At the Edges of Science: Mechanism, Evidence and Consciousness

What happens when the movement away from substance reaches questions science usually leaves at its edge—rebirth, the reported powers of contemplatives, and consciousness itself? The two sections below are not further milestones in the history traced in the previous chapter. The first asks what the collapse of intrinsic causal power does, and does not, permit us to say about phenomena usually dismissed as impossible; the second sets beside the Dharma one contemporary physicist's attempt to make consciousness fundamental, and marks where the Madhyamaka must part company with it.

Ordinary Magic

Once causal power is seen to have no real anchor anywhere—once it is understood that fire does not possess a hidden force that produces burning, that dependent arising has no engine, and that the pattern is not a thing either, only conditions met, designated and working—a strange reversal follows. The bell struck, the sound heard: it is tempting to file this under 'ordinary', and to file rebirth, or the reported powers of advanced contemplatives, under 'extraordinary', as though the first rested on a real mechanism the second lacked. But the mechanism connecting the striking of a bell to the hearing of it—air, eardrum, cochlea, nerve—is itself only a further description of the same dependent pattern; no intrinsic causal power has ever been found anywhere along it either. What gets called ordinary was never explained. It was only witnessed so often, by so many, so reliably, that its unexplainedness stopped being visible. Familiarity quietly did the work that explanation was supposed to do. Seen without that familiarity, the bell is exactly as unaccountable as anything ordinarily dismissed as impossible. The only real difference between them is how used to one we have become.

This does not mean that whatever has been dismissed as impossible should now be assumed true. That would trade one error for another—replacing 'it cannot happen because there is no medium to carry it' with 'it must happen because emptiness permits it', which claims far more than emptiness actually delivers. What dissolves is a specific objection: the assumption that a phenomenon must be rejected for lacking a connecting mechanism with intrinsic causal power, when no phenomenon, anywhere, has ever had one. What does not dissolve, and should not be pretended to, is the separate question of whether a given phenomenon is actually observed to occur, and how reliably. Removing a bad argument against something is not the same as supplying a good argument for it. Both matters deserve to be held honestly, and separately.

It is on this second, harder ground—not the philosophical permission but the evidence itself—that the work of the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson deserves real credit. For decades, Stevenson investigated children's reports of memories from a previous life, and did something rare in this territory: he insisted on the same discipline any careful scientist would demand elsewhere. He sought cases where a child's stated memories could be checked against an identifiable deceased person's actual, verifiable life, ideally before any contact between the two families had occurred. He looked for correlating details—birthmarks and birth defects that matched documented wounds on the deceased, named individuals, specific unverifiable-in-advance facts later confirmed. He catalogued thousands of such cases across many cultures, attempting the kind of methodological rigour the substantialist framework claims such territory can never receive—an attempt that has drawn serious methodological criticism as well as credit. Whatever conclusion one draws from that body of work, it was not casual, and it was not credulous. It was an honest attempt to bring evidential standards to a question usually dismissed before it is examined, and the dismissal itself is too often driven by taboo and by a demand for the wrong kind of proof—the kind a substantialist, mechanism-first framework requires and which, as this book has argued, no phenomenon, ordinary or otherwise, has ever actually supplied.

The deeper point, though, is not particular to rebirth. Connection without a found carrier is not a fringe idea: as the Bell section of the previous chapter showed, correlation with nothing found travelling between the correlated events is confirmed at the very foundation of physics—though only between entangled systems, and with no possibility of sending a signal, so it lends rebirth no direct support. What it removes is only the objection that every connection must have a carrier.

Federico Faggin and the Aliveness of Manifestation

When the relational picture of physics is carried over to the nature of mind and matter, the rigid wall between the 'subject' and the 'object' crumbles. Physicist and computing pioneer Federico Faggin bridges this gap by shifting the focus to the nature of consciousness itself, arguing that materialist reductionism cannot bridge the gulf between inanimate brain tissue and subjective experience.

Faggin holds that physical matter is not the source of experience but its outer, symbolic aspect, and that consciousness is not an accidental byproduct of dead matter. Read from this book's side, that view loosens the grip of matter as a standalone substance. Within pure perception, there is no isolated, permanent 'witness' standing back to observe an external world; rather, you are the manifestation itself. On Faggin's view—a contested minority position (Irriducibile, 2022; English translation Irreducible, 2024)—consciousness and its inner experience are fundamental to reality itself. Here the Madhyamaka parts company with him: to make consciousness fundamental is to install one more ground.

Function Without Substance

Perhaps the deepest convergence between these two independent paths can be expressed in a single principle: function does not require substance. Gravity functions, evolution functions, language functions, economies function, consciousness functions, and mathematics functions. None of these phenomena require the postulation of an intrinsic essence hidden beneath appearances in order to exhibit coherent regularities. Their intelligibility lies entirely in their organization, their relationships, and the conditions under which they arise. This insight does not deny reality; rather, it reconsiders what reality consists of, as the search for hidden substances gradually gives way to the investigation of relational intelligibility.

Beyond Science

The Dharma continues where science necessarily pauses. It asks what becomes of suffering when the illusion of intrinsic existence dissolves, what becomes of fear when identity is understood as dependently arisen, and what becomes of separation when experience is recognized as relational through and through. These are not questions physics or cognitive science were designed to answer; they belong fundamentally to the domain of wisdom.

The convergence explored in this Part should therefore not be viewed as a final destination, but as an open invitation. Science has progressively revealed a universe that is increasingly relational, participatory, and dynamic. The Dharma invites the realization of the existential significance of that insight. One investigates the world; the other transforms the mode of being within it. Together, they suggest a vision of reality that is neither built from independently existing substances nor reduced to mere abstraction, but understood as dependently designated through and through—coherent, intelligible, functional, and open. The journey from substance to relation is therefore not merely a scientific revolution, but an invitation to reconsider what it means to exist, to know, and ultimately, to awaken.