Nagarjuna and Rovelli — emptiness meets relational quantum mechanics

The physicist Carlo Rovelli was developing an interpretation of quantum mechanics when people around him kept asking him whether he'd read a particular second century Buddhist philosopher. He finally did and he devoted an entire chapter of his book Helgeland to what he found. The philosopher was Nagarjuna and his Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is one of the most rigorous works in the history of philosophy. Nagarjuna uses what could be interpreted today as a sort of four-valued logic, although this is contested. Namely that a thing is, is not, is both, or is neither, and then methodically dismantles every one of those options. His conclusion is that nothing possesses independent existence of its own. Instead everything is what it is only in relation to something else and he calls this aspect of reality emptiness. Now here's where Rovelli, a physicist, found that so striking. You see, Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that objects have no properties in isolation, only in relation to other objects. And so here were two thinkers, separated by 18 centuries and completely different methods, arriving at a structurally similar picture of reality. Rovelli said it helped him think more clearly about the physics, but he added something else. It also made him less anxious about impermanence, because it dissolved the permanent self he had been anxious about in the first place.