Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind

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.

For centuries scientists and philosophers have pondered the relationship between scientific theory and reality. Analyzing two major positions, the author points out the many assumptions required to adopt the realist view, and nihilism implicit in the instrumentalist position.

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.