Schrodinger's arguments for the Atman and Brahman

Indian thought is remarkable. Many thousands of years after it was written, the greatest scientists of the world like Carl Sagan, Schrodinger, Bohr and Oppenheimer swore by Indian scriptures like the Upanishads. Indian scriptures stand out in depth of logical and intellectual grandeur, that even thousands of years later, the most hard-nosed and skeptical scientists have not found a better way to describe the universe. It is a shame that Indians do not take their own heritage seriously.

Schrodinger was the founder of quantum mechanics and a prolific reader of the Upanishads and Advaita philosophy. Many of his ideas about quantum mechanics were rip-offs from classical Vedanta philosophy. Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology have discussed some of these ideas in a paper, which can be downloaded here .

Firstly, Schrodinger talks about the problem of studying the universe from a first-person perspective. He notes,

"...Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject-of-cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world."

Schrodinger notes that science frequently makes the mistake of making findings without asking who the observer is. We can reflect on this conundrum. An event cannot happen without an observer. When the Big Bang event occurred, who was the observer? If the universe had not emerged at the point of the Big Bang, could there have been an observer? If there was no observer, how could there have been an event? Was the observer the universe itself?

Schrodinger actively propounded the Upanishad idea that "there is no duality between the subject and object." His ideas, reflecting the ideas of Advaita, were the exact opposite of what modern science proposes. Schrodinger also correctly predicted why science would make no progress in understanding consciousness. Scientists have called this issue 'the hard problem of consciousness." In spite of research for more than 150 years, there has been little to no progress in understanding what consciousness is. Neither life nor consciousness have been understood, let alone recreated in a lab. In Schrodinger's words,

"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. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it."

He also mentions elsewhere that "The mind is thus the container of the world picture, not something within that picture."

In addition, Schrodinger talks about an interesting problem that few of us think about - perception. If the world is objective, how can all life forms see the same version of the world? How can any living being interact with each other and agree on any sense of perception? In other words, if we all live in an objective world, if we can only perceive our own feelings and can only live in our own personal universe, how is it even possible for any of us to interact with any other living being? The answer, Schrodinger notes, is found in Indian philosophy. He notes that,

"There is obviously only one alternative [to the paradox], namely the unification of minds, or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads..."

As clinching proof of all life having the same Atman or consciousness, Schrodinger writes,

"The doctrine of identity (of all minds) can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world."

Similarly, what does Schrodinger think about space and time? He borrows word for word from the Upanishads when he notes that,

"Mind is by its very nature a singular tantum. I should say: the over-all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar time-table, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations."

Read the original research paper for the source of my quotations. The research authors also describe the deep connections between Indian and Zen philosophy. Let us not forget that the founder of Zen philosophy, Bodhidharma, was a monk from Kanchipuram in Southern India.