Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (2nd Ed.)

Description

Choosing Reality shows how Buddhist contemplative methods of investigating reality are relevant for modern physics and psychology. How shall we understand the relationship between the way we experience reality and the way science describes it? In examining this question, Alan Wallace discusses two opposing views- the realist view, which argues that scientific theories represent objective reality, and the instrumentalist view, which states that concepts cannot describe what exists independently of them. Finding both of these philosophies of science inadequate, the author explores the Buddhist middle way view and the relevance for modern physics of Buddhist contemplative methods of investigating reality. He also examines the ideas of body, mind, and reincarnation from the viewpoint of Tibetan Buddhism.

B. Alan Wallace has authored, translated, edited, and contributed to more than forty books on Tibetan Buddhism, science, and culture. With fourteen years as a Buddhist monk, he earned a BA in physics and the philosophy of science and then a PhD in religious studies. After teaching in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies to explore the integration of scientific approaches and contemplative methods.

"A reflective philosophical analysis based on sound knowledge of physics and Buddhist thought."-Choice magazine "Choosing Reality shares the podium with The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters and wears the gold medal. It is a triumphant commentary on the relationship between physics and mind, science, and religion."-John Tigue, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Daemen College "B. Alan Wallace's proposed solution, using Buddhist understandings, to the philosophical dilemma of whether the world should be understood from a 'realist' or an 'instrumentalist' point of view. The former sees our scientific models of the world as independently real, the latter as only summaries of experience."-Science & Theology News