Independent Paths: What Science Gave Up

For much of history, both philosophy and science inherited a similar intuition about the cosmos. The world was assumed to be composed of independently existing things possessing intrinsic properties, situated within absolute space and absolute time, and observed by detached subjects. Whether expressed through the atomism of ancient Greece, the metaphysics of substance, or the triumph of Newtonian mechanics, this picture became so firmly embedded in human thought that it came to appear almost self-evident. Reality, it was assumed, must ultimately rest upon independently existing foundations.

The Buddhist tradition, particularly through the philosophy of Nāgārjuna, challenged this intuition nearly two thousand years ago. Rather than accepting the existence of independent substances, Madhyamaka subjected every claim to intrinsic existence to rigorous philosophical analysis. It concluded that no phenomenon—whether self, object, cause, space, time, or consciousness—possesses an independent essence. Everything arises only through dependent conditions. Emptiness is therefore not the denial of the world, but the absence of intrinsic existence that dependent arising, relational intelligibility and conventional functioning themselves demonstrate.

Yet over the last century and a half, many branches of modern science have independently begun questioning the very assumptions that classical science inherited. Across physics, the philosophy of science, and cognitive science, a gradual transformation has unfolded. Absolute space gave way to relational spacetime. Intrinsic properties became increasingly dependent upon experimental context. Detached observers became participants. Independently existing entities yielded to relational phenomena. Representation gave way to embodied participation and enacted meaning.

This historical convergence is philosophically significant. It does not mean that science has proven the Dharma, nor does it mean that Buddhism anticipated every discovery of modern science; such claims would misunderstand both traditions. Instead, the convergence provides something more subtle and, in many ways, more valuable. It demonstrates that one of humanity's most successful intellectual enterprises has, through its own methods, repeatedly encountered the limitations of classical substantialism. The questions that modern science now wrestles with—about relation, context, participation, emergence, and observer dependence—echo, in a different vocabulary, philosophical issues that the Buddhist tradition has examined for centuries.

This chapter follows that movement in five short steps — space and time, the properties of things, connection at a distance, the observer, and the mind — and the next turns to two questions at its edge. It is a survey, not a treatment: the physics is handled more fully, including the status of the wavefunction, in The Logical Necessity of a Substrateless World. Throughout, the claim is the same and modest: these developments resonate with the Dharma; they do not prove it.

Space and Time Without a Stage

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Newtonian worldview appeared virtually unassailable. Space was understood as an infinite, absolute container within which objects moved. Time flowed uniformly throughout the universe, independent of events. Motion was measured against this invisible but supposedly objective backdrop. Even when nothing else existed, Newton argued, absolute space itself remained. To most physicists, this seemed perfectly reasonable.

Mach asked a different question: how could absolute space ever be observed? If every measurement of motion is made relative to something else, what scientific meaning does an invisible, unobservable space possess? If absolute motion can never be detected independently of other bodies, why should science postulate its existence?

Consider the classic thought experiment of sitting in a smoothly moving train. If every window is covered, every vibration eliminated, and every external reference removed, can it be determined whether the train is moving at a constant speed? Galileo had already shown that it cannot, and Newton agreed: uniform motion cannot be detected from within. Yet Newton still held that the train has a true motion relative to absolute space, even if no experiment could ever reveal it. Mach asked what such an undetectable motion could mean.

Newton's own argument for absolute space turned not on uniform motion but on rotation. Water in a spinning bucket climbs the sides, and he took this to show rotation relative to absolute space itself. Mach replied that the water might be rotating relative to the distant stars—the whole mass of the universe—rather than to an invisible space. It was this reply, more than the train, that unsettled the idea of a container independent of its contents.

Mach’s most influential proposal concerned inertia. Why does a physical body resist acceleration? Classically, inertia was regarded as an intrinsic property of matter, inherent to the object itself. Mach proposed something quite different: perhaps inertia is not something an object possesses in isolation. Perhaps it arises because every object exists within the gravitational and dynamical relations of the entire universe.

Although this idea—later named Mach’s Principle by Einstein—has never been fully incorporated into modern physics in a definitive form, it influenced Albert Einstein during the development of general relativity. Einstein later modified and, in some respects, moved beyond Mach’s position, but Mach’s challenge to absolute space helped reshape the conceptual landscape from which relativity emerged. Whether the specific proposal about inertia ultimately proves correct is less important than the philosophical transformation it initiated. Properties once thought to belong inherently to isolated objects increasingly appeared intelligible only through their relations. The scientific imagination had begun moving away from substances towards structures.

