When Einstein Met Tagore | Hacker News Reader

When Einstein Met Tagore

brainpickings.org

140 pointsdboles9927 comments

I'm sure nobody in the Tel Aviv municipality thought of this when they had Einstein St. and Tagore St. intersect just near Tel Aviv University [1]

[1] - http://goo.gl/maps/dASWE

Haha, that's amazing!

Wow, there's a Tagore St in Tel Aviv ?

Offtopic but in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Israel intersects with Palestine: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=-34.597823,-58.424972&num=1&v...

The crux.

Tagore: "According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion."

Indian philosophy has long held that there is no individual consciousness, but something encompassing the whole: - Knowledge is just that, knowledge, and it just exists; like numbers, pythagorous theorem etc. - Reality (as consumed by human mind) is result of senses interacting with that knowledge, and producing the illusion of individual. More importantly, it creates "observed knowledge". - The relationships within observed knowledge, which are uncovered by mathematics. Observed knowledge "shadows" the reality, but at no point can we say that observed knowledge is exactly same as reality. - Exactly as we can manipulate the information in computer, the observed knowledge itself can be manipulated. For example, one could add a new "sense" and thus sense the reality in wholly new manner.

So, if anybody says "There is an entity independent of the observed reality, and thus can manipulate it independent of the rules of that reality", then they are merely creating another observed reality.

But then, Indian philosophy further goes ahead and says the consciousness is independent of all this, and therefore, it will forever be creating newer and newer experiences out of the contents of the reality.

So if you identify yourself with brain, all you are saying is that "it is simply not possible to derive any more knowledge other than what senses + mathematics give us".

Instead, if you identify yourself as an entity independent of knowledge itself, then at least there is possibility of finding out if there is an ultimate reality much beyond the brain, and most important, it should "free you" from the bodily limitations.

And hence in India (in particular, the Advaita philosophy) they say, you are "Brahman", i.e. you are yourself God, but you mis-identify yourself as body and brain.

(As an aside, if you come to India, check out the religious channels and listen to Gurus talking there. Most of them convey this very philosophy to its very core!)

Please be warned about "Gurus" in India. Most of them are manipulative, corrupt scumbags. I would highly recommend not getting your dose of Indian philosophy from them.

I would further add that each and every person's journey of inquiry is personal and also encompasses their experiences of being manipulated, whether through institutions like the church or mosques or through individual conmen like many indian gurus.

Some of them, like Steve Jobs, manage to break away from this illusion and seek to find their inner truth through their personal work and others through their charity work. ultimately, though, the journey is personal and usually unique.

Great documentary called Kumaré Gets into this. He creates his own philosophy and identity. Great watch! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865425/

This Documentary was awesome to say the least. With many human mental shortcomings on display. But just to clarify, Tagore was not such a "Guru". He was a poet, philosopher, artist and a true genius of our times. Despite his looks he wasn't a religious "guru"

I don't think this conversation actually happened. It does not read at all like Einsteins other conversations.

I feel like some follower of Tagore may have authored this after the death of Einstein.

You'd think Einstein would have occasionally asked a follow-up question or Tagore might have asked Einstein a question or two.

Here are quotations from both Tagore and Einstein about their childhood experiences in school:

http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html

Probably that contributed to Tagore re-thinking the environment/methods of teaching and establishment of Santiniketan where one of the main objectives was to make the learning more enjoyable and being closer to nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiniketan

Some of Tagore's work is available as volunteer-recorded public domain mp3 and ogg files from librivox.org -- the recordings for Tagore's book "Sadhana: The Realization of Life" are very well done, by a volunteer named Peter Yearsley http://librivox.org/sadhana-by-rabindranath-tagore-v2/

How unfortunate that no physical recording of this meeting exists. At any rate, "For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent" is a superb representation of the difficulty Westerners have in comprehending "the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man" and the associated experiences. (Before psychedelics, anyway.)

Tagore: "It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings."

