mills

Erwin Schrödinger, in the absolutely wonderful What is Life? (which you can read online). He argues that the only logical conclusion one can draw from the statistical facticity of determinism, given our structure, size, and subjugation to the laws of science, is that consciousness is not individual but universal and -so to speak- at the base of all things; in the words of the Upanishads, which he cites, Atman is Brahman.

The book is fascinating, and the co-discoverer of DNA’s nature claims it anticipated and sped his research: significant praise for a work by a physicist. Beyond its discussion of the basis of life in a physical sense, it contains Schrödinger’s thoughts on mind, a phenomenon of special complexity and meaning that is taken for granted despite being scarcely understood. In “The Mystic Vision,” he wrote:

“Knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it… For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours… is, in a certain sense, the whole… This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula… ’Tat tvam asi’ — this is you. Or, again, in such words as ‘I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.’ Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you … For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

I find the insistence of a Nobel laureate such as Schrödinger that these ideas are to be taken as literal descriptions of the world, not as metaphors in any sense, to be extraordinarily interesting.

Sir Martin Rees in a TED lecture. He suggests that humans have evolved to this scale, an almost beautiful mean between stars and atomic particles, because we must be large enough to permit massive complexity in structure while small enough to experience minimal gravitational effects.

This idea reminds me of Schrödinger’s amazing explanation of why the fundamental components of human life -particularly DNA- are sized as they are.

It always makes me feel rather happy to think that everything had to be just so for our world, as we know it, to occur. Rees calls this quality of the universe its biophilia and describes it more here.

Erwin Schrödinger, Mind and Matter. Schrödinger, a Nobel laureate physicist of renown, concludes this from the fact that adaptive evolutionary consciousness functions thusly: “consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how is unconscious.”

That is to say: in the discord of novel but periodically repeating situations the organism adapts, and it is in this adaptation that life reflects its environment with increasing complexity until what we call consciousness emerges from the interplay.

As such, in instances of success we achieve stagnation, and “places of stagnancy slip from consciousness.” This relationship between discord, growth, vitality, awareness, change, suffering and ease, stagnation, somnambulance, comfort, existential arrest is evident in our lives, but I’d not previously thought of its evolutionary grounding.

I cannot recommend this book enough. I’ve written about Schrödinger before; he is a striking thinker across many fields, and I’m sure I’ll have cause to further quote him.

Erwin Schrödinger, quoting an example used by Lord Kelvin, to demonstrate how small atoms are (that is: how many of them there are in everything, like glasses of water).

As he notes, however, it’s not so much that atoms are small as it is that we are large, very large. Schrödinger begins What Is Life?, which was sent to me by my dad, by pondering the relative size of organic life to its atomic constituents. Why are cells, organisms, humans so much larger than atoms and atomic events? Why are all fundamental physical processes so far beneath our sensory perception?

The question is not facile, although the immediate instinct is to say, as we do when we don’t understand something, “Because it is!” But Schrödinger arrives at an arresting conclusion: life is vastly larger in scale because at the atomic scale, individual atomic events are not reliably predictable. Due to the bizarre and irregular nature of individual molecular and atomic events, few repeatable phenomena are available for systems to organize their processes with; that is to say, you cannot build reliable, repeatable processes from atoms or molecules because they are too random. Life must use aggregates of millions of atoms or molecules.

In aggregates, atoms behave with statistical regularity despite individual irregularity. Schrödinger illustrates this with examples like diffusion and Brownian motion; in both cases, individual atoms behave with total and unpredictable irregularity, but in massive groups they behave with complete predictability. Just as one could not build a skyscraper on unpredictably shifting earth, so organic life must rely on the aggregation of atoms and molecules for the processes it uses to function (like diffusion, for example). Hence our sense organs all being far too massive to perceive all the fundamental phenomena of the universe’s compositional elements.

Abusing this remarkable observation, I thought it a nicely poetic metaphor for an epistemological phenomenon that has long irked me: the manner in which the more closely examined something is, the more fleeting its precise details are; there is a Heisenberg-like quality to reality, and I remember when as a child I was attempting to learn about JFK’s assassination how baffled I was that so many thousands of investigators, historians, academics, and law-enforcement personnel, working for decades, could not arrive at an indisputable conclusion. As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen that this is true of virtually every event, even those recorded on video or photographic media and witnessed by millions.

While this has nothing whatever to do with Schrödinger and Heisenberg, it struck me then that reality resists knowing: the more closely you examine it, the more space in between facts you see, the more chaotic the motion you seek to arrest, the more diffuse the facts you want to connect. Crystalline structures of conclusive meaning merely mask enormous spaces in their own lattices, spaces where the random trails of the unpredictable remain visible.

(Note: I’m not even discussing the inescapable fact that at the quantum level, and thus probably beyond it, mere observation demonstrably affects reality in ways that are scarcely believable).

William Faulkner, from the thoroughly excellent tumblelog Unburying the Lead. Tangentially, Wikipedia offers some explanations for the WWII-era phrase “Kilroy was here,” a meme before Richard Dawkins had developed* the term, one which spread across media before the Internet (mainly as graffiti on walls and written in fiction).

*I say Dawkins developed, rather than invented, the term “meme” as my dad recently discovered the work of Richard Semon (1859-1918), who coined the term “mneme” to describe evolutionary phenomena in a manner remarkably similar to Dawkins’ work. That my father came across his ideas in a biography of Erwin Schrödinger is notable, as it demonstrates that Semon is not particularly obscure. Of course, few great ideas are sui generis, and Dawkins’ application of the idea to culture -and to phenomena such as global graffiti patterns- was novel and extremely useful.

I doubt whether Dawkins, Faulkner, Schrödinger or any thinker or artist really conceives of his or her work as creative immortality; you may scribble what you like on the wall, but if your only interest is in etching a sign of your existence you might save the astounding labor of an Absalom, Absalom! and just write “Damn.” But I very much like the first part, especially this: art, viewed by a stranger from another time, “moves again since it is life.”

The more explanation a work of art requires before it “moves again” for the stranger who views it, the less artful it is; it should just happen, like life.