What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? An Answer.
The Zen koan which asks, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” has become a cliche. For most people it is just a piece of Eastern mumbo-jumbo, a trope to stand for the supposedly unfathomable wisdom of the East. It is well-known that Zen novices are given bizarre conundrums to wrestle with, in order to shake them out of their conventional consciousness. Yet “the sound of one hand clapping” is not just a random piece of nonsense designed to confuse students of Zen. It has a meaning and, in a sense, an answer.
Of course, a Zen koan is not really meant to be answered as such. The “answer” is a transformation in the understanding of the individual wrestling with it. You are meant to struggle with the problem and that struggle, and the eventual understanding that comes from it, is the true meaning of the question. In a sense then, venturing an answer to the koan here might be seen as missing the point. However, given the extent to which it has been turned into a lifeless stereotype standing for Eastern obscurity, I think the transgression can be forgiven.
Clearly, however, the answer can’t be a sound. The attempt to answer the question literally is what ties one up in absurdity. One tries to imagine “half claps”, or a single hand making a clapping motion in thin air, soundlessly, or other ridiculous mental contortions. Eventually, unless one is truly committed to the Zen path, one gives up and consigns the problem to a shelf marked “imponderables”, and leaves it at that.
Many years ago, when I first encountered Buddhist doctrine, I struggled with the question and gave up too. It remained on its shelf for many years, along with another piece of Buddhist lore: the “lack of inherent existence” of phenomena, that comes from a different branch of Buddhism: the Mahayana tradition.
Years later I became fascinated by quantum physics. My great grandfather Max Born had won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in the field, and I developed a deep interest in its implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. While studying it, I came upon a paper by physicist David Merman titled, “What is Quantum Mechanics Trying to Tell Us?” In it, discussing quantum entanglement, Mermin uses the expression “correlations without correlata”, a weird concept indeed! How can a correlation exist without something that is correlated? It seems as if the idea of a pure, free floating correlation is an absurdity similar to the notion of a single hand clapping.
Yet Mermin is only putting into natural language a feature of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. When two quantum particles are maximally entangled, the mathematical description of that system is one of a pure correlation of plus or minus one. The only information in the quantum wave function is information about the relationship between the particles, with no room left over for anything to describe the state of the individual particles themselves.
Physicist Leonard Susskind puts it this way: In quantum mechanics, it is possible to have a situation in which you know everything about a system while knowing nothing about its parts, and that is all there is to know. In other words, the mathematical description is of a relationship, but the things related, the correlata, are completely absent, subsumed within the relationship itself. The apparent paradox of this was what caused Einstein to look for his famous “hidden variables”. He thought there had to be information about the individual particles somewhere. Bell’s Theorem, and its subsequent experimental verification, proved Einstein wrong. Quantum mechanics was correct, and complete.
This result is very difficult to interpret. Mermin, in his “Ithaca Interpretation”, concludes that the business of physics is the study of correlations, and correlations only. It cannot concern itself with the underlying reality, which somehow turns these correlations into something experienced as a world. This is a position reminiscent of Kant. The “Ding an Sich” (thing-in-itself) must forever remain beyond our reach, or at least the reach of physics.
Yet we can do better than that. If we really think about it, there are correlata, just not the independently existing particles which our Newtonian common sense would suggest must be there. The theory is telling us that when we measure the interaction of the quantum system (the two particles) with some system we are part of, those measured values will be correlated . The correlata are actually future observations.
What has disappeared in this understanding is the idea of matter as consisting of bits of “stuff” that have real properties independent of other parts of the system to which they belong.
Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli has developed this idea into own Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which he explores in his beautifully written book Helgoland. The Theory of Relativity showed us that certain physical properties that we had assumed were absolute are actually relative to the frame of reference of an observer. What quantum mechanics shows us, Rovelli suggests, is that all physical properties are relative.
Physical systems only assume well defined values when they interact with other systems, and these values are only well defined with respect to that system. A system’s properties are relational, not inherent. In this understanding there is no thing-in-itself. Reality exists in the relational network, and the nodes of the network are particle interactions, not particles as things with independent existence.
Indeed particles disappear from the picture and what are left are the moments of interactions between particles, with the “particles” turning into regularities between the nodes. There is no “thing” that travels from one moment of interaction to the next. There are only the relationships between nodes, and the whole of reality is this network, with no absolute things to be seen anywhere. Amazing. Brilliant.
This has a very profound implication. If nature at its deepest level does not have inherent properties, but only relational ones, then there are no inherent properties that exist in individual things at any level. Rather, all properties are relational ones. Everything we can say about the world is a relational statement; it is not a statement about the way things are in themselves. This is the fundamental revelation of quantum mechanics.
