What Is Life (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrodinger

  It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of ‘cross-references’ between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

  1 Cambridge University Press, 1954.

  2 Eranos Jahrbuch (1946), p. 398.

  3 The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1928), Introduction.

  4 Cambridge University Press, 1940.

  5 See my Science and Humanism (Cambridge Universty Press, 1951), p. 49.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Arithmetical Paradox:

  The Oneness of Mind

  The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it. But, of course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world however is only one. This comes from the fashion in which the world-concept produces itself. The several domains of ‘private’ consciousnesses partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the ‘real world around us’. With all that an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: Is my world really the same as yours? Is there one real world to be distinguished from its pictures introjected by way of perception into every one of us? And if so, are these pictures like unto the real world or is the latter, the world ‘in itself, perhaps very different from the one we perceive?

  Such questions are ingenious, but in my opinion very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from the one source, which I called the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experiences the one world is concocted. The solution of this paradox of numbers would do away with all the questions of the aforesaid kind and reveal them, I dare say, as sham questions.

  There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly ‘Western’). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz’s fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them; the monad ‘has no windows’, it is ‘incommunicado’. That none the less they all agree with each other is called ‘pre-established harmony’. I think there are few to whom this suggestion appeals, nay who would consider it as a mitigation at all of the numerical antinomy.

  There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; and this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East. Let me quote as an example outside the Upanishads an Islamic Persian mystic of the thirteenth century, Aziz Nasafi. I am taking it from a paper by Fritz Meyer1 and translating from his German translation:

  On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world, the body to the bodily world. In this however only the bodies are subject to change. The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged.

  Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy2 and which is an anthology from the mystics of the most various periods and the most various peoples. Open it where you will and you find many beautiful utterances of a similar kind. You are struck by the miraculous agreement between humans of different race, different religion, knowing nothing about each other’s existence, separated by centuries and millennia, and by the greatest distances that there are on our globe.

  Still, it must be said that to Western thought this doctrine has little appeal, it is unpalatable, it is dubbed fantastic, unscientific. Well, so it is because our science – Greek science – is based on objectivation, whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. But I do believe that this is precisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought. That will not be easy, we must beware of blunders -blood-transfusion always needs great precaution to prevent clotting. We do not wish to lose the logical precision that our scientific thought has reached, and that is unparalleled anywhere at any epoch.

  Still, one thing can be claimed in favour of the mystical teaching of the ‘identity’ of all minds with each other and with the supreme mind – as against the fearful monadology of Leibniz. The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology – we are quite unable to imagine the contrary.

  Yet there are cases or situations where we would expect and nearly require this unimaginable thing to happen, if it can happen at all. This is the point that I should like to discuss now in some detail, and to clinch it by quotations from Sir Charles Sherrington, who was at the same time (rare event!) a man of highest genius and a sober scientist. For all I know he had no bias towards the philosophy of the Upanishads. My purpose in this discussion is to contribute perhaps to clearing the way for a future assimilation of the doctrine of identity with our own scientific world view, without having to pay for it by a loss of soberness and logical precision.

  I said just now that we are not able even to imagine a plurality of consciousnesses in one mind. We can pronounce these words all right, but they are not the description of any thinkable experience. Even in the pathological cases of a ‘split personality’ the two persons alternate, they never hold the field jointly; nay this is just the characteristic feature, that they know nothing about each other.

  When in the puppet-show of dream we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply, whether he is going to fulfil my urgent request. That I could really let him do and say whatever I please does not occur to me – in fact it is not quite the case. For in a dream of this kind the ‘other one’ is, I dare say, mostly the impersonation of some serious obstacle that opposes me in waking life and of which I have actually no control. The strange state of affairs, described here, is quite obviously the reason why most people of old firmly believed that they were truly in communication with the persons, alive or deceased, or, maybe, gods or heroes, whom they met in their dreams. It is a superstition that dies hard. On the verge of the sixth century B.C. Heraclitus of Ephesus definitely pronounced against it, with a clarity not often met with in his sometimes very obscure fragments. But Lucretius Carus, who believed himself to be the protagonist of enlightened thought, still holds on to this superstition in the first century B.C. In our days it is probably rare, but I doubt that it is entirely extinct.

