The taste of a theory

A meditation on the dharma of science, beauty, and the unsatisfactoriness of explanation

I have just come back from an incredibly beautiful week-long silent meditation retreat, based in the Buddhist insight tradition. I spent some of my time reflecting on how the insights arising on the mat might apply to all aspects of my life. A slowly building theme throughout the retreat was the parallel I began to notice between the Buddhist view of human psychology and experience, as framed in the doctrine of dependent origination, and the nature of scientific inquiry itself. Both, I felt, shared a common experiential character: here are some thoughts on that.

By way of a warning, this isn’t a heavily researched piece. My days formally studying philosophy of science and religion, and indeed theology, are behind me, and this is really born (at least proximally) of quiet introspection into what it feels like to be practising the dharma or thinking scientifically, and the many unspoken ways of seeing that we bring to both; it also leans quite heavily into Buddhist terminology (preferentially using the Pali terms over the Sanskrit). Particularly if these terms are unfamiliar, I hope they might resonate and offer a fresh perspective on what we’re actually doing when we say that we’re doing science.

The first meal

Just as when we arrive on a retreat and sit down to our first meal, and we catch ourselves shovelling the food in, without taking the time to savour it, so too with knowledge and with ideas. It is possible, I have seen, to wolf them down, and to go swimming in a sea of concepts and resonances without taking the time to examine each one properly.

This habit has been supercharged by AI and by the endless possibilities of the internet. It can feel thrilling, even beautiful, to consume ideas at speed. But it does not compare to delicately holding a theory or idea and really attending to it, and to what it does to you.

We might ask ourselves:

• How does this idea, field of study or theory move me?

• What aspect of it calls to me?

• How does the very mention of this idea land in my body?

• What repels me about certain ideas and hypotheses?

• What am I bringing from myself and my own history that makes one theory or concept attractive and another unpleasant?

The taste of thought

These judgements occupy, to a large extent, a space similar to aesthetic judgements. They are movements of the heart and mind rather than deliberate decisions. They arise involuntarily, as the mind’s subtle contractions or expansions around a thought.

We might say that each concept has its vedanā, its feeling tone. When we hold a theory in the light of awareness, we can ask: what is its flavour? Does it change when we keep it there? Does it alter somehow? When someone says “string theory” or “gamma-delta T cells” or “free energy”, what happens to the heart?

The immediate pleasure or aversion that arises at the moment of contact with an idea, the subtle tightening or release: science begins with this pre-conceptual movement of the heart-mind (the citta). We sometimes consume ideas the way we consume sugar: for the hit rather than the nourishment. But insight, like digestion, like real tasting, takes time.

Beauty and truth

It has long been something of a mystery as to why beauty and truth appear to be mutually dependent. For many scientists, being receptive to and inclining oneself towards beauty is a guiding heuristic in the search for truth. I can’t help but feel that the question of the reciprocality of beauty and truth might touch on something deeply fundamental and important.

So I find myself thinking of Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Its use of heavy, extraneous machinery felt disappointing to many mathematicians. Even though it was correct, it did not shimmer with the spirit of Fermat’s little margin note so much as overwhelm it within a vast algebraic edifice. Similar reactions met the computer-assisted proof of the Four Colour Theorem, whose mechanical enumeration seemed to jar against a mathematician’s yearning for insight. We should probably also remember that even some of today’s canonical theories, including the Standard Model of particle physics, quantum mechanics and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, were each at first criticised for their ugliness. The moral and aesthetic repulsion that met Darwin is well documented, and one might even read Einstein’s “God does not play dice” as a kind of aesthetic protest. For many contemporary scientists, however, these same theories now stand as emblems of beauty. Their elegance was not immediate, it was emergent, sometimes revealed most clearly when placed in relation to other frameworks or observations. This shows how beauty, like truth, is a dependent quality, something that arises only in the context of a larger seeing.

But we may become attached to either without realising their dependent and ultimately fabricated natures. This is the old problem of mistaking the map for the territory.

With an emptiness view, the Buddhist view (most prevalent from early Mahāyāna thought onwards) that all things are ultimately fabrications or constructions, there is no territory, there are only maps. This does not imply a rejection of truth, but it does avoid its reification occurring from a place of ignorance.

Do we reject old, defunct theories as ugly? Not usually. We often still see the beauty even when we can acknowledge their falsity or loss of utility. Why, then, do we reject novel hypotheses - those addressing what we might consider to be live problems - that we do not like as in some sense ugly? What is the source of that aversion? I think if we really pay attention closely enough, we might be able to answer this.

