Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
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"Quantum physics thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe."
"The fact that life exists and that it is maintained by a continuous stream of 'negentropy' from the outside, is the most profound mystery of all."
"The greatest change will be in the thinking habits of the human race. It will learn to look at things in a new way. Quantum theory will force it to do so."
"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."
"The most important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence."
Austrian physicist who shared the 1933 Nobel for the wave equation that bears his name and the famous cat thought-experiment. Closely associated with Werner Heisenberg (matrix-mechanics rival who reached the same physics by different math) and Albert Einstein (his pen-pal on quantum interpretation). For an intellectual contrast, see Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and architect of the Copenhagen interpretation — Schrödinger's cat thought-experiment was specifically designed to ridicule Bohr's 'observer-dependent reality' reading of quantum mechanics — Schrödinger thought the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd; the cat was meant as reductio ad absurdum.
From 'Mind and Matter', a strong philosophical stance on the primacy of consciousness.
Date: 1958
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Consciousness isn't reducible to physical processes—neurons, chemistry, or physics equations can't fully explain the subjective experience of being aware. Consciousness is the most fundamental thing that exists; everything else we know about the physical world is known only through it. Rather than awareness emerging from matter, the experienced physical world may itself depend on consciousness, making it the irreducible ground of all reality, not a byproduct of it.
Schrödinger formulated wave mechanics and the famous cat thought-experiment, spending his later career at the boundary of physics and mind. His 1944 book What Is Life? and philosophical essays show he believed quantum mechanics exposed the limits of materialism. Deeply shaped by Vedanta philosophy, he held individual and universal consciousness are unified—making this statement consistent with both his wave-function work and his conviction that science had cornered something irreducibly subjective at nature's foundation.
Schrödinger wrote this mid-20th century, when quantum mechanics had demolished classical determinism. The measurement problem—observation collapsing wave functions—forced physicists to confront the observer's role in physical reality. Simultaneously, logical positivism dominated philosophy, insisting only empirically measurable facts matter. Schrödinger pushed back, arguing physics itself revealed something irreducibly non-physical at its core, anticipating what philosophers now call the hard problem of consciousness decades before the term existed.
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