Einstein went further. One of his central discoveries was that simultaneity is not absolute. Consider the classic thought experiment of two lightning bolts striking opposite ends of a moving train. To an observer standing stationary beside the railway, the two strikes may appear to occur simultaneously. To a passenger travelling at high speed on the train, however, the strike towards which the train is moving is observed first, while the other appears later.

Neither observer is mistaken, yet there is no universal moment against which both observations can be compared. What counts as the present depends entirely upon the observer's state of motion. Time no longer flowed identically for every observer; instead, it became inseparable from the relational circumstances under which events are measured. Consequently, the ancient intuition of a single cosmic clock quietly disappeared.

In general relativity, space is not an empty stage waiting to be occupied. Matter and energy influence the geometry of spacetime, while that geometry concurrently governs the motion of matter and energy. In John Wheeler's later summary, matter tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime tells matter how to move. Neither possesses complete independence from the other. Instead of independent substances interacting across an empty void, physics increasingly describes mutually defining structures.

The clearest case is the reinterpretation of gravity. Newton conceived gravity as an invisible force acting instantaneously across empty space. Einstein replaced this picture entirely, demonstrating that gravity is not a mysterious force pulling one object towards another, but rather the manifestation of curved spacetime. Planets do not travel because an invisible force reaches across the void; they follow the curved geometry of the spacetime in which they already participate. The explanatory focus thus shifted from hidden mechanisms to relational structure, presenting a universe less like a machine assembled from independent parts and more like an interconnected geometry whose elements possess meaning only through their mutual relations.

This mirrors one of the central insights of dependent arising: phenomena need not be grounded in independently existing backgrounds in order to function coherently. Their intelligibility is relational through and through, and the relations are no more a foundation than the things. The convergence should not be overstated; Einstein was not articulating Buddhist philosophy, nor does relativity establish the doctrine of emptiness. Yet the direction of travel is unmistakable. Science had moved another decisive step away from the search for fixed foundations and towards a universe understood through relation rather than substance. Quantum mechanics would soon challenge not only absolute space and time, but the very notion that physical objects possess intrinsic properties independent of the conditions under which they are observed.

Properties Without Intrinsic Nature

Quantum mechanics challenged something more fundamental still: the assumption that physical objects possess fully determinate properties independently of their experimental context. For centuries, classical physics assumed that every object possessed definite attributes. A particle had a precise position, a precise momentum, and a precise trajectory, whether or not it was being observed. Measurement simply revealed what was already there. Quantum mechanics overturned this intuitive picture.

The work of Niels Bohr reshaped how physicists understood measurement. Bohr argued that the properties attributed to quantum systems cannot be meaningfully separated from the experimental arrangements through which those properties are investigated. Whether an experiment reveals wave-like interference or particle-like localization depends entirely upon the measurement context. Neither description is false, and neither is complete by itself; both are complementary expressions of phenomena that resist classical categories.

The most direct modern statement of this relational view is in the work of theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the founders of Loop Quantum Gravity. Rovelli dedicated a significant portion of his work to exploring how the strange behaviour of quantum mechanics is best explained by a purely relational ontology. In his Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) framework, physical variables do not exist in an absolute state between interactions; an electron has no property, such as position, simpliciter; a value is actualized only in an interaction, and only relative to the system it interacts with ('Relational Quantum Mechanics', 1996).

In Helgoland (2020; English translation 2021) Rovelli draws the connection to Nāgārjuna himself: he found in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā a way of thinking about entities that exist only in their relations. Here the Madhyamaka would add one step. For Rovelli, reality becomes a network of relations rather than a collection of substances; for Nāgārjuna, the network too is designated, and no more found than the things it replaces.

Taking this relational view into the domain of information theory, the quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral argues in Decoding Reality (2010) that the universe is most deeply described not as matter but as information. Vedral does not discuss svabhāva; the connection is this book's. A bit of information is defined only as a difference between two states, never as a thing on its own, and in that sense an information-based physics leans away from intrinsic nature. But it also invites the opposite move, making information the new substance. From the side of Madhyamaka, information is as designated as matter, and no more a ground.

