What Does It Mean for Something to Exist?
There is a question that seems simple until you start chasing it.
What is reality?
We normally don’t question the answer. A tree exists because we can see it. A table exists because we can touch it. The room around us exists whether we think about it or not.
But the deeper we go into physics, the less obvious this becomes.
Quantum mechanics presents a world that behaves very differently from the solid, predictable reality of everyday experience. Particles can exist in superpositions. Distant particles can become entangled. Measurements affect what we can observe. And suddenly, an innocent question appears:
Is the world really the way it appears to us?
That question is interesting because Buddhism, particularly the analytical tradition of the Abhidhamma, approaches reality from a completely different direction and arrives at some surprisingly provocative questions of its own.
Not answers that can simply be equated with quantum mechanics. Buddhism is not secretly a theory of quantum physics.
But the two disciplines force us to question something we normally take for granted: the apparent solidity and continuity of reality.
The world we experience isn’t necessarily the world at the fundamental level
Imagine looking at a wooden table.
To us, it is simply a table. It has a surface, a colour, a shape and a certain weight. We don’t experience billions of atoms interacting through electromagnetic forces. We experience a table.
Physics progressively dismantles that intuitive picture.
Matter is made of atoms. Atoms contain nuclei and electrons. At deeper levels, our descriptions become increasingly abstract and counterintuitive. At the quantum level, the familiar idea of a tiny solid object moving along a definite path stops being an adequate description.
Yet the table remains perfectly real at the scale at which we live.
This creates an important distinction:
What we experience is real as an experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean our intuitive description of it is fundamental.
And this is where the philosophical conversation becomes fascinating.
Then there is the observer
One of the most misunderstood ideas in quantum mechanics is the role of observation.
People sometimes hear that quantum mechanics says:
“Things don’t exist until someone looks at them.”
That’s much stronger than what the physics actually establishes.
Quantum mechanics tells us that measurement plays a fundamental role in determining what can be observed about a quantum system. But this does not require a conscious human being staring at a particle and magically bringing it into existence.
Still, the philosophical question remains fascinating.
What exactly is an observation?
And more fundamentally:
What is the relationship between the physical world and the experience of that world?
This takes us beyond physics and into the philosophy of consciousness.
Buddhism starts somewhere else
The Buddha wasn’t trying to discover the smallest particle in the universe.
The starting point was human experience.
We experience seeing, hearing, touching, thinking, remembering, wanting and feeling. And underneath all of these experiences is an extremely strong intuition.
“I am the person experiencing all of this.”
The Abhidhamma takes this apparently continuous experience and attempts to analyze it.
Instead of treating the person as one indivisible thing, it examines the components and processes that constitute experience.
Consciousness.
Mental factors.
Material phenomena.
And the conditions through which these phenomena arise.
This produces a very different picture of reality.
The strange idea of continuity
Think about a movie.
When you watch a film, you see continuous movement. But a movie is actually a rapid succession of individual frames.
The continuity is something that emerges from the succession.
The Abhidhamma’s analysis of experience can be understood, at least as an analogy, in a somewhat similar way.
What we call “my life” feels like one continuous thing.
But moment by moment, experiences arise and disappear.
A thought appears.
It disappears.
Another thought appears.
A sensation arises.
It disappears.
A perception occurs.
It changes.
Yet consciousness feels continuous enough that we construct the concept of a permanent person moving through time.
This raises one of Buddhism’s most profound questions:
Is the “self” something that exists independently, or is it a conceptual designation imposed upon an ever-changing process?
This brings us to an interesting Buddhist way of questioning reality. The Catuṣkoṭi, or four-cornered analysis.
Instead of assuming that every proposition must simply be true or false, the four possibilities can be examined.
- It exists.
- It does not exist.
- It both exists and does not exist.
- It neither exists nor does not exist.
Now from the movie to the self take the analogy one step further.
Suppose instead of a movie, we examine a person.
You say:
“This is me.”
But what exactly is the me?
Your body has changed throughout your life.
Your thoughts change.
Your emotions change.
Your memories change.
Your opinions change.
Even your sense of identity changes.
And yet there is an extraordinarily strong feeling of continuity.
And this is where the two worlds seem to touch
At first glance, quantum physics and Abhidhamma have almost nothing to do with each other.
One is an empirical mathematical framework describing physical phenomena.
The other is a philosophical and contemplative analysis of experience and reality.
Yet both challenge our everyday intuitions and the ordinary mind.
The everyday mind says,
Objects are solid.
Things have definite properties.
The world is exactly as it appears.
The self is a stable entity.
Modern physics tells us that the first three statements become considerably more complicated when examined at fundamental level.
Buddhist analysis challenges the fourth directly.
Perhaps the more interesting question is consciousness
Eventually, the discussion becomes unavoidable.
We can describe neurons.
We can describe electrical activity.
We can describe brain chemistry.
We can increasingly correlate physical processes with conscious experiences.
But there remains a profound question:
Why is there an experience at all?
Why does processing information feel like something?
Why isn’t the universe simply a collection of physical processes happening in complete darkness, with nobody experiencing any of it?
Science has made extraordinary progress in explaining the mechanisms associated with consciousness.
But the subjective nature of experience remains one of philosophy and neuroscience’s deepest problems.
And this is where Buddhist thought offers a radically different perspective.
Instead of beginning with matter and attempting to explain consciousness from it, Buddhist investigation begins with experience itself.
It asks us to examine consciousness directly.
Not merely as an abstract concept, but as something occurring moment by moment.
The self may be the most interesting illusion of all
Consider your own identity.
You have memories from years ago. Your body has changed. Your opinions have changed. Your emotions have changed. Your thoughts constantly change.
Yet there is an extraordinary sense of continuity:
“I am the same person.”
Buddhism doesn’t necessarily require us to deny the conventional person. Obviously, there is a person who goes to work, talks to friends and remembers yesterday.
The deeper claim concerns what we assume exists underneath that conventional identity.
Is there a permanent, unchanging entity called “me”?
Or is “me” a useful name for a constantly changing collection of physical and mental processes?
That distinction is subtle.
But once you start examining it, it changes the way you think about consciousness, identity and existence.
The question that remains
Perhaps the deepest question isn’t.
“Does quantum physics prove Buddhism?”
That question is too simplistic.
A much more interesting question is:
“Why does reality appear the way it does to us in the first place?”
Why do changing processes appear as stable objects?
Why does a succession of experiences feel like a continuous self?
Why does the physical universe give rise to subjective experience?
And how much of what we call “reality” is actually a model constructed by the mind?
Quantum physics approaches reality from the outside, through mathematics and experiment.
The Abhidhamma approaches experience from the inside, through analysis and contemplation.
Putting them side by side creates something valuable.
It reminds us that the reality we instinctively believe we understand the solid world, the permanent self, the observer standing outside everything else may be much less straightforward than it appears.
And perhaps that is the most fascinating lesson of all.
The more deeply we investigate reality, the less confident we should become about the assumptions we started with.