{"id":243696,"date":"2023-10-02T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=243696"},"modified":"2023-09-05T05:07:19","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T04:07:19","slug":"atom-and-identity-bridging-eastern-philosophy-and-western-science-to-illuminate-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/atom-and-identity-bridging-eastern-philosophy-and-western-science-to-illuminate-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"Atom and Identity: Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity: Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOur minds are all threaded together,\u201d the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the first years of the twentieth century, \u201c& all the world is mind.\u201d<\/a> Those were the dawning days of quantum mechanics, just beginning to illuminate a whole new order of golden threads holding the world together, just beginning to reverse-engineer the loom with nothing more than the human mind. A decade after Woolf\u2019s death, the Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger<\/strong> (August 12, 1887\u2013January 4, 1961) would bring the lens of his new science to this age-old question threading together the minds of artists, philosophers, and mystics since the dawn of thought.<\/p>\n

In October 1956, Schr\u00f6dinger delivered a set of lectures at Trinity College under the title Mind and Matter<\/em>, posthumously included in his lecture collection What Is Life?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). A generation of science later, on the cusp of our own century, the visionary mathematician, philosopher of science, and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose described the book as brimming with \u201cpoints that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people.\u201d Today, as we continue to unravel the ongoing mysteries of mind and matter \u2014 which might be a single and permanent mystery<\/a> \u2014 Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s book remains a tapestry of ideas epochs ahead of their time, yet stretching back to some of humanity\u2019s most ancient wisdom.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>

Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger, circa 1920s<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Drawing on his lifelong inquiry into the relationship between quantum physics and Vedanta<\/a>, Schr\u00f6dinger writes:<\/p>\n

Our science \u2014 Greek science \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With an eye to the ego\u2019s illusion of separateness from the totality of life and the ancient Buddhist notion of no-self \u2014 which the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh would articulate with ravishing vividness<\/a> in his account of the epiphany he had the year of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s death \u2014 Schr\u00f6dinger writes:<\/p>\n

The same elements\u2026 compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of \u201ccross-references\u201d 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 [discoveries] in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
One Mind<\/em> by Maria Popova. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s point seems at first more poetic than scientific, consonant with Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s perceptive observation that \u201cscience describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside, [and] both celebrate what they describe.\u201d<\/a> And yet beneath this surface intuition is the point itself: such binaries are themselves a function of our misplaced dualism. The barrier between the poetic and the scientific does not exist any more than the barrier between subject and object, or between any two minds. (This, of course, is what The Universe in Verse<\/em><\/a> celebrates.) Schr\u00f6dinger considers how we have erected these artificial barriers to cope with the \u201carithmetical paradox\u201d of one-mind:<\/p>\n

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 \u201cprivate\u201d consciousnesses partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the \u201creal world around us.\u201d With all that an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: Is my world really the same as yours? Is there one<\/em> 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 \u201cin itself,\u201d perhaps very different from the one we perceive?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Precisely because we perceive the world not as it is but as we are<\/a> \u2014 because our world-concept is shaped by the particular atoms of experience and neurochemistry composing our particular unchosen minds \u2014 Schr\u00f6dinger observes that such questions, while genuine and natural, are actually \u201csham questions\u201d that only further muddle this paradox of numbers \u2014 the numerous conscious egos of which the one world is composed. Instead, he endeavors to borrow from Eastern philosophy its \u201cdoctrine of identity\u201d \u2014 a term uncolored then by our present political connotations, which he uses to mean rather the opposite: the inter-identification of minds with each other due to each mind being identical with the whole<\/a> \u2014 and to integrate it with the Western scientific worldview \u201cwithout having to pay for it by a loss of soberness and logical precision\u201d \u2014 an endeavor still met with staggering resistance by mainstream science, yet one taken up with renewed rigor by a new generation of scientists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the scientific counterpart to the 19th-century naturalist John Muir\u2019s poetic observation that \u201cwhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,\u201d<\/a> and in a premise far subtler and more intellectually robust than the enticing but limited notion of panpsychism<\/a>, Schr\u00f6dinger considers the central empirical fact of this \u201cdoctrine of identity\u201d:<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 we are quite unable to imagine the contrary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reflexive impulse to counterargue \u2014 perhaps by invoking the psychiatric disorder of dissociative identity, or some classic Oliver Sacks case study of a neurophysiological lesion resulting in multiple personalities \u2014 must be preempted with the simple recognition that personality, personae, and all the other performances of personhood we call identity are still playing out on the single stage of a person\u2019s one and only consciousness. And yet the theater of reality is only one \u2014 there is only one world, atom by atom and moment by moment. With this, Schr\u00f6dinger arrives at his Woolfian point:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A quarter century earlier, while Schr\u00f6dinger was doing the quantum work that would earn him the Nobel Prize, the young Hannah Arendt \u2014 perhaps the most penetrating philosophical mind of the twentieth century \u2014 captured this aspect of consciousness in its most intimate manifestation, observing that if love is ever to prevail over the entropic inevitability of loss, \u201cthe only valid tense is the present, the Now.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is <\/em>Maria Popova<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which <\/em>bore the unbearable name <\/em>Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (<\/em>More<\/em><\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity: Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":243697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[2036,801,1170,1269,1183,747,3019,308,2401,304,1911,805],"class_list":["post-243696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-spirituality","tag-brain","tag-consciousness","tag-life","tag-materialism","tag-metaphysics","tag-mind","tag-nobel-prize-physics","tag-philosophy","tag-quantum-physics","tag-science","tag-science-and-spirituality","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243698,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243696\/revisions\/243698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}