What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form – not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it.

How do you say ‘shit’ in Science?

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).

Si un hombre nunca se contradice, será porque nunca dice nada.1 MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO (quoted from conversation)

TWO WAYS OF PRODUCING ORDERLINESS

‘Third Law of Thermodynamics’ (the first being the energy principle, the second the entropy principle).

(Let me recall that entropy is a direct measure of molecular disorder, viz. its logarithm.)

1If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.

How far back or ‘down’ in the animal kingdom there is still some sort of consciousness, and what it may be like in its early stages, are gratuitous speculations, questions that cannot be answered and which ought to be left to idle dreamers. It is still more gratuitous to indulge in thoughts about whether perhaps other events as well, events in inorganic matter, let alone all material events, are in some way or other associated with consciousness. All this is pure fantasy, as irrefutable as it is unprovable, and thus of no value for knowledge.

One might say, metaphorically, that consciousness is the tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves his pupil alone to deal with all those tasks for which he is already sufficiently trained.

consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how (Können) is unconscious.

At all epochs and with all peoples the background of every ethical code (Tugendlehre) to be taken seriously has been, and is, self-denial (Selbstüberwindung).

And thus at every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time – it is a true continued ‘self-conquering’

In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution.

The ethical law in its simplest general form (be unselfish!) is plainly a fact, it is there, it is agreed upon even by the vast majority of those who do not very often keep it. I regard its puzzling existence as an indication of our being in the beginning of a biological transformation from an egoistic to an altruistic general attitude, of man being about to become an animal social. For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species; in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice. An animal that embarks on forming states without greatly restricting egoism will perish. Phylogenetically much older state-formers as the bees, ants and termites have given up egoism completely. However, its next stage, national egoism or briefly nationalism, is still in full swing with them. A worker bee that goes astray to the wrong hive is murdered without hesitation. Now in man something is, so it seems, on the way that is not infrequent. Above the first modification clear traces of a second one in similar direction are noticeable long before the first is even nearly achieved. Though we are still pretty vigorous egoists, many of us begin to see that nationalism too is a vice that ought to be given up. Here perhaps something very strange may make its appearance. The second step, the pacification of the struggle of peoples, may be facilitated by the fact that the first step is far from being achieved, so that egoistic motives still have a vigorous ap...

Altruism is next step from egoism.

Popular expositions of Darwin’s theory are apt to lead you to a gloomy and discouraging view on account of the apparent passivity of the organism in the process of evolution. Mutations occur spontaneously in the genom – the ‘hereditary substance’. We have reason to believe that they are mainly due to what the physicist calls a thermodynamic fluctuation – in other words to pure chance. The individual has not the slightest influence on the hereditary treasure it receives from its parents, nor on the one it leaves to its offspring. Mutations that occur are acted on by ‘natural selection of the fittest’. This again seems to mean pure chance, since it means that a favourable mutation increases the prospect for the individual of survival and of begetting offspring, to which it transmits the mutation in question. Apart from this, its activity during its lifetime seems to be biologically irrelevant. For nothing of it has an influence on the offspring: acquired properties are not inherited. Any skill or training attained is lost, it leaves no trace, it dies with the individual, it is not transmitted. An intelligent being in this situation would find that nature, as it were, refuses his collaboration – she does all herself, dooms the individual to inactivity, indeed to nihilism.

As you know, Darwin’s theory was not the first systematic theory of evolution. It was preceded by the theory of Lamarck, which rests entirely on the assumption that any new features an individual has acquired by specific surroundings or behaviour during its lifetime before procreation can be, and usually are, passed on to its progeny, if not entirely, at least in traces.

It is infinitely more attractive than the gloomy aspect of passivity apparently offered by Darwinism. An intelligent being which considers itself a link in the long chain of evolution may, under Lamarck’s theory, be confident that its striving and efforts for improving its abilities, both bodily and mental, are not lost in the biological sense but form a small but integrating part of the striving of the species towards higher and ever higher perfection. Unhappily Lamarckism is untenable. The fundamental assumption on which it rests, namely, that acquired properties can be inherited, is wrong. To the best of our knowledge they cannot. The single steps of evolution are those spontaneous and fortuitous mutations which have nothing to do with the behaviour of the individual during its lifetime. And so we appear to be thrown back on the gloomy aspect of Darwinism that I have depicted above.

The most remarkable feature among living beings is that they are divided into species which are, many of them, so incredibly specialized on quite particular, often tricky performances, on which especially they rely for survival.

Non-specialization is the exception. The rule is specialization in peculiar studied tricks which ‘nobody would think of if nature had not made them’.

In metaphorical speech one might say: the species has found out in which direction its chance in life lies and pursues this path.

Now I believe that the increasing mechanization and ‘stupidization’ of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence. The more the chances in life of the clever and of the unresponsive worker are equalled out by the repression of handicraft and the spreading of tedious and boring work on the assembly line, the more will a good brain, clever hands and a sharp eye become superfluous. Indeed the unintelligent man, who naturally finds it easier to submit to the boring toil, will be favoured; he is likely to find it easier to thrive, to settle down and to beget offspring. The result may easily amount even to a negative selection as regards talents and gifts. The hardship of modern industrial life has led to certain institutions calculated to mitigate it, such as protection of the workers against exploitation and unemployment, and many other welfare and security measures. They are duly regarded as beneficial and they have become indispensable. Still we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that, by alleviating the responsibility of the individual to look after himself and by levelling the chances of every man, they also tend to rule out the competition of talents and thus to put an efficient brake on biological evolution. I realize that this particular point is highly controversial. One may make a strong case that the care for our present welfare must override the worry about our evolutionary future. But fortunately, so...

The present line in physics is possibly a quite serious contamination. The uncertainty principle, the alleged lack of strict causal connection in nature, may represent a step away from it, a partial abandonment.

The first of these antinomies is the astonishment at finding our world picture ‘colourless, cold, mute’.

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.

Edgar Allan Poe’s masterly story, which I am sure many a reader remembers well; I mean The Masque of the Red Death.

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’?

Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the ‘world of energy’,

This seems wrong

Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy2

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.

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.

Hence, Kant.

The discovery of chromosomes as the decisive factors in heredity seems to have given society the right to overlook other better-known but equally important factors such as communication, education and tradition. It is assumed that these were not so important because from the point of view of genetics they are not stable enough. This is quite true. However, there are cases such as that of Kaspar Hauser, for example, and that of a small group of Tasmanian ‘Stone Age’ children who were only recently brought to live in English surroundings and granted a first-class English upbringing, with the effect that they reached the educational level of upper-class Englishmen. Does this not prove to us that it takes both a code of chromosomes and civilized human surroundings to produce people of our kind? In other words, the intellectual level of every individual is bred by ‘nature’ and by ‘nurture’. Schools are therefore (not as our Empress Maria Theresa liked to see it) invaluable for human guidance, and much less for political purposes. And a sound family background is just as important for preparing the soil for the seed the schools will sow. This is unfortunately a fact overlooked by those who claim that only the children of the less educated should attend schools for higher education (will their children be excluded for the same reasons?) and also by British High Society, where it is deemed upper class to replace family life by boarding school and considered a sign of nobility to l...