Mindflex- Kabballah- Quantum Mechanics of The Spiritual World- Rabbi Adam Jacobs- Part 1

asked to speak about kabbalah and um there may be a kabbalistic aspect to all this uh especially in that it deals with the concept of oneness of which i think there is no more kabbalistic concept i think that's the entire kabbalah is trying to explain the nature of the universe and the fact of its oneness i think you know you could summarize all of judaism that way to some degree but i'm going to come to it from a slightly different angle i'd like to share some ideas about science and some theological ideas from the writer c.s lewis who was uh not a jewish man but a very fascinating thinker and a person with a lot of insight and i think the two ideas will complement each other and i hope in a kabbalistic way we'll present a picture of a hint as to what the ultimate nature of the universe is the one that both science and theology are striving to understand there are of course of course are those who think that those two things are in conflict um famously maimonides from a jewish perspective did not think there was any conflict and thought any conflict that appeared was a result of a misunderstanding either on the scientific end or on the judaic end would be that as it may i'm in the camp that says everybody is looking for the truth and science comes to it from one angle and theology from another and i think the two camps can gain a lot from each other and i think in many ways are very complementary and more than most people think in my subjective opinion science is showing that spiritual matters are perhaps real and there's a great benefit to spirituality from the contribution of science and that's been going on for a very long time so to start off we've all heard the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that's an interesting concept that you could take a certain number of something and all of a sudden it'd be more than it was before it doesn't make sense if you think about it if you have for instance um one grain of sand and you add another one to it you just have two grains of sand and that's kind of it and if you continue to do that process you will just have more and more mounds of sand and you know until their dunes and you know beaches and and you have a lot of sand um and that's true isn't it interesting though that you can take a cell a human cell for instance and add another cell to it and no one would say that those individual cells have consciousness they may be very fascinating entities and which they are and there's there's a whole discussion that can be had scientifically and theologically exactly about how did the cell end up having the level of complexity that it does would be that as it may you still just have two cells or a thousand cells and and there should be nothing greater than that collection of cells and yet we all know of course that somehow a human being ends up being assembled as a result of the joining together of cells yet a human being is much more than just a collection of cells the whole is greater than the sum of its parts it's also a fascinating question how that group of cells became aware of itself how a human being has consciousness and that is a fascinating topic for another time but okay so we have this notion and we understand it that somehow when you add things up there is some grander results than the bits that you have assembled to create that result and that's a fascinating thing okay so physics for more than 100 years has been revealing wild things about the nature of the universe totally counterintuitive stuff um the more you look into it again in my opinion and i think uh i'll read you some quotes momentarily and i think you'll agree that sometimes physicists sound like theologians and what they're saying the uh the nature of physical reality is far stranger than it appears on the surface and that's that's been known like i said for a very long time the fact that uh you know the computer that you're watching this on is known to not be a solid object in any sense is very counterintuitive you know that the fact that it's mostly empty space does not seem to be the case you know and the farther down you go into your computer into the particles that make it up the more and more ephemeral those particles become until get down to the quark level and particles seem to be popping in and out of existence constantly and some some scientists liken those particles more to information than they do to matter so on the deepest level everything that we perceive is information and we might ask the question where did that information come from and that's an important question to ask you know how is it just there um and one of the great thinkers of all time in physics name was werner heisenberg perhaps you've heard of him coffee break um so he famously formulated a concept known as heisenberg's uncertainty principle and that principle essentially says that there is a limit to the precision that we can know complementary physical variables of a particle such as its position and its momentum meaning that when we look at subatomic particles and we try to understand them we will not be able to perceive the full picture in its entirety we'll be able to know part of the picture you can know its momentum but not its um spin or you can know its position um but you know you can't know its momentum um why is it that when we try to look down and see these particles we fail why why can't you why can't we understand them better and there may be many physical reasons for that but what it seems as though is the very act of measuring those particles precludes the ability to to understand what they are as if the measurement is interfering with the perception of the thing