What is Life? (Canto Classics) by Erwin Schrodinger & Roger Penrose

Author:Erwin Schrodinger & Roger Penrose [Schrodinger, Erwin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781107604667
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

ETHICS

Even without this last generalization, which to me is very important but may still seem rather dubious to others, the theory of consciousness that I have adumbrated seems to pave the way towards a scientific understanding of ethics.

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). The teaching of ethics always assumes the form of a demand, a challenge, of a ‘thou shalt’, that is in some way opposed to our primitive will. Whence comes this peculiar contrast between the ‘I will’ and the ‘thou shalt’? Is it not absurd that I am supposed to suppress my primitive appetites, disown my true self, be different from what I really am? Indeed in our days, more perhaps than in others, we hear this demand often enough mocked at. ‘I am as I am, give room to my individuality! Free development to the desires that nature has planted in me! All the shalls that oppose me in this are nonsense, priests’ fraud. God is Nature, and Nature may be credited with having formed me as she wants me to be.’ Such slogans are heard occasionally. It is not easy to refute their plain and brutal obviousness. Kant’s imperative is avowedly irrational.

But fortunately the scientific foundation of these slogans is worm-eaten. Our insight into the ‘becoming’ (das Werden) of the organisms makes it easy to understand that our conscious life – I will not say shall be, but that it actually is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego. For our natural self, our primitive will with its innate desires, is obviously the mental correlate of the material bequest received from our ancestors. Now as a species we are developing, and we march in the front-line of generations; thus every day of a man’s life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species, which is still in full swing. It is true that a single day of one’s life, nay even any individual life as a whole, is but a minute blow of the chisel at the ever unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by myriads of such minute chisel blows. The material for this transformation, the presupposition for its taking place, are of course the inheritable spontaneous mutations. However, for selection among them, the behaviour of the carrier of the mutation, his habits of life, are of outstanding importance and decisive influence. Otherwise the origin of species, the ostensibly directed trends along which selection proceeds, could not be understood even in the long spaces of time which are after all limited and whose limits we know quite well.

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.

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