John Stewart Bell: When Metaphysics Became Measurable

For most of the twentieth century, the question of whether quantum correlations conceal a deeper, classical mechanism seemed destined to remain exactly that: a dispute. Einstein himself, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, argued in 1935 that quantum mechanics must be incomplete, since it permitted correlations between distant particles that seemed to imply what Einstein later called, in a 1947 letter to Max Born, 'spooky action at a distance'. Einstein's intuition was that some hidden, local variable—some property carried by each particle since their initial interaction—must be quietly determining the outcomes, restoring an orderly, substantialist picture beneath the strangeness. For decades, no experiment could distinguish this hidden-variable picture from the standard quantum account. The dispute remained philosophical.

In 1964, the physicist John Stewart Bell changed this permanently. Bell derived a precise mathematical inequality that any theory relying on local hidden variables—any theory in which particles carry predetermined properties and influence one another no faster than light—must obey. Quantum mechanics, by contrast, predicted that this inequality would be violated. For the first time, a metaphysical question about the hidden furniture of reality had been converted into a number that could be measured in a laboratory.

The experiments followed, growing steadily more rigorous across decades: the first test by Stuart Freedman and John Clauser in 1972, Alain Aspect's landmark experiments in the early 1980s, Anton Zeilinger's group's work since, and the first loophole-free tests, at Delft, Vienna and NIST, in 2015. Every one of them found the same result. Bell's inequality is violated, precisely as quantum mechanics predicts. This work was recognized with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded jointly to Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger 'for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science'.

The result does not merely suggest that hidden local mechanisms are unnecessary; it shows that no local hidden-variable mechanism can reproduce what is actually observed. (Non-local hidden-variable theories, such as David Bohm's, remain possible; what Bell rules out is the local kind.) Two entangled particles, separated by any distance, exhibit correlations that cannot be explained by any signal travelling between them at or below the speed of light, and cannot be explained by properties each particle secretly carried all along. Nor can the correlations be used to send a message: each side, taken alone, sees only randomness. The correlation is real, confirmed, and repeatable. What is absent, on any local account, is the carrier.

This bears directly upon one of the most persistent intuitions underlying substantialist thought: that connection presupposes a medium, a channel, some carrier bridging two things for them to be related at all. For any local carrier, Bell's theorem shows this intuition to be false—not as philosophy, but as physics. Two systems can be genuinely, measurably correlated with nothing found travelling between them and no local property responsible for the correlation on either side.

This should not be mistaken for a demonstration of dependent arising, and the same caution offered throughout this chapter applies with equal force here. Bell's theorem concerns a narrow, precisely defined class of physical correlations; it does not address karma, rebirth, or any specific claim of Buddhist cosmology, and it does not by itself establish that reality is empty of intrinsic existence. What it does establish, under assumptions most physicists accept, is that the demand for a local mediating substance underlying connection is not a law of nature. It is an assumption, and physics itself, at its most carefully tested edge, has already been forced to abandon it. Nāgārjuna arrived at a structurally similar conclusion through analysis, showing that relation does not require independently existing relata standing behind it. Bell and the experimenters who tested his theorem arrived at theirs through derivation and measurement. That two such different methods, separated by two thousand years, converge upon the same refusal—that connection requires no underlying carrier—is among the clearest resonances in this chapter.

Knower and Known

For centuries, science imagined itself as describing a universe that simply existed 'out there'. The observer stood outside nature, recording facts that were already complete before observation occurred. Measurement was regarded as passive, objective, and fundamentally separate from what was being measured. Quantum mechanics made this picture increasingly difficult to maintain. Building upon Niels Bohr's insights, the physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed one of the most influential philosophical visions in twentieth-century physics: the participatory universe.

His famous formulation, offered as a summary of Bohr's point—'No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon'—has often been misunderstood. Wheeler was not claiming that human consciousness magically creates the universe, nor was he advocating subjective idealism; 'registered' meant brought to a close by an irreversible act of amplification, such as the click of a detector, not noticed by a mind. Rather, he was drawing attention to a lesson emerging from quantum theory: physical phenomena cannot be understood independently of the experimental situations through which they become manifest. Observation is not merely looking; it is an act of fundamental participation.

From the standpoint of dependent arising, Wheeler's participatory universe possesses an intriguing resonance. The Dharma likewise rejects the image of a completely detached observer standing outside experience. Knowing and known arise together, dependently.