and in other experiments that physics has done and the the active measurement seems to affect the way that the matter the particle behaves um which is also which is totally counterintuitive uh how would you ex why would you expect subatomic matter to respond to your attempt to measure it how how does it know that you're doing that um and so there's a famous experiment called the double slits experiments where photons lightest shots against a photographic plates you know that has two slits in it and um and as we would expect generally there's an even distribution of the photons that are on the panel behind it which are recording these photons landing but as soon as we choose to measure and to try to see which slit the light is going into it affects the number of photons that goes through the slits if we try to if we focus on this one more of them go into this one and less into this one and if we do nothing there's an even distribution again seemingly affecting the way that matter is behaving and um which is very mysterious um okay so commenting on the nature of particles again the great physicist niels bohr once made the surprising observation that it is a mistake to think that a particle ever existed prior to our measurements isolated material particles are as he says abstractions it's a mistake to think that the particle ever existed prior to our measurements so in it sounds like and this is you know it's not this is a secular scientist you know um it sounds like the act of measuring the particle or attempting to measure the particle kind of creates it and that's weird um you know why why should that be how could that be and the more that they talk about this stuff as i said the stranger it seems to get and therefore they talk about particles as existing in these super states these superpositions where they're kind of everywhere at once and only when you go to look at it do all the manifold possibilities of those various states that exist all at once become isolated and a particular reality of that particle manifests itself even though it wasn't like that before it existed in some other form some other plane until we wanted to know about it and then it became real and this is this is straight out of physics not science fiction not star trek physics from from a long time ago so um if the particle didn't exist before we measured it what exactly was it before so again according to heisenberg he said the particle was quotes a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality oddly prior to our measurement the particle is said to exist everywhere in a state of superposition as we said up until the time that we attempt to locate it at which point we are able to discern certain qualities that it has but not others okay some scientists go even farther and there this is a he's a great writer of um science if you are interested his name is paul davies and um i've had the pleasure of reading uh several of his works he's one of these guys who can take you know very high flute and scientific concepts and make it accessible to regular people by the way i i don't have any scientific background i didn't even do particularly well in biology in high school i have a layman's interest in all this and the thoughts that i'm presenting here are a a combination of kabbalistic ideas popular science ideas that are certainly available to everyone um and my own reflections on on the topic so anyway paul davies wrote a an article called particles do not exist um so he says that we find the particle concept is nebulous and ideally it should be abandoned completely physicist john gribben agrees and writes quotes we call those objects particles for want of a better name what they really are we do not know the particle concept is simply a crutch ordinary mortals can use to help them towards an understanding of mathematical laws it's an additional question you know what is a mathematical law and where do those come from and and where do they exist how do you how is it that a mathematical law governs a physical thing where where is the law written how does the physical particle or any aspect of matter how does it know to behave according to the mathematical law it's another mystery and if you read the words of some mathematicians to boot i would say that they have an almost religious sounding um tone and reverence for what they describe as the mathematical world which is a world that is revealed it's a world that's discovered as opposed to invented so the mathematicians do not think that they are inventing math they are discovering it and they discover that it already had existed long before they came along and considered it so all this is part of the same direction and and is one of them to me is one of the most fascinating aspects of of life is that many many things that we take for granted from math to meaning to happiness to love to concepts and of justice and we're going to talk about this tomorrow night by the way a little bit more um don't seem to manifest in a physical sense at all and the question might be how do we know that they exist and what are they and where do they come from and math falls into this category physics calls and this falls into this category and particle physics is especially fascinating because as the great physicists say they don't know what the heck articles are or where they come from and they can't really measure them yet everything in reality and material reality is built from them so it's not interesting so we don't know the most basic stuff um about the most obvious aspect of life which is our uh our physical existence and that's not to say that they're not working on a greater understanding or that they want to arrive at one and that's not to devalue science in any regard