The idea that there is a soul, which is a kind of independent entity in the body, is not something that I think a lot of people would agree with today. But the idea that consciousness is something that is not reducible to the brain is something that many people still hold.
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"The scientific picture of the world is a simplification, an abstraction, and it is not the whole truth."
"The great difficulty is to get rid of the idea that we are separate from the world."
"This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in a single gl…"
"What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space. Particles are just schaumkommen (appearances)!"
"The true meaning and purpose of human life lies in our striving for understanding and knowledge."
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.
Attributed, but precise source and wording are difficult to pin down. Reflects general philosophical stance.
Date: Approx. 1950s
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Consciousness may be more than just brain activity — something that cannot be fully explained by neuroscience alone. While the religious notion of a detachable soul has lost mainstream credibility, the deeper philosophical question of whether subjective experience can be reduced entirely to physical brain processes remains genuinely unresolved and contested among scientists and philosophers alike.
Schrödinger, who founded quantum wave mechanics, spent his later career exploring the intersection of physics and consciousness, most notably in his 1944 book 'What Is Life?' He believed quantum physics revealed the limits of purely mechanistic explanations of nature, and he drew on Vedantic philosophy to argue that consciousness was fundamental, not derivative — consistent with his lifelong resistance to purely materialist reductionism.
In the mid-20th century, logical positivism and behaviorism dominated intellectual culture, pushing consciousness aside as unscientific. Yet existentialism, Eastern philosophy's Western spread, and quantum mechanics' observer-effect paradoxes were simultaneously destabilizing pure materialism. Schrödinger wrote amid this tension — after two world wars shattered confidence in mechanistic rationalism — making questions about the mind-body relationship urgently relevant again.
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