Erwin Schrödinger and the Paradox of Life. - Physics, diffuse consciousness, and Eastern philosophy. #999105

There is a cat locked in a box. Next to it is a device capable of releasing a poison if a radioactive atom decays. As long as the box remains sealed, according to an extreme interpretation of quantum laws, the atom can be in a superposition of states: decayed and not decayed. The cat would then, in a paradoxical and intolerable sense, be both alive and dead at the same time.
Few thought experiments have had the power of this image. It has found its way into textbooks, movies, and everyday conversations; it has become a metaphor for uncertainty, ambiguity, and even lives suspended in the face of a choice. But Schrödinger’s cat was not invented to prove that the world is absurd, nor to suggest that human consciousness magically creates reality by observing it. It was conceived, in 1935, as a provocation: a way to show just how difficult it was to unquestioningly transfer the strange rules of the atomic world to the world of living beings.
Behind that box lies more than just a physics puzzle. There is an ancient and fundamental question: What is life? Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, was not a physicist willing to leave this question on the margins of his discipline. His curiosity crossed boundaries that we today tend to regard as separate: matter and mind, biology and physics, scientific knowledge and philosophical reflection. In his famous book *What Is Life?*, published in 1944, he sought to understand how organisms manage to maintain their own order— —in a universe also governed by disorder. But Schrödinger was also a keen reader of Indian philosophy. In the Upanishads and in “Advaita Vedānta,” he found expressions of an intuition that stayed with him throughout his life: the multiplicity of individual experiences might not be the final word on reality. Perhaps what we call “I” is a local perspective, a window opening onto a vaster whole. Perhaps consciousness is not an object among objects.
These are fascinating but delicate ideas. Science and Eastern philosophy speak different languages, ask different questions, and use different criteria to distinguish what is plausible from what is true. Yet they can meet on common ground: the recognition that reality does not always conform to the simplest images we construct of it.
This book portrays Schrödinger as the protagonist of an era in which matter ceased to appear solid, predictable, and completely separate from the observer. But the intellectual horizon opened up by Schrödinger extends even further, leading to a topic of current relevance: consciousness, one of humanity’s greatest mysteries. Thus, the journey Schrödinger began in quantum physics extends into metaphysics, Eastern philosophy, biology, and neuroscience, all the way to the hypothesis of a unified field of consciousness,  revealing an ever-deepening relevance in contemporary debate.