« But I have decided not to continue-there would be no point. » it is with this extraordinary phrase that Erwin Schrödinger ends his Autobiographical sketches. As if the man who had literally transformed modern physics with his wave equation of quantum mechanics and who had greatly influenced as well molecular biology with his reflections on the nature of the genetic materiel that lay at the heart of the evolutionary theory of life’s development on earth was afraid to assume the psychological implications of his philosophical enquiries and could only do so by means of an obscure litote. For it is his insistance on the importance of the age old debate about the duality of mind and matter that led me to reconsider the theoretical basis of my work.

Schrödinger is without any doubt the philosopher whose thinking has most greatly enriched me, with the possible exception of Kant, and this even though he has only written a few small pamphlets in the later years of his life. My first stop on a very emotional journey several years ago to visit the concentration camps which for diverse reasons were important to me, my first stop between Brenner’s Pass and Vienne was the small village of Alpbach, which lies a few kilometres off the main highway. There on a snowy October day, I would stop to ask my way to the « friedhof », a word which I would subsequently have frequent recourse to, cemetery in German. I short walk took me before the tomb of Schrödinger and his wife Annemarie where a shortened form of his famous equation is inscribed upon the tombstone.

Schrödinger was especially interested in the philosophical implications of duality and his attempts to convince his fellow scientists that by their obstinate maintenance of a strictly objective approach to science they were excluding from their study the most marvellous of life’s creations, the human spirit were met with for the most part mockery, scorn, or indifference. It is this context that his antiphrasis seems to leave one last indication as to the path we should take towards a fuller understanding of the human condition. And yet the path we choose to follow he seems in Science and Humanity to expressly close: « For the observing mind is not a physical system it cannot interact with any physical system. » But we are perhaps getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s backtrack a bit.

The duality mind /matter derives from the question as to the ultimate reality of the world, a question which was probably coincidental with the rise of human consciousness, and can be found among the most diverse and far flung societies, in time as in space. The Vedas, which were Schopenhauer’s as Schrödinger’s principle reference, are very explicit as to this: « It is Maya, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream. It is like sunshine on the sand which the traveler takes from afar as water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake. »

The year I spent visiting the ancient Indian civilisations of central America,  I came across an Aztec hymn: « We only came to sleep, we only came to dream, it is not true, no, it is not true that we came to live on this earth. » The Polynesians held a similar reverence for dreams and accorded them the same degree of reality as the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi who upon awakening could not decide if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

Western philosophy begins with this questioning, from Heraclitus (we will come across him later) to Plato and his famous cave peopled with shadows, from Augustin to Descartes, and most strikingly from Leibniz and Kant to Schopenhauer, whose The World as Will and Idea already clearly presents the modern alternative.

Contemporary to Schödinger, Martin Buber addressed the issue from a religious point of view. In Buber’s Between Man and Man he writes the most wonderful phrase: « In every hour the human race begins. » This simultaneous image of humanity as devenir, caught in a « world-historical « formative process « a creative event if ever there was one, newness rising up, primal potential might. This potentiality, streaming unconquered, however much of it is squandered, is the reality child: ….. »

The world, devenir, the gods, soul, spirit, mind, body, dreams, reality, time, space, subjectivity, objectivity, holism, materialism, science, religion, emergence, duality….These are concepts that have tormented human beings since time was counted.But what do they have to do with our enquiry here?

After my visit to this snowy grave in Alpbach, I headed east on the main highway towards Vienne., where I had intended to spend a few days to see two expositions of my favourite painters, Egon Schiele and Lucien Freud. A chance stop sent me on a small diversion to see the camp of Mauthausen, of which I knew nothing and which would be for me an extraordinarily powerful moment. For there I saw for the first time all of humanity caught in the nets of human violence that the Nazi regime had thrown. The Jews, the Gypsies, the communists, the socialists, the resistants of all nations, of all political orientations, the mentally ill, the soldiers from all allied nations, the criminels, all flung down those famous Stairs of Death which led to the stone quarry below the camp and which was the principal source of income of this ghastly enterprise.

The juxtaposition of these two visions of humanity, the one seeking a spiritual resolution, the other alleviation for its suffering creates a dynamic that animates our effort here. It is the urgency that human suffering imposes upon us that transcends the philosophical debate and demands that its pertinence to our projected construction of a general theory of social evolution be made clear. This pertinence had for the most part escaped me all these years. Certainly, there is a fleeting reference to the recourse to our interior psychological experiences as a tool for social investigation, countered by numerous warnings as to the necessity of an objective scientific approach. Certain considerations as well as to the experiential relativity of the different species, and at the end of the work a rather strange discussion of the cybernetic functions of pleasure, which struggles to find a legitimate place in the theory.