  Let me turn to something quite different. I find it utterly impossible to form an idea about either how, for example, my own conscious mind (that I feel to be one) should have originated by integration of
the consciousnesses of the cells (or some of them) that form my body, or how it should at every moment of my life be, as it were, their resultant. One would think that such a ‘commonwealth of cells’ as each of us is would be the occasion par excellence for mind to exhibit plurality if it were at all able to do so. The expression ‘commonwealth’ or ‘state of cells’ (Zellstaat) is nowadays no longer to be regarded as a metaphor. Listen to Sherrington:

  To declare that, of the component cells that go to make us up, each one is an individual self-centred life is no mere phrase. It is not a mere convenience for descriptive purposes. The cell as a component of the body is not only a visibly demarcated unit but a unit-life centred on itself. It leads its own life … The cell is a unit-life, and our life which in its turn is a unitary life consists utterly of the cell-lives.3

  But this story can be followed up in more detail and more concretely. Both the pathology of the brain and physiological investigations on sense perception speak unequivocally in favour of a regional separation of the sensorium into domains whose far-reaching independence is amazing because it would let us expect to find these regions associated with independent domains of the mind; but they are not. A particularly characteristic instance is the following. If you look at a distant landscape first in the ordinary way with both eyes open, then with the right eye alone, shutting the left, then the other way round, you find no noticeable difference. The psychic visional space is in all three cases identically the same. Now this might very well be due to the fact that from corresponding nerve-ends on the retina the stimulus is transferred to the same centre in the brain where ‘the perception is manufactured’ – just as, for example, in my house the knob at the entrance door and the one in my wife’s bedroom activate the same bell, situated above the kitchen door. This would be the easiest explanation; but it is wrong.

  Sherrington tells us of very interesting experiments on the threshold frequency of flickering. I shall try to give you as brief an account as possible. Think of a miniature lighthouse set up in the laboratory and giving off a great many flashes per second, say 40 or 60 or 80 or 100. As you increase the frequency of the flashes the flickering disappears at a definite frequency, depending on the experimental details; and the onlooker, whom we suppose to watch with both eyes in the ordinary way, sees then a continuous light.4 Let this threshold frequency be 60 per second in given circumstances. Now in a second experiment, with nothing else changed, a suitable contraption allows only every second flash to reach the right eye, every other flash to reach the left eye, so that every eye receives only 30 flashes per second. If the stimuli were conducted to the same physiological centre, this should make no difference: if I press the button before my entrance door, say every two seconds, and my wife does the same in her bedroom, but alternately with me, the kitchen bell will ring every second, just the same as if one of us had pressed his button every second or both of us had done so synchronously every second. However, in the second flicker experiment this is not so. Thirty flashes to the right eye plus alternating 30 flashes to the left are far from sufficient to remove the sensation of flickering; double the frequency is required for that, namely, 60 to the right and 60 to the left, if both eyes are open. Let me give you the main conclusion in Sherrington’s own words:

  It is not spatial conjunction of cerebral mechanism which combines the two reports … It is much as though the right- and left-eye images were seen each by one of two observers and the minds of the two observers were combined to a single mind. It is as though the right-eye and left-eye perceptions are elaborated singly and then psychically combined to one … It is as if each eye had a separate sensorium of considerable dignity proper to itself, in which mental processes based on that eye were developed up to even full perceptual levels. Such would amount physiologically to a visual sub-brain. There would be two such sub-brains, one for the right eye and one for the left eye. Contemporaneity of action rather than structural union seems to provide their mental collaboration.5

