What Is Life (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrodinger

  By this I mean the thing that is also frequently called the ‘hypothesis of the real world’ around us. I maintain that it amounts to a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world. This device is veiled by the following two circumstances. First, my own body (to which my mental activity is so very directly and intimately linked) forms part of the object (the real world around me) that I construct out of my sensations, perceptions and memories. Secondly, the bodies of other people form part of this objective world. Now I have very good reasons for believing that these other bodies are also linked up with, or are, as it were, the seats of spheres of consciousness. I can have no reasonable doubt about the existence or some kind of actualness of these foreign spheres of consciousness, yet I have absolutely no direct subjective access to any of them. Hence I am inclined to take them as something objective, as forming part of the real world around me. Moreover, since there is no distinction between myself and others, but on the contrary full symmetry for all intents and purposes, I conclude that I myself also form part of this real material world around me. I so to speak put my own sentient self (which had constructed this world as a mental product) back into it – with the pandemonium of disastrous logical consequences that flow from the aforesaid chain of faulty conclusions. We shall point them out one by one; for the moment let me just mention the two most blatant antinomies due to our awareness of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of a non-concerned observer.

  The first of these antinomies is the astonishment at finding our world picture ‘colourless, cold, mute’. Colour and sound, hot and cold are our immediate sensations; small wonder that they are lacking in a world model from which we have removed our own mental person.

  The second is our fruitless quest for the place where mind acts on matter or vice-versa, so well known from Sir Charles Sherrington’s honest search, magnificently expounded in Man on his Nature. The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts. (This was stated in a very brief and clear sentence by Spinoza, see p. 122.)

  I wish to go into more detail about some of the points I have made. First let me quote a passage from a paper of C.G. Jung which has gratified me because it stresses the same point in quite a different context, albeit in a strongly vituperative fashion. While I continue to regard the removal of the Subject of Cognizance from the objective world picture as the high price paid for a fairly satisfactory picture, for the time being, Jung goes further and blames us for paying this ransom from an inextricably difficult situation. He says:

  All science (Wissenschaft) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.2

  Of course Jung is quite right. It is also clear that he, being engaged in the science of psychology, is much more sensitive to the initial gambit in question, much more so than a physicist or a physiologist. Yet I would say that a rapid withdrawal from the position held for over 2,000 years is dangerous. We may lose everything without gaining more than some freedom in a special – though very important – domain. But here the problem is set. The relatively new science of psychology imperatively demands living-space, it makes it unavoidable to reconsider the initial gambit. This is a hard task, we shall not settle it here and now, we must be content at having pointed it out.

  While here we found the psychologist Jung complaining about the exclusion of the mind, the neglect of the soul, as he terms it, in our world picture, I should now like to adduce in contrast, or perhaps rather as a supplement, some quotations of eminent representatives of the older and humbler sciences of physics and physiology, just stating the fact that ‘the world of science’ has become so horribly objective as to leave no room for the mind and its immediate sensations.

  Some readers may remember A.S. Eddington’s ‘two writing desks’; one is the familiar old piece of furniture at which he is seated, resting his arms on it, the other is the scientific physical body which not only lacks all and every sensual qualities but in addition is riddled with holes; by far the greatest part of it is empty space, just nothingness, interspersed with innumerable tiny specks of something, the electrons and the nuclei whirling around, but always separated by distances at least 100,000 times their own size. After having contrasted the two in his wonderfully plastic style he summarizes thus:

  In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper … The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.3

  Please note that the very recent advance does not lie in the world of physics itself having acquired this shadowy character; it had it ever since Democritus of Abdera and even before, but we were not aware of it; we thought we were dealing with the world itself; expressions like model or picture for the conceptual constructs of science came up in the second half of the nineteenth century, and not earlier, as far as I know.

  Not much later Sir Charles Sherrington published his momentous Man on his Nature.4 The book is pervaded by the honest search for objective evidence of the interaction between matter and mind. I stress the epithet ‘honest’, because it does need a very serious and sincere endeavour to look for something which one is deeply convinced in advance cannot be found, because (in the teeth of popular belief) it does not exist. A brief summary of the result of this search is found on p. 357:

  Mind, the anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a ‘thing’. It remains without sensual confirmation and remains without it forever.

  In my own words I would express this by saying: Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff. Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself– withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator.

