My View of the World by Erwin Schrodinger

Author:Erwin Schrodinger [Schrodinger, Erwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1951-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT IS REAL?

1960

I

REASONS FOR ABANDONING THE DUALISM OF THOUGHT AND EXISTENCE, OR MIND AND MATTER

Probably for historical reasons of language and education, it comes naturally to the simple man of today to think of a dualistic relationship between mind and matter as an extremely obvious idea. He finds no difficulty in thinking that we first, through our will, move parts of our living selves, and then, by means of them, move other material things; nor that material things, coming in contact with our bodies, give rise through the nerves to the feeling of touch; that vibrations in the air, when they reach the ear, cause the sensation of sound, and that light, striking the eye, causes that of sight, and so on (meaning that similar things apply to sensations of smell, taste and temperature). But a more careful consideration should make us less ready to admit this interaction of events in two different spheres—if they really are different spheres; for the first (the causal determination of matter by mind) would necessarily have to disrupt the autonomy of material events, while the second (causal influence on mind of bodies or their equivalent, for example, light) is absolutely unintelligible to us; in short, we simply cannot see how material events can be transformed into sensation or thought, however many text-books, in defiance of Du Bois Reymond, go on talking nonsense on the subject.

These shortcomings can hardly be avoided except by abandoning dualism. This has been proposed often enough, and it is odd that it has usually been done on a materialistic basis. Probably the first such attempt was the naïve suggestion of the great Democritus that the soul too consists of atoms, but of peculiarly subtle, smooth, spherical and hence highly mobile ones. (This was not wholly without repercussions, as appears from the famous fragment, Diels 125, discovered as late as 1900 amongst the writings of Galen.) Epicurus and Lucretius took this idea further, adding the delightful ‘improvement’ of ‘atomic fits’, usually attributed to the former, which were frankly supposed to explain free will in men and animals and have, in this connection, found a remarkable parallel in our own day. The monism of Haeckel and his school is another scarcely pardonable attempt, which casts a shadow over their services to science. Spinoza’s uniting of the two in one substance which he called God, with the two attributes known to us of extension and thought, while avoiding the worst mistake, since it explicitly excludes interaction, nevertheless seems to us, greatly though we esteem that extraordinarily lovable and utterly honest and selfless thinker, a somewhat formal solution. Bertrand Russell, in The Analysis of Mind, made a promising contribution by suggesting that mental states are constituted from the same kind of elements as bodies, merely put together in a different way. The explanation offered here is most closely related to this. But it strikes me that Russell soon shies away from that fundamental surrender of the notion of the real external world which, alien as it seems to everyday thinking, is nevertheless absolutely essential.

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