The philosophical implication is that, whenever we perceive an “intrinsic property” in a thing, we are making a kind of artificial incision in the whole cloth of the world. This is necessary of course. Because we must operate in a finite reality, with a finite set of what we consider facts relevant to a given situation, we must cut off the relatedness of all things with all things, drawing a line to say: “beyond this point I no longer care about the relationships between what is inside the boundaries of the thing I am interested in and what is outside, so I will fix certain values and call these properties intrinsic.”
Obviously, this is not a conscious process; it is built into our cognitive and perceptual apparatus. As tool-making animals, it is necessary for us to artificially divide the world up into separate things, even though those things do not have actual, absolute boundaries. In the same way, when we make theories or models of the world, we need to have some entities with intrinsic properties to define the boundaries of that theory’s ontology.
For example, if I develop a theory of economics which talks about certain entities like “markets” and “individual economic agents”, it necessarily simplifies the real state of affairs. I assign certain putatively inherent properties to the entities of the theory, saying, for example, that economic agents always act in a rational self-interested manner, even while knowing that this is a generalisation that cannot hold up to scrutiny at the level of each individual case.
Why does the economic agent behave this way? What is self interest and what are the boundaries of that concept, i.e., under what circumstances might it break down? What indeed is the basis of rationality? These questions are deliberately left unanswered and unscrutinised, because, well, you simply have to draw the line somewhere as to what is in and what is out of your theory.
Inevitably this severance also creates the disjunctures that will eventually lead the theory into trouble, because the whole thing is premised on a certain context of relationships that is, in reality, in constant flux. Eventually that flux will cause the boundaries of the theory — its “inherent properties” — to come under increasing stress. Eventually the relationships that were elided in the initial act of theoretical construction reveal their importance and economists are forced to undergo that painful transformation known, in Kuhnian terms, as a “paradigm shift”.
This is what the Mahayana Buddhists are getting at with their notion of the “lack of inherent existence” of both mind and matter. The key word here is “inherent”. The dharma does not assert that the world does not exist. It asserts that it contains nothing that exists inherently. Any part of it that we choose to look at is empty in itself. Its only meaningful existence is in relation to the totality. It is a “dependent arising”, without existence in and of itself.
We experience the material world as consisting of solid, inherently existing stuff because we are bound up in that system of relationships that we call the material world. This imposes a certain emergent experience on us. But solid matter, like “rational self interested economic agents”, is a fiction in which certain inherent properties get attributed to the world in order to create a finite boundary.
Hume, in the eighteenth century, drew a line between mental and non-mental phenomena, ascribing a primary ontological status to the material, and a secondary status to the mental realms. In that moment the so-called “Hard Problem of Consciousness” came into being, because a schism had been created between the world as object and the experiencing subject. What could possibly heal that rift?
If we accept Relationalism — the philosophical position I am expounding which is not the same as Rovelli’s purely scientific concept — then there simply isn’t a fundamental schism between subject and object. Mind and matter do not inhabit ontologically distinct realms between which lies an unbridgeable chasm.
Let us return, then, to the sound of one hand clapping. The meaning of the koan is this: that the sound of a clap can only occur in the interaction between two hands. The sound of a single hand clapping in isolation is indeed an absurdity. And this extends to every expression of mind and matter. It is always relational.
The properties of the world are not properties of a thing that is out there distinct from us as observers, a fundamental tenet of Western science for centuries. We are bound up in a mutual, reciprocal network of being from which we cannot extricate ourselves in order to occupy a “view from nowhere” (in Thomas Nagel’s phrase) from whence we can observe the world’s objective state.
Fortunately or unfortunately, we are forever a part of the sea of existence within which we swim. This reciprocity extends infinitely far. We, as conscious observers, are bound up in the deepest nature of things. The Anthropic Principle tells us that the physical laws that we observe are not fixed, absolute laws binding everything everywhere, but are contingent phenomena too. We see the physics we do because only these laws enable there to be observers. Everything we observe, down to the most fundamental laws we know of, is bound up with who and what we are as conscious intelligent beings.
The Buddhist insight embodied in the koan “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” and in the doctrine of the emptiness of inherent existence has never been well understood in the West. Scientific reductionism has always been predicated on a notion of absolute, fundamental properties, an atom or “thing of things” at the bottom of the reductive hierarchy. This was first articulated in the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, more than two millennia ago in Greece.
Relationalism implies that no such absolute fundament exists. It is relationships “all the way down”. The discoveries of quantum physics and the increasing understanding of the implications of the fine tuning problem suggest that, while the West ended up far outstripping the East in scientific and technological know-how, it is the East that may have had the deeper insight into the ultimate nature of reality.