i have very high regard for scientists and scientific inquiry so i hope that i'm not coming across that way i'm just pointing i think that they're doing us a great favor by pointing out the a very unusual and contradictory facet of of reality and that helps us in some ways and i'll try to explain a little more okay so maybe it is that our inability to perceive particles is not due to the specific nature of the particle itself which eludes measurements maybe it's because really what we're dealing with is a unified whole the name of this talk heisenberg the tao and the unbreakable one maybe that one cannot be broken down and when we attempt to break it down we become confused because it's like trying to grasp some tiny little piece of an immense puzzle you know if you were to uh visit the louvre which with your mask maybe you can do that these days um and go and look at the mona lisa but you were restricted to looking at a one by one millimeter portion of the mona lisa um you would not get it nobody would and that's to be expected you know you see a little black and smudge you know and you'd say you conclude that that that's confusing and doesn't you know i don't really know what to make of it it's not significant um obviously if you step back and you look at the totality ah now you see what it is you know and um and life is like that in general we are doing our best with fragmentary evidence limited powers of perception limited brain capacity and we're trying to piece together an understanding of of what life is about and i i like to think that science and theology and philosophy are partners in that endeavor and they are working together of course we know that oftentimes they perceive each other as being at odds with each other i mentioned that before i think that's unfortunate and i also think it's false um i think each has a lot to teach the other and okay so this concept of trying to isolate a piece of a whole and making sense of it and failing to do that has ramifications not just in physics but i think in ethics and morality as well and that's where c.s lewis comes in um he wrote a fascinating book called the abolition of man and he wrote about what he described as a comprehensive morality and he referred to that morality as the tao dao which is an eastern term and and he was a christian theologian so i'm not precisely sure why he decided to call it that but uh but he did and um and basically this tao of i'll pronounce it like that um is morality it is what it is it is the system of morality that cannot not be reduced cannot be revised it cannot be changed it can't be critiqued i mean you could critique it but you know in his way of thinking you would just simply just be wrong you know like you could critique physics as well um but you know your feelings about the way that particles behave is not not really relevant so too in his way of thinking um this system of morality simply exists and to try to isolate parts of it in the same way that we try to isolate particles and try to make sense of what they are and fail in doing that so too we will fail in in discerning what is good and what is not good what is moral and what is immoral by trying to cherry-pick the quote-unquote parts that we like and the parts that we don't like so he said the following this thing which i have called for convenience the tau and which others may call natural law or traditional morality or first principles of practical reason or the first platitudes is not one of a series of possible systems of value it is the sole source of all value judgments if it is rejected all value is rejected if any value is retained it is retained the effort to refute it and to raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory so what does he mean by that i had a very interesting conversation actually last night um with a very bright young woman who um calls herself a utilitarian she uh she believes that the best that humanity humanity can do in terms of a moral practice is to produce the greatest amount of good measured in units actually for as many people as possible and on the surface of course that sounds like a nice thing and when you look deeply into it they seem to equate good with pleasure so that which is pleasurable is is good and they make a sort of general assumption that what most of humanity finds pleasurable is good and and most people agree on it i did point out that there are some cultures and some people who get a kind of pleasure for doing things that we would call bad and i wonder how these people would be accommodated in this system or sometimes there's entire cultures who do things um that they find pleasurable and meaningful that entire other cultures deem to be evil what happens in such a situation it seems to me that that's irresolvable and will lead invariably to conflict it's such a vague and nebulous understanding of what these terms good and bad are in fact in you know the opening of the description of utilitarianism uses the words good and bad to which i might wonder well can we can't we just define that before we talk about you know how to get those things um and if it's important to get those things and you know is it not the case that sometimes suffering is good and and pleasure is not good um but anyway as c as lewis says the terms right and wrong themselves are borrowed directly from the towel so as soon as you use one of those terms you have plucked off a piece of the tau of the ultimate moral system separate tried to separate it from the hole and said i like this bit and i reject the rest of it exactly the same as trying to isolate a particle and comprehend it which as we've demonstrated i think cannot be done so too you cannot isolate out of the entire totality of the moral