  I cannot convey the grandeur of Sherrington’s immortal book by quoting sentences; one has to read it oneself. Still, I will mention a few of the more particularly characteristic.

  Physical science … faces us with the impasse that mind per se cannot play the piano – mind per se cannot move a finger of a hand (p. 222).

  Then the impasse meets us. The blank of the ‘how’ of mind’s leverage on matter. The inconsequence staggers us. Is it a misunderstanding? (p. 232).

  Hold these conclusions drawn by an experimental physiologist of the twentieth century against the simple statement of the greatest philosopher of the seventeenth century: B. Spinoza (Ethics, Pt III, Prop. 2):

  Nec corpus mentem ad cogitandum, nec mens corpus ad motum, neque ad quietem, nec ad aliquid (si quid est) aliud determinare potest.

  [Neither can the body determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the body to motion or rest or anything else (if such there be).]

  The impasse is an impasse. Are we thus not the doers of our deeds? Yet we feel responsible for them, we are punished or praised for them, as the case m
ay be. It is a horrible antinomy. I maintain that it cannot be solved on the level of present-day science which is still entirely engulfed in the ‘exclusion principle’ – without knowing it – hence the antinomy. To realize this is valuable, but it does not solve the problem. You cannot remove the ‘exclusion principle’ by act of parliament as it were. Scientific attitude would have to be rebuilt, science must be made anew. Care is needed.

  So we are faced with the following remarkable situation. While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space. We do not usually realize this fact, because we have entirely taken to thinking of the personality of a human being, or for that matter also that of an animal, as located in the interior of its body. To learn that it cannot really be found there is so amazing that it meets with doubt and hesitation, we are very loath to admit it. We have got used to localizing the conscious personality inside a person’s head – I should say an inch or two behind the midpoint of the eyes. From there it gives us, as the case may be, understanding or loving or tender – or suspicious or angry looks. I wonder has it ever been noted that the eye is the only sense organ whose purely receptive character we fail to recognize in naïve thought. Reversing the actual state of affairs, we are much more inclined to think of ‘rays of vision’, issuing from the eye, than of the ‘rays of light’ that hit the eyes from outside. You quite frequently find such a ‘ray of vision’ represented in a drawing in a comic paper, or even in some older schematic sketch intended to illustrate an optic instrument or law, a dotted line emerging from the eye and pointing to the object, the direction being indicated by an arrowhead at the far end. –Dear reader or, or better still, dear lady reader, recall the bright, joyful eyes with which your child beams upon you when you bring him a new toy, and then let the physicist tell you that in reality nothing emerges from these eyes; in reality their only objectively detectable function is, continually to be hit by and to receive light quanta. In reality! A strange reality! Something seems to be missing in it.

  It is very difficult for us to take stock of the fact that the localization of the personality, of the conscious mind, inside the body is only symbolic, just an aid for practical use. Let us, with all the knowledge we have about it, follow such a ‘tender look’ inside the body. We do hit there on a supremely interesting bustle or, if you like, machinery. We find millions of cells of very specialized build in an arrangement that is unsurveyably intricate but quite obviously serves a very far-reaching and highly consummate mutual communication and collaboration; a ceaseless hammering of regular electrochemical pulses which, however, change rapidly in their configuration, being conducted from nerve cell to nerve cell, tens of thousands of contacts being opened and blocked within every split second, chemical transformations being induced and maybe other changes as yet undiscovered. All this we meet and, as the science of physiology advances, we may trust that we shall come to know more and more about it. But now let us assume that in a particular case you eventually observe several efferent bundles of pulsating currents, which issue from the brain and through long cellular protrusions (motor nerve fibres), are conducted to certain muscles of the arm, which, as a consequence, tends a hesitating, trembling hand to bid you farewell – for a long, heart-rending separation; at the same time you may find that some other pulsating bundles produce a certain glandular secretion so as to veil the poor sad eye with a crape of tears. But nowhere along this way from the eye through the central organ to the arm muscles and the tear glands – nowhere, you may be sure, however far physiology advances, will you ever meet the personality, will you ever meet the dire pain, the bewildered worry within this soul, though their reality is to you so certain as though you suffered them yourself – as in actual fact you do! The picture that physiological analysis vouchsafes to us of any other human being, be it our most intimate friend, strikingly recalls to me Edgar Allan Poe’s masterly story, which I am sure many a reader remembers well; I mean The Masque of the Red Death. A princeling and his retinue have withdrawn to an isolated castle to escape the pestilence of the red death that rages in the land. After a week or so of retirement they arrange a great dancing feast in fancy dress and mask. One of the masks, tall, entirely veiled, clad all in red and obviously intended to represent the pestilence allegorically, makes everybody shudder, both for the wantonness of the choice and for the suspicion that it might be an intruder. At last a bold young man approaches the red mask and with a sudden jolt tears off veil and head-gear. It is found empty.

