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.
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"The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively. But it is not a logical necessity."
"If we were to pursue the idea to its logical conclusion, we would have to assume that every thought, every feeling, every sensation is somehow connected with an elementary process in the brain, with a…"
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
"The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees."
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 'What is Life?', a deep philosophical insight into the nature of the observer and its relationship to the perceived world.
Date: 1944
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The scientific worldview — atoms, forces, neurons, galaxies — is built entirely by the conscious mind observing and interpreting. Because consciousness is the builder of that picture, not an object within it, it won't appear anywhere in the finished map. You cannot find the eye by looking through the eye. Consciousness is the precondition for science, not something science can locate, explain, or contain within its own framework.
Schrödinger spent decades bridging physics and philosophy, most visibly in 'What is Life?' and 'Mind and Matter.' His wave mechanics placed the observer at the center of quantum reality — yet physics could never account for the observer itself. Deeply shaped by Vedantic philosophy, he believed individual consciousness and universal reality were identical. This quote crystallizes that conviction: the observer and the observed are ultimately the same thing, a view radical for a working physicist.
Written mid-20th century, after quantum mechanics had shattered classical determinism and made the observer indispensable to physics. Simultaneously, materialist neuroscience was claiming consciousness was merely neural firing — reducible, eliminable. Schrödinger wrote amid this contradiction: science growing vastly powerful yet unable to account for the experience doing the science. Post-WWII existentialism and rising Western interest in Eastern philosophy made questions about self, consciousness, and the limits of objective knowledge culturally urgent.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].
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