This position should not be mistaken for idealism. The Buddha did not teach that consciousness manufactures the external world, just as Wheeler did not argue that observation creates reality from nothing. Rather, both perspectives challenge the assumption that observer and observed possess complete independence from one another. Participation replaces separation.

For much of the twentieth century, physicists debated whether the wavefunction represents an objective, physical entity existing out in nature. Arguments persisted over whether it describes a literal wave propagating through space, a mere mathematical convenience, or an abstract representation of statistical ensembles. QBism (Quantum Bayesianism), developed by Carlton Caves, Christopher Fuchs and Rüdiger Schack, and later championed by N. David Mermin, breaks with these traditional debates. Within this framework, the wavefunction is not an objective physical object existing independently in the world. Instead, it represents an individual agent's personal expectations regarding the consequences of their future interactions with reality.

Relation Without Relata

The philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, drawing on Bohr, goes further with what she calls intra-action. Entities do not first exist in isolation and then enter into relationships; rather, distinct entities emerge only through the specific relationships that constitute a given phenomenon. The relata do not precede the relation; they arise together. On this view the universe is no longer imagined as a collection of self-contained objects connected by external forces; objects and their relations are constituted together within a phenomenon. In Barad's framework, phenomena are primary and isolated objects secondary—though, as below, the phenomenon is no more established than the objects.

Yet a crucial distinction must be maintained. Barad does not formulate her philosophy through the language of emptiness or religious doctrine; her concern is to understand how specific scientific practices disclose physical phenomena. Nāgārjuna asks a further question: are relations themselves grounded in intrinsically existing relata? The Madhyamaka answer is resolutely negative. Relations and relata are designated together; neither stands behind the other. Conventional identities are dependently designated, and dependence itself is no more established than they are. In this respect, agential realism approaches the deepest intuitions of Madhyamaka without explicitly employing its philosophical vocabulary.

The closest convergence between agential realism and the Dharma appears in Barad's formulation of 'relations without preexisting relata'. This phrase must not be misunderstood as a denial of conventional objects. Scientists, instruments, particles, mountains, rivers, and human beings continue to function perfectly within ordinary experience. What it denies is that these conventional identities possess self-existing essences prior to the relational conditions through which they become intelligible. The Madhyamaka goes one step further than the phrase: where no relata are established, no relation is established either, and the phenomenon itself is equally unfound.

The Mind Without a Container

For centuries, the dominant model of cognition within Western thought was explicitly representational. Under this framework, the physical world existed entirely independently 'out there', while the brain received raw data through the senses and subsequently constructed internal representations that mirrored that external reality. Knowledge was understood as an increasingly accurate correspondence between these mental representations and an objective, pre-given universe. This model appears intuitive, yet it rests upon the exact same substantialist assumptions that modern physics has progressively dismantled. It presupposes an independently existing world on one side and an independently existing mind on the other, treating representation as a bridge connecting two already completed entities. Enactivism proposes an alternative.

Introduced by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991), building on Humberto Maturana and Varela's earlier work on autopoiesis, enactivism argues that cognition is not the passive representation of a pre-given world, but the active enactment of a meaningful world through embodied participation. An organism does not first receive an objective reality and then interpret it; rather, the organism and the environment continually co-determine one another through ongoing engagement.

Consider the varied reality of a single forest. To a botanist, it appears as an intricate ecosystem of interacting species; to a bird, it presents specific nesting opportunities; to a deer, it offers food and shelter; and to an engineer, it represents timber resources. The physical forest itself has not changed, yet the relational world enacted changes completely across different forms of life. This does not imply that the forest is a mere subjective illusion or that each organism invents reality from nothing. Instead, each organism brings forth a meaningful world through its unique, embodied capacities for action. World and organism arise together, and neither possesses complete intelligibility in isolation.

The resonance with dependent arising is clear. Neither the organism nor the environment possesses complete intelligibility apart from the other, and experience unfolds through mutual dependence. Yet an important distinction remains. Enactivism remains a scientific and philosophical framework for understanding cognition; it does not explicitly attempt to establish emptiness or liberation from suffering. The Dharma proceeds further, asking whether the organism, the environment, cognition, and embodiment themselves possess any intrinsic existence. The Madhyamaka answer remains consistently negative: everything that arises does so dependently.