not have been poisoned depending on whether a particle was emitted or not by a radioactive source), we can say whether it was or wasn't dead or alive till we looked; but while we weren't looking, the very question didn't make sense. Effectively, I think Gupta is suggesting, causality can work backwards in time. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's carefully considered the laws of physics as we currently know them: there is actually no scientific case against retrocausation beyond the rationalist, materialist "intuition" that it can't be.

Not being a physicist, I have to take for granted Gupta's argument that macro objects are indeterminate in the same way as quantum ones, and that their apparent consistency is due to their "very long regeneration time". He never explains what he means by a "regeneration time" but it seems to be something to do with "memories" that billions of quantum events, tightly linked with each other, create in the universe that result in the appearance of physical objects and predictable phenomena. Gupta seems to argue that the individual mind gives us direct access to the processes whereby the universe's memories are laid down - and that the individual mind, tied to a tiny, amplified subset of the universe's memories, is really just part of a larger consciousness.

If this sounds a tad wishy-washy, it must be emphasised that, at least in the earlier parts of the book, much of Gupta's thinking is rigorously thought out and indeed very subtle, requiring a good deal of imaginative effort to grasp. Even then, I struggled sometimes to apprehend the meaning of statements like this:

I honestly don't think Gupta is being pretentious or obscurantist here; rather, he doesn't always define his terms of reference adequately. His talk of "tangled hierarchies", using Maurice Escher's visual paradoxes as analogies, is similarly intriguing, but I didn't find it very clearly elucidated.

But then, these are difficult ideas, based partly on esoteric mystical insight and partly on the mathematical labyrinth of theoretical physics. I dare say the book would benefit from being read twice.

Or most of it, anyway. I admit that I skipped the last 50 or so pages, where Gupta leaves science to all intents and purposes behind, attempting to derive from the doctrine of monistic idealism justifications for universal love, the validity of romantic fulfilment, yadda yadda. My feeling (from reading other bits of his writing) is that Gupta found personal happiness at around the same time that he radically revised his ideas on physics, and felt compelled to infer a link between the two changes. Perhaps there was a link, but I can't say that it's persuasively established in this book. The result is that after a fascinating, if challenging, start and middle, it ends rather limply, sounding like so many of the "science and spirituality" efforts that offer reasonable pecuniary rewards for mystically inclined hack writers.

But it must be emphasised that Gupta isn't one of the latter: he's a respected academic physicist with a deep grounding in the subtleties of Eastern thought. If there's a gap in his thinking, it's in the area of neurology. It's very well to posit that the brain, like the rest of the material world, is a function of consciousness, but all the evidence is that the material structure of the brain has a direct, one-to-one correspondence with particular mental states - a correspondence that Gupta doesn't even acknowledge, let alone investigate.

So ultimately - and apologies if this counts as a "spoiler" for those who haven't read the book - Gupta doesn't locate the meaning of existence, but one has the feeling he's at least looking in the right places.