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A review by peter_ewing
What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by Erwin Schrödinger
4.0
In its time, "What is Life?" was a work of genius and it still has a high reputation. However, it must be said that the discovery of DNA a few years after it was written makes much of it redundant. Schrodinger's insight was in understanding in principle how genes might work from physics. We know how this works, so little of his brilliant analysis now feels quite as revelatory as it once must have. Nonetheless, the insights into life and entropy must still be a foundation for thinking about life.
More radical for us, perhaps, are his philosophical speculations, particularly in Mind and Matter. Concerns about the operation of natural selection on humans seem to have uncomfortable echoes of eugenics, though he stops well short of that. (Schrodinger fled from the Nazis to Ireland.) His approach to the mind-body problem though was new to me. (Admittedly, I have only a tenuous grasp of philosophy of mind.) The dichotomy that he reaches, of accepting either Leibniz's monadology (which he regards with horror) or the single mind of Vedanta is stark and, I suspect, unlikely to find favour with philosophers.
Schrodinger's understanding of and ease with philosophy is striking and reminds us that the great physicists of his generation, including Einstein and the other originators of quantum theory, were throroughly grounded in philosophy, in contrast to the dismissive attitude of many modern physicists. Given the advances made in physics in the early 20th century compared to the present stagnation of the field, one wonders whether we might be missing something.
More radical for us, perhaps, are his philosophical speculations, particularly in Mind and Matter. Concerns about the operation of natural selection on humans seem to have uncomfortable echoes of eugenics, though he stops well short of that. (Schrodinger fled from the Nazis to Ireland.) His approach to the mind-body problem though was new to me. (Admittedly, I have only a tenuous grasp of philosophy of mind.) The dichotomy that he reaches, of accepting either Leibniz's monadology (which he regards with horror) or the single mind of Vedanta is stark and, I suspect, unlikely to find favour with philosophers.
Schrodinger's understanding of and ease with philosophy is striking and reminds us that the great physicists of his generation, including Einstein and the other originators of quantum theory, were throroughly grounded in philosophy, in contrast to the dismissive attitude of many modern physicists. Given the advances made in physics in the early 20th century compared to the present stagnation of the field, one wonders whether we might be missing something.