  This is followed by very general considerations, of which I shall again pick out only the most characteristic passages:

  Are there thus quasi-independent sub-brains based on the several modalities of sense? In the roof-brain the old ‘five’ senses instead of being merged inextricably in one another and further submerged under mechanism of higher order are still plain to find, each demarcated in its separate sphere. How far is the mind a collection of quasi-independent perceptual minds integrated psychically in large measure by temporal concurrence of experience? … When it is a question of ‘mind’ the nervous system does not integrate itself by centralization upon a pontifical cell. Rather it elaborates a millionfold democracy whose each unit is a cell … the concrete life compounded of sublives reveals, although integrated, its additive nature and declares itself an affair of minute foci of life acting together … When however we turn to the mind there is nothing of all this. The single nerve-cell is never a miniature brain. The cellular constitution of the body need not be for any hint of it from ‘mind’ … A single pontifical brain-cell could not assure to the mental reaction a character more unified, and non-atomic than does the roof-brain’s multitudinous sheet of cells. Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does ‘life’, but not so mind.

  I have quoted you the passages which have most impressed me. Sherrington, with his superior knowledge of what is actually going on in a living body, is seen struggling with a paradox which in his candidness and absolute intellectual sincerity he does not try to hide away or explain away (as many others would have done, nay have done), but he almost brutally exposes it, knowing very well that this is the only way of driving any problem in science or philosophy nearer towards its solution, while by plastering it over with ‘nice’ phrases you prevent progress and make the antinomy perennial (not forever, but until someone notices your fraud). Sherrington’s paradox too is an arithmetical paradox, a paradox of numbers, and it has, so I believe, very much to do with the one to which I had given this name earlier in this chapter, though it is by no means identical with it. The previous one was, briefly, the one world crystallizing out of the many minds. Sherrington’s is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it. Yet we know that a sub-mind is an atrocious monstrosity, just as is a plural-mind – neither having any counterpart in anybody’s experience, neither being in any way imaginable.

  I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science – a religion, however, not opposed to science, but supported by what disinterested scientific research has brought to the fore.

  Sherrington says: ‘Man’s mind is a recent product of our planet’s side.’6

  I agree, naturally. If the first word (man’s) were left out, I would not. We dealt with this earlier, in chapter 1. It would seem queer, not to say ridiculous, to think that the contemplating, conscious mind that alone reflects the becoming of the world should have made its appearance only at some time in the course of this ‘becoming’, should have appeared contingently, associated with a very special biological contraption which in itself quite obviously discharges the task of facilitating certain forms of life in maintaining themselves, thus favouring their preservation and propagation: forms of life that were late-comers and have been preceded by many others that maintained themselves without that particular contraption (a brain). Only a sma
ll fraction of them (if you count by species) have embarked on ‘getting themselves a brain’. And before that happened, should it all have been a performance to empty stalls? Nay, may we call a world that nobody contemplates even that? When an archaeologist reconstructs a city or a culture long bygone, he is interested in human life in the past, in actions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, in joy and sorrow of humans, displayed there and then. But a world existing for many millions of years without any mind being aware of it, contemplating it, is it anything at all? Has it existed? For do not let us forget: to say, as we did, that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliché, a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experience does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that – as Berkeley was well aware.

  But the romance of a world that had existed for many millions of years before it, quite contingently, produced brains in which to look at itself has an almost tragic continuation that I should like to describe again in Sherrington’s words:

  The universe of energy is we are told running down. It tends fatally towards an equilibrium which shall be final. An equilibrium in which life cannot exist. Yet life is being evolved without pause. Our planet in its surround has evolved it and is evolving it. And with it evolves mind. If mind is not an energy-system how will the running down of the universe affect it? Can it go unscathed? Always so far as we know the finite mind is attached to a running energy-system. When that energy-system ceases to run what of the mind which runs with it? Will the universe which elaborated and is elaborating the finite mind then let it perish?7