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Erwin Schrödinger
Meine Weltansicht (My View of the World)
Category: Miscellaneous | Published: 1960 | Review Added: 21-11-2011
As a young man, Erwin Schrödinger planned to divide his academic career between theoretical physics and philosophy. Circumstances forced him to drop his ambitions in the latter, with the result that his philosophical output is confined to two essays written in his leisure time. These are "Seeking the Path", written in 1925, and "What is Real?", written in 1960. He published the works together under the title "My View of the World" shortly before his death.
Schrödinger was a polymath, not just a great technical scientist, but a brilliant and imaginative thinker. His ideas are deeply influenced by the Hindu Upanishad texts, and Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy. Put simply, Schrödinger regarded ultimate reality to consist in a "super-consciousness", and the individual mind to be essentially illusory. The perceived external universe is what the Upanishads call "maya": not something that exists independently, but that is projected by consciousness.
Whose consciousness projects maya? The single, "universal" consciousness, or the collective of individual minds? Both, perhaps - but if so, where is the boundary between the universal and the individual minds? These are subtle questions, and Schrödinger isn't always clear in his answers. He makes the valid point that consciousness is always experienced unitarily: by definition, a single entity cannot experience two exclusive states of consciousness at the same time; they must always be conjoined into a single experience, however complex and multi-levelled. But from this, Schrödinger seems to infer that there is only ever one mind, and that in some strange way the experience of all separate-seeming minds is actually identical. I don't follow this. Of course, the universe of every one of us exists only inside our own minds; nevertheless, that universe is particular and contingent, and the apparent existence of other conscious entities suggests entirely different experiences. Of course, our imagination of their experiences is something limited to our own minds; so is Schrödinger's suggestion that our imagination of their experiences, and their experiences themselves, are one and the same? If there is consistency between his argument that there is only one mind, and the reference to individual ones, I couldn't see it.
In Hinduism, relevation comes through the perception that the self is an illusion: that the universe and the individual mind are one. No doubt this is a state one must have experienced oneself to truly understand. Whichever way you look at it, it seems to me that you can only explain the apparent existence of multiple minds by either solipsism ("other people's minds have no existence beyond their apparent interaction with mine"); or the idea that a putative super-consciousness can find itself fragmented into myriad smaller consciousnesses.
Schrödinger takes for granted that there is no "halfway house" between universal and individual consciousness; nothing seems to have convinced him of the existence of telepathy or of the idea that there can exist intermediate levels of consciousness - for example those shared between two people, or among groups of people. He also rejects as "superstitious nonsense" Schopenhauer's thoughts on the paranormal. I am not with Schrödinger on this, but then one's attitude to these matters depends a great deal on personal experience, however much a mystic one claims to be.
In summary, Schrödinger's philosophical ideas, although all leading in the same general direction towards monistic idealism, and often yielding brilliant insights, are, nevertheless, not always internally consistent and fully worked through. His prose is not always terribly readable, either, falling occasional victim to the Germanic taste for long and grammatically intricate, but semantically confusing sentences that must be read several times to be comprehended.
On the other hand, Schrödinger was a deep thinker who applied his intellect perspicaciously to a remarkably wide range of subjects. (In addition to philosophy, for example, in Meine Weltansicht he makes interesting observations about language.) And this book is important on one level in particular. Many rationalists maintain that Schrödinger mistrusted the view of reality suggested by his own paradox ("Schrödinger's Cat") - the view, namely, that consciousness lies at the heart of existence. Meine Weltansicht represents, above all, his unequivocal statement of adherence to this controversial creed.