Rocky
May 21, 2006, 9:02am
1
…by one of the greatest physicists. This passage comes from [i]What is Life?/i by Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who’s also famous for his thought-experiment, “Schrödinger’s Cat”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger
You may be surprised that he, like many of the greatest scientists, subscribed to a mystical worldview.
So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:
The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’ – am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.
Within a cultural milieu (Kulturkreis) where certain conceptions (which once had or still have a wider meaning amongst other peoples) have been limited and specialized, it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say: ‘Hence I am God Almighty’ sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.
In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN upheld in (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
That (ii) reminds me of something Spinoza once said, namely that if a stone could speak, and someone asked it why it went vertically downwards when it was released, it would say that it did so of its own free will.
