What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

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.

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.

Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy

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).

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

‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’

this reproach again and again, but unjustly so. No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it.

We know, when God is experienced, this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one’s own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time – that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: God is spirit.

Can the results of scientific research be of any help in gaining a reasonable and satisfactory attitude towards those burning questions which assail everyone at times? Some of us, in particular healthy and happy youth, succeed in shoving them aside for long periods; others, in advanced age, have satisfied themselves that there is no answer and have resigned themselves to giving up looking for one, while others again are haunted throughout their lives by this incongruity of our intellect, haunted also by serious fears raised by time-honoured popular superstition.

A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover

Every integer, except 1 and 2, is ‘in the middle’ of two prime numbers, or is their arithmetical mean; for instance As you see, there is usually more than one solution. The theorem is called Goldbach’s and is thought to be true, though it has not been proved.

Admittedly our sense perceptions constitute our sole knowledge about things. This objective world remains a hypothesis, however natural.

However, the supreme importance of Kant’s statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object – the world – between them in the process of ‘mind forming an idea of the world’, because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two. The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing – mind or world – may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like.

So with all due acknowledgment to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.

on the one hand all our knowledge about the world around us, both that gained in everyday life and that revealed by the most carefully planned and painstaking laboratory experiments, rests entirely on immediate sense perception, while on the other hand this knowledge fails to reveal the relations of the sense perceptions to the outside world, so that in the picture or model we form of the outside world, guided by our scientific discoveries, all sensual qualities are absent.

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electro-magnetic waves of wave-length in the neighbourhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow. On further inquiry you may hear that different wave-lengths produce different colour-sensations, but not all do so, only those between about 800 and 400 μμ. To the physicist the infra-red (more than 800 μμ) and the ultra-violet (less than 400 μμ) waves are much the same kind of phenomena as those in the region between 800 and 400 μμ, to which the eye is sensitive. How does this peculiar selection come about? It is obviously an adaptation to the sun’s radiation, which is strongest in this region of wave-lengths but falls off at either end. Moreover, the intrinsically brightest colour-sensation, the yellow, is encountered at that place (within the said region) where the sun’s radiation exhibits its maximum, a true peak. We may further ask: Is radiation in the neighbourhood of wave-length 590 μμ the only one to produce the sensation of yellow? The answer is: Not at all. If waves of 760 μμ, which by themselves produce the sensation of red, are mixed in a definite proportion with waves of 535 μμ, which by themselves produce the sensation of green, this mixture produces a yellow that is indis...

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.

But the most striking fact about sound is that a mixture of several distinct frequencies never combines to produce just one intermediate pitch such as could be produced by one intermediate frequency. To a large extent the superposed pitches are perceived separately – though simultaneously – especially by highly musical persons. The admixture of many higher notes (‘overtones’) of various qualities and intensities results in what is called the timbre (German: Klangfarbe), by which we learn to distinguish a violin, a bugle, a church bell, piano … even from a single note that is sounded.

I have gone into some detail here, in order to make you feel that neither the physicist’s description, nor that of the physiologist, contains any trait of the sensation of sound. Any description of this kind is bound to end with a sentence like: those nerve impulses are conducted to a certain portion of the brain, where they are registered as a sequence of sounds. We can follow the pressure changes in the air as they produce vibrations of the ear-drum, we can see how its motion is transferred by a chain of tiny bones to another membrane and eventually to parts of the membrane inside the cochlea, composed of fibres of varying length, described above. We may reach an understanding of how such a vibrating fibre sets up an electrical and chemical process of conduction in the nervous fibre with which it is in touch. We may follow this conduction to the cerebral cortex and we may even obtain some objective knowledge of some of the things that happen there. But nowhere shall we hit on this ‘registering as sound’, which simply is not contained in our scientific picture, but is only in the mind of the person whose ear and brain we are speaking of.