  Now our skulls are not empty. But what we find there, in spite of the keen interest it arouses, is truly nothing when held against the life and the emotions of the soul.

  To become aware of this may in the first moment upset one. To me it seems, on deeper thought, rather a consolation. If you have to face the body of a deceased friend whom you sorely miss, is it not soothing to realize that this body was never really the seat of his personality but only symbolically ‘for practical reference’?

  As an appendix to these considerations, those strongly interested in the physical sciences might wish to hear me pronounce on a line of ideas, concerning subject and object, that has been given great prominence by the prevailing school of thought in quantum physics, the protagonists being Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and others. Let me first give you a very brief description of their ideas. It runs as follows:5

  We cannot make any factual statement about a given natural object (or physical system) without ‘getting in touch’ with it. This ‘touch’ is a real physical interaction. Even if it consists only in our ‘looking at the object’ the latter must be hit by light-rays and reflect them into the eye, or into some instrument of observation. This means that the object is affected by our observation. You cannot obtain any knowledge about an object while leaving it strictly isolated. The theory goes on to assert that this disturbance is neither irrelevant nor completely surveyable. Thus after any number of painstaking observations the object is left in a state of which some features (the last observed) are known, but others (those interfered with by the last observation) are not known, or not accurately known. This state of affairs is offered as an explanation why no complete, gapless description of any physical object is ever possible.

  If this has to be granted – and possibly it has to be granted – then it flies in the face of the principle of understandability of nature. This in itself is no opprobrium. I told you at the outset that my two principles are not meant to be binding on science, that they only express what we had actually kept to in physical science for many, many centuries and what cannot easily be changed. Personally I do not feel sure that our present knowledge as yet vindicates the change. I consider it possible that our models can be modified in such a fashion that they do not exhibit at any moment properties that cannot in principle be observed simultaneously – models poorer in simultaneous properties but richer in adaptability to changes in the environment. However, this is an internal question of physics, not to be decided here and now. But from the theory as explained before, from the unavoidable and unsurveyable interference of the measuring devices with the object under observation, lofty consequences of an epistemological nature have been drawn and brought to the fore, concerning the relation between subject and object. It is maintained that recent discoveries in physics have pushed forward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and the object. This boundary, so we are told, is not a sharp boundary at all. We are given to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are given to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation and of thinking about the results of our experiments that mysterious boundary between the subject and the object h
as broken down.

  In order to criticize these contentions let me at first accept the time-hallowed distinction or discrimination between object and subject, as many thinkers both in olden times have accepted it and in recent times still accept it. Among the philosophers who accepted it – from Democritus of Abdera down to the ‘Old Man of Königsberg’ – there were few, if any who did not emphasize that all our sensations, perceptions and observations have a strong, personal, subjective tinge and do not convey the nature of the ‘thing-in-itself, to use Kant’s term. While some of these thinkers might have in mind only a more or less strong or slight distortion, Kant landed us with a complete resignation: never to know anything at all about his ‘thing-in-itself. Thus the idea of subjectivity in all appearance is very old and familiar. What is new in the present setting is this: that not only would the impressions we get from our environment largely depend on the nature and the contingent state of our sensorium, but inversely the very environment that we wish to take in is modified by us, notably by the devices we set up in order to observe it.

  Maybe this is so – to some extent it certainly is. May be that from the newly discovered laws of quantum physics this modification cannot be reduced below certain well-ascertained limits. Still I would not like to call this a direct influence of the subject on the object. For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the ‘world of energy’, they cannot produce any change in this world of energy as we know from Spinoza and Sir Charles Sherrington.

  All this was said from the point of view that we accept the time-hallowed discrimination between subject and object. Though we have to accept it in everyday life ‘for practical reference’, we ought, so I believe, to abandon it in philosophical thought. Its rigid logical consequence has been revealed by Kant: the sublime, but empty, idea of the ‘thing-in-itself’ about which we forever know nothing.