The things it works in conjunction with (morals, tastes, opinions) are subjective, karma itself (as a concept) is objective, and the outcome as a result of both of these things has both objective and subjective elements.
What is objective about it? What about the actions and their consequences, is subjective, that is, I can measure and describe all the events in a dispassionate and amoral terms? Those things which are objective, like say the knife wound that someone suffered, and how it caused them to die, can be done in such a manner, and they are also the things which outside observers can see and agree on. (Hence objective) How the person who I just shanked BF feels internally about losing his GF, I can not measure directly, it is purely subjective and prone to the bias and error of individual minds.
No, Karma is not the concept of energy and matter interacting. It is the concept of cause and effect, hence my example of air particles getting pushed into your ear causing bones to vibrate and then send a signal to your cochlea which your brain then interprets as sound.
What exactly about air (matter) moving in an elastic manner (energy) causing (interaction) bones (matter) to themselves undergo elastic deformation (energy) which send a signal (interaction) to the brain (matter) which is processed in some manner involving chemicals and ions (matter) to change their arrangement's (interaction) and thus evoke electric fields (energy) that is not about matter, energy and their interactions again?
Cause and Effect: I throw baseball at window, it hits window, it transfer energy to window, window has bending moment and deforms to the point of brittle failure, window is broken. Ergo, it broke because I tossed a ball at it, is well described as interactions of matter and energy, no?
If nothing is affected by the action, there is no Karma. Now, you can take into account the karma felt by the other trees who might have wanted to fertilise the fallen tree or some lumberjack who wanted to cut it down for wood or the bird who lost it's next. I reiterate, if nothing is affected, there is no Karma. It is neutral.
An action with no effect is not an action. At a minimum, the tree, the air it fell thru and the water around it are somehow affected.
I only mentioned emotions as they are the origin/contribute to actions. Karma is measured in (re)actions. One can sit down and analyse different actions and speculate as to why this occurred, they're usually sociologists or psychologists, not physicists. Seconds and metres are arbitrary, too.
Psychologists are still using the scientific method, reductionist, naturalistic, dispassionate, like any other scientist. And hey, I'd challenge them to come up with fMRI or PET or spectroscopy of brain tissues or anything of that sort without some nerd talking about tiny dots that spin around and carry charges and all that. But that they can successfully approach the area of emotion with all the rigor and bland passive third person writing that a geologist can use with regards to rocks, shows these things too can be explained physically, albeit an equation that solves for someones brain state is a long ways off...
Seconds and meters are arbitrary, but a second is a second is a second, a meter is always the same length, and when I say "75m/s" I can be sure that each one of the meters and seconds is the same, that 75 is exactly 75 times more then 1. Not so with peoples emotions, I can't say if your happiness is the same as mine in that sense, hence emotions are not useful constructs by which to measure the quantity of an object in some given dimension.
Now I could go onto the kharmic/dharmic theory that kharmic actions are selfless and dharmic actions are selfish but I believe to be able to act in a way that disregards the effects one will experience and focuses on the affect it will have on another requires self to be able to determine that. Even though the end result is void of self, self is required to reach such a stage. Which is like throwing a baseball and then ignoring the space it travelled through and just saying it went from x to x without specifying how, which devalues the throw entirely. Who said it was even a throw?
What makes something selfish or selfless? Can I measure it?
I can talk about object going from one point to another without discussion of the space it passed though, or similar terms. It's common as fuck, because that stuff is usually moot and makes no difference, or else can be handled case by case, but it's not fallacious to discuss, say, an electron moving though a chamber without trying to arrive at it's precise path...partly because the concept of a precise path is meaningless in the case we are discussing a thing which is partly wave-like and for which one can not resolve both momentum and position to an exact level.
The same can apply to a baseball, if I am just trying to measure how far, fast and what sort of trajectory it had, it does not matter if it was thrown, lobbed by a machine, or appeared out of thin air due to a wizard