Buddhism teaches that the cause of suffering - dukkha - is clinging. And in science, as in all of experience, one of the greatest sources of suffering can be clinging to a particular hypothesis, world view, or way of seeing.

To hold a theory because it seems beautiful while suspecting that it may be false is a kind of delusion, though it may be one of the more charming kinds; and I suspect lies on a spectrum with the more common situation in which the perceived beauty of a theory subtly encourages us to turn away from data which someone less enamoured might recognise to be incommensurate with it. Both happen far more often, in ourselves and in others, than we might think.

If the initial vedanā is what guides the choice of which hypothesis to attend to then the entire subsequent chain of scientific reasoning (the equivalent of saṅkhāra or conditioned formations) is founded upon a pre-conceptual, aesthetically-driven bias. Some philosophers and sociologists of science have appreciated the enormity of the implications of this; most of us do not think about it much.

The suffering of theories

We need to hold our hypotheses lightly and appreciate that they too are subject to change: to anicca, impermanence. The dukkha that comes from a hypothesis is an essential part of science. Every theory is, in gross or in subtle ways, unsatisfactory.

Although Buddhism speaks of dukkha as a suffering which affects all living beings, in meditation one learns that the subtlety of this suffering can be exquisite, far subtler than what in our day-to-day lives we would commonly describe as suffering, and this is inherent to all things. This is why many meditation teachers in the Buddhist tradition prefer to translate dukkha as unsatisfactoriness rather than suffering.

It has occurred to me, as I suspect to other neuroscientists who are meditators, that there is a beautiful resonance between the idea of dukkha and that of prediction error. If the minimisation of prediction error (which in itself is a framing of a broader free energy principle) is an integral part of what all living things do, then this does make prediction error, or at least the systemic recognition or phenomenal correlate of prediction error, a suitable candidate for the computational location or identity of dukkha.

The computation of prediction error is in essence a commitment to comparison, and therefore embodies what in Buddhism is sometimes termed dualistic perception. In order for there to be a prediction error, there must be a predicted state and an actual state, and they must be in some sense seen as separate. The very notion therefore has an in-built duality, and on this basis alone might be seen within a Buddhist framework to be the source of avijjā, or delusion.

In meditation, when clinging to any object in experience is reduced, that object fades. With the letting go of ever more subtle forms of clinging, phenomena disappear; this is the fundamental meditative insight which reveals the emptiness of all things. Progress in insight occurs through the repeated letting go of clinging. The remarkable thing, of course, is that the action of letting go itself reduces the mismatch between the predicted or expected and the experienced environment.

Here the parallel to science becomes striking. Dukkha is what keeps the wheel of dependent origination turning: it is what drives the entire cycle of cognition and becoming. Likewise, prediction error is what keeps science turning. Without discrepancy, there is no curiosity, no refinement, no world. Science needs dukkha.

But what happens when dukkha is fully extinguished, when prediction error is perfectly minimised? In the predictive-processing literature this question is raised as the so-called “dark room problem,” an objection suggesting that if living systems aim to minimise prediction error, they should simply retreat into a state of perfect predictability. The standard response is that organisms possess priors that demand movement, nourishment and exploration; thus, remaining in a literal dark room would in fact violate those expectations.

Yet from a Buddhist point of view, the imagined limit of that process - the state in which all prediction error is truly minimised - resembles something astonishingly familiar (from the teachings if not from personal experience): the cessation of experience itself. The fact that such cessation appears to be not only possible but, in some traditions, is the highest goal of human development, is almost absurdly counter-intuitive. And yet precisely because of its unlikeliness, it reads to me as a kind of vindication of predictive-processing accounts: the mind’s most radical self-negation confirms the logic of its own construction.

Dependent origination, viewed through this lens, offers not a challenge but a phenomenological proof of the theory’s deepest implication: that experience itself depends on the play of prediction and error, and that when that play stops, so too does the world we create.

The end of science?

So what would the end of science look like? If science were ever to succeed completely, if every prediction error were resolved, would it too would enter a kind of nirvana, a cessation of questioning? It is difficult to imagine such a state, or even to say whether it could exist. Yet the question reveals something: that science, like mind, depends on its own unsatisfactoriness to survive.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, though born from mathematics, can be read almost as a modern sutra: a reminder that any self-referential system must contain truths it cannot prove, that closure is impossible, and incompleteness is not failure but is actually the very condition of discovery. The wheel keeps turning because it cannot do otherwise.