It was an interesting discussion, but WRT "previously examined definitions of science", quoted from the article, I did not see anything in the general area of science discussed or anything resembling an application of the scientific method along the lines of falsifiable logical predictions based about testable experiments and so on. I think a discussion along those lines with the same characters would be interesting, although this small excerpt was pretty far away from those specific topics.

The metaphors Tagore is using are confusing, at least to me, but this is definitely in the realm of "Philosophy of Science." It's funny because I can't really spot a practical consequence of the difference in their model of the world, functionally speaking.

Einstein says he believes there is a reality which exists independent of the human mind. When we leave the kitchen the table remains, even though we can't see it. It seems like for Einstein this is less of a metaphysical belief and actually a scientific postulate. I could imagine him saying, "It might not be true, but I don't know how one can do meaningful science with any other premise."

Tagore, OTOH, imagines a "Universal Mind", compatible with certain aspects of our own mind, that "anchors" reality for us. It's this universal mind we're discovering when we're doing science, not some foreign reality.

To be honest, these two pictures of the world seem isomorphic as far as science is concerned. That seems like it might've been part of Tagore's point, when he said "In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings." Here is a thing which could very well be true but nevertheless couldn't be demonstrated scientifically.

In many ways his worldview reminds me of True Arithmetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_arithmetic), which circumvent's Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem at the cost of being undecidable and recursively innumerable. As soon as we constrain our set of arithmetical axioms to something that a "finite mind" can handle, so to speak, we wind up with true-but-unprovable theorems.

True Arithmetic encapsulates the whole universe of Truth when it comes to arithmetic, but in a way that makes it impossible for us to do any meaningful work. Once we constrain ourselves in a way that allows us to do meaningful work, it becomes impossible to ever reach True Arithmetic.

This debate interweaves lots of metaphysics and epistemology, which are things scientists can and do discuss. See, e.g., realism vs. positivism vs. instrumentalism vs. empiricism.

Interesting, my take on Einstein's POV is that there is a reality (God, Nirvana, etc.) that is independent of reality as we know it, and therefore has nothing to do with anything -- thus Einstein's claim that it is his religious belief, and not something that can be proven scientifically.

The kitchen table argument is quite fascinating. One could argue that nothing exists without oneself to observe it; i.e. when walks away from the kitchen, does the kitchen continue to exist, or has the reality of the living room now come into Mind? i.e. all that exists is what we are currently experiencing and everything else is a delusion.

Or, delusions are endless, as the Zen masters teach.

This is a fascination article by Roger Penrose where he argues well (imho) that there must really be a reality. http://www.mintinnovation.com/links/docs/Mind_and_consciousn...

You can play a lot of thought experiments about scientific experiments to test if the table disappears. As far as I know at this time, they all devolve into the brain-in-a-vat or the bad-actor solution (although I may have the names mixed up). The brain in a vat is we're brains in a vat connected to a really high end "second life" computer server. The bad actor argument boils down to some god is testing our faith by trying to fool us (usually heard about fossils, or the earth being round, etc)

>...if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

Tagore makes an interesting argument that is certainly true on some level. I think further reading may be required. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Check this http://www.vedantaadvaita.org/AdvaitaVedanta_2.htm#heading_t...

The keyword is "Advaita" = non duality

I feel a bit ashamed to say this, but as a polymath, wasn't Tagore's specific knowledge limited compared to Einstein's, who had been doing distributed work solely in scientific fields rather than spreading his knowledge thin with political matters and theology? Obviously the conversation in question doesn't involve much science, but if Tagore did have the scientific stature to debate Einstein with concrete detail, one could wonder why the conversation seemed metaphysical rather than concrete.

There is nothing inherently wrong with metaphysics.

And this debate is some seriously good metaphysics. To me this is the kind of writing that is going to keep me busy for quite a while.

Ah, philosophy. My version of this:

Q: Do questions exist?

A: Only if someone asks them.

Q: Do answers exist?

A: Sometimes, when there are questions.

Q: Do answers exist without someone to ask the questions?

A: No

The question is who is asking this and there may not be an answer and that (the state of realization) could be the truth.

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