system a peace and and say you want this peace but not the others because as soon as you say as soon as you acknowledge the existence of that peace and you say there is such a thing as actual good and actual bad you are speaking in absolute terms unless of course you simply throw up your hands and say listen um none of this is real we've just simply agreed to use these terms good and bad they don't have any actual meaning it's we're just playing we're playing a game we we made this up and we may change it in the future and this is the best we can do for right now there isn't actually any um right and wrong it seems to me of course at that moment that that person has forfeited their rights to comments on ethical matters because by their own admission tacitly they they say it doesn't exist um and this this is just something that we arbitrarily chose we could have chosen something else and in the future we may choose something quite different so again once you rest away the concept of good and bad and use it divorced from its original context which is a transcendent context context an absolute context we're no longer dealing with morality so he goes on to say there has never been and never will be a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world what purport to be new systems or as they now call them ideologies all consist of fragments from the tao itself arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the hole and then swollen to madness in their isolation yet still owing to the tao and to it alone such vitality as they possess okay great so i believe and i think it's um easily recognized and again i'm going to speak about this a little bit more tomorrow night that humanity deeply values unity and is striving to achieve what i would describe as a oneness people are attracted to being at one with each other this is the reason that i believe an organization like the un exists even though it's a highly flawed manifestation of this is it's an attempt to to unify the world to bring the entire world under one roof and to create oneness their science is searching for something called the unified field theory right now there are four fundamental forces of nature einstein and others simply assume that they're at the lowest point all four of those fundamental forces can be merged or they're all they all spring from one force which by the way i agree with i i might label that force god is the force behind the forces science has not yet come to that conclusion although they may um and what greater expression is there from certainly from a kabbalistic perspective from a judaic perspective the national anthem of the jewish people is the shema and the shema is a declaration of the ultimate unity of existence it's not simply as some people think a declaration that we believe in one god as opposed to two or more it is a declaration about reality itself which is that there is one miss that this world is a unified whole not just this world reality itself and for a very kabbalistic idea the four-letter proper name of god in judaism which is not meant to be pronounced is spelled you'd comes from a root meaning to be and is an interesting um interesting word that seems to comprise the words was is and will be simultaneously indicating that god who in the jewish conception of course is infinite is the totality of existence and the platform by in which and by which everything occurs um being itself and that works very well with what we're discussing if it is the case that god is an ultimate unity which i believe can be demonstrated philosophically um and i for the third time believe that science is pointing us in that direction and other things pointing us in that direction as well and hopefully someday the the world will come to the conclusion that this is the case and i think that people will get along much better when they do there's a lot of corollaries to this concept and a lot of implications for human behavior for morality for spirituality um and for understanding life in its ultimate proper context if that's possible um humanity is looking to be unified there there are obstacles but one of the obstacles i think is a an improper comprehension of the nature of reality itself and the more disunified and the more random people perceive reality to be they will follow a a breakdown in moral code because the conclusions of those beliefs are that morality is not real and ultimately i'm not accountable to my behavior but it has no ultimate meaning the corollary to a belief in the ultimate unity of reality which some people call god is that there is an abstract transcendence morality that is absolutes that c.s lewis calls the tau that cannot be broken down that cannot be changed if we are accountable to that we're going to all behave in a particular way in in in an elevated way um and the world would would vastly improve so they're these are not just ideas i think they are um critical aspects of of life that people would all benefit including myself from exploring in a deeper way the first of the ten commandments and i'm going to close with this is to know that there is a god it does not mean to have blind faith that there is one it means to go out and think and research and show to yourself that that must be the case um i believe that science physics especially has shown that i believe there are philosophers and theologians who have made extremely cogent arguments that demonstrate that and i believe that humanity as a whole is striving to move in that direction so these are my thoughts on on this topic and i look forward to speaking to you more tomorrow night and expanding on it in a slightly different direction but um thank you for being here and thank you for listening have a great evening bye