Perhaps the end of science needs an ethical framing, rather than a mind-bending metaphysical one: perhaps it is not the equivalent of Nibbāna, but of the path to Nibbāna. Even once they have experienced the cessation of all suffering an arahant (fully enlightened being) does not stop living; they stop suffering by removing the clinging. The arahant-scientist, then, might be one who continues to observe, test, and build models, but does so without the clinging to the expected outcome or the beautiful theory. Prediction error still arises (dukkha is still a condition of the system), but the suffering of theories - the clinging that leads to delusion (avijjā) - is gone.

In science as in the dharma, freedom lies not in the eradication of error but in our relationship to it: in learning to meet the gap between what is predicted and what is with care rather than grasping.

The not-self of science

To understand anatta, we must see that scientific theories have no inherent existence. On some accounts, they exist only in correspondence with other facts in the world, which themselves are changing.

Every object, framework, and fact in science is empty of inherent essence. What seems solid is provisional. Even our most established concepts have turned out to be contingent. They have no self-nature.

And yet there is also a not-self that pertains to ownership: a recognition that a theory does not belong to anyone. It is a temporary configuration of causes and conditions: my neurons firing, data aligning, metaphors solidifying into coherence, papers being published, lectures given. ‘Truth’, when it appears, most naturally emerges when no one is trying to own it.

But the deeper meaning of anatta is that even these conditions lack inherent substance. The theory, the thinker, and the thought itself are all co-arising patterns: empty of enduring core, real only in their relations.

Dharma and science: two ways of seeing, mutually illuminated

It is tempting to see dharma and science as opposites: the one inward-looking, the other outward; one seeking liberation, the other explanation. But seen more carefully, both are modes of disciplined curiosity, both oriented toward uncovering the conditions by which experience arises. Each is a practice of dependent seeing.

In the Buddhist tradition, paṭicca-samuppāda (dependent origination) reveals that all phenomena arise due to conditions and cease when those conditions cease. In current science, causality is framed differently but rests on the same intuition: that no phenomenon exists independently or as they might appear, and that understanding comes from discerning conditional structure. Both replace essence with relation, at least on one view within the philosophy of science.

Each is also self-correcting. In the dharma, even insight is conditioned and must eventually be released. In science, even the most elegant theory must be surrendered when contradicted by evidence. Both cultivate a form of humility that does not devalue knowledge but prevents it from hardening into belief.

In spiritual life, attachment to views leads to dukkha; in scientific life, attachment to paradigms leads to dogma. Both require structured ways of letting go. The iterative process of falsification in science and the iterative process of non-grasping in meditation are parallel gestures: each learns to release its previous certainties in order to see more clearly.

Truth in both cases is provisional: Buddhism distinguishes between conventional and ultimate truths, but treats both as context-bound ways of speaking. Likewise, scientific theories are not mirrors of reality but models, useful fictions whose worth lies in their ability to reduce uncertainty and generate coherence. Both are forms of skilful means: they are contingent constructions that point beyond themselves.

Even the felt experience of discovery has its parallel. In meditation, moments of stillness or insight bring a quiet joy when perception aligns with reality. In science, that same joy appears as the recognition of pattern or elegance: Newton under the apple tree, Siddhartha Gautama under the bodhi tree, Archimedes in his bathtub. Beauty, in both cases, is the felt signature of alignment: the system resting, however briefly, in low tension between what is expected and what is.

Finally, both are forms of training. They require patience, ethics, rigour, and community, or saṅgha. Both invite us to inhabit uncertainty with care rather than fear. The contemplative and the scientist share the same gesture: to look closely, to let go of what cannot be known, and to allow understanding to arise from what remains. What untold goods might come if we can shift our contemplative questioning to our scientific practice and ask: how can we systematically train the scientific citta (heart-mind) to become aware of, and thus less subject to, this initial, pre-rational vedanā?

The difference between science and the dharma does not even lie in direction: it is but a caricature to say that science refines the model of the world, where dharma refines the model of the self. Because under a broader frame, one that recognises the mind and the world as mutually specifying processes, they converge. Both are ways of easing the friction between prediction and reality. Both are paths of non-clinging. Both, in their deepest movement, are means of liberation.

Letting go

What then corresponds, in science, to a moment of insight? What corresponds to the overturning of a previous theory? Is this the equivalent of insight in meditation?

Did quantum theory surpass classical physics because of a letting go? Or was it merely the replacement of one way of seeing with another?

Perhaps every great revolution in science begins with a small act of letting go. The holding and the release are both part of the same movement, the continuous practice of seeing, testing, and surrendering to what is, rather than to what we expect.