In fact, the notion of pleasure, with the debate on the duality of the human experience, has significant importance for our thesis. If we reconsider the Buberian image, in a more mathematical or rather abstract formulation, as a wave function, and seek to describe it at a given moment of its displacement, that is a given time and location in history, understood generally as all human past experience, we are thus confronted with the need to generate a theoretical description of this process which translates the genetic instructions which concern the social structures of a given people (for example, the psychological formation of the citizens of Renaissance Florence (from 1492 to 1592). By social structures, we mean the totality of the socialising process, which ranges from technical (language acquisition) to emotional (sexual behaviour, aggressive behaviour, social bonding, etc.) in their genetic predispositions.

I am trying to be very cautious in my formulations here so as to adhere as closely as possible to the social reality we are attempting to apprehend. We have extracted from the genetic materiel of the individuals of a given society at a given time in history (and precision here is critical) all structures which form the social response to the existential requirements of the chosen society. What needs to be reconsidered in reviewing my theoretical development is the absence of a means of transcribing these genetic responses into reality. This absence is all the more surprising in that we had specifically made reference to the Darwinian model as a template for our social model of evolution. Now in the Neo-Darwinian model, the DNA contains the information necessary to construct a new individual but this information must be transcribed by the RNA into reality. It is this crucial point that I had failed to assimilate into my theoretical construction.The fertilised egg at the moment of conception is not the individual, but rather the project of this individual, a work in progress requiring a variable time for its completion.

Just as the DNA requires a molecular counterpart, the RNA,  to transcribe its information into biological form, to materialise it as it were, so the social structural elements must be transcribed into emotions, or more generally into a sensual emotive capacity to apprehend the reality the individuals will be confronted with. It is this process that Heraclitus so succinctly resumed 2500 years ago: « Character is destiny ». 

This transcription is a wonderful and mysterious process. Take a familiar and basic physiological example. The eye receives a certain frequency of electro-magnetic radiation reflected by a flower, let’s say a rose. This information is transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve. But this colour red is a strictly social convention, based on the patently false supposition that we all see the same thing. You could be seeing yellow (or grey as the daltoniens) for this frequency and there would be no means of finding out our difference since we would both use the same linguistic conventional symbol  to describe the flower. We have here inverted the poet’s reflexion, » a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. » But this transcriptive function is not simply physiological for to the color red in its emotive reception will be added our experiential associations such as blood, fire, heat. This is an infinitely complex process which is at the heart of the human creative capacity and can be metaphorically resumed as a black box containing all the information necessary to transcribe the world into reality. Originally, the black box was a part of the airplane designed to resist destruction in case of an accident and to furnish all information as to the cause of the accident. In our case, the black box is the transcripteur which each of us has within, and which translates in permanence our sensory apprehension of our world into reality as we perceive it. It is here that we come full circle with the philosophical propositions of Schrödinger, who imagined as a solution to the question of the duality, that the spirit was One, that God is Spirit. In our case, the black box understood as the information, i.e. the biochemical transcription which transforms experience into flesh (emergence), collected during the individual’s lifetime would upon death of the individual return to the « Cloud », in so far as it was transmitted to others who remain.

The conventional nature of the black box can already be found in philosophy. Heraclitus spoke of this convention as the overlapping of human experience in so far as they are shared, ‘idios’ being the private world accessible only to the individual (hence the term idiot). ‘The waking have one common world,  but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.’ And Leibniz, greatly decried by Schrödinger, who abhors his model of the physical universe in terms of monads, presents a particularly interesting case. For it is of much interest to note the similarities between our vision of humanity’s social evolution in terms of the collective development of the individuals’ black boxes with Leibniz’ monad theory of atomic structures. Both are made of closed individuals with no means of communicating their interior world to the others and yet functioning in a prearranged universal harmony established, in the case of Leibniz, by God , and in our case by the genetic predispositions of the transmissible biological material. As if Leibniz drew his universal model from an interior reflexion, a common creative process, and Schrödinger’s rejection, as most forcefully expressed by his phrase ‘there would be no point’ would be a sort of recognition by denial.“

This denial, inherent to those with a religious orientation, a large and extremely diverse population, by explicitly refusing the idea that the mind is a physical system emerging from an indifferent material world leaves us with no means of investigating or even imagining the processus of transcription which we see as the key to the social function.  It seems to me, although Schrödinger calls for a subjective approach in the same essay, that it opposes as well, by refusing the model of Leibniz,  the subjective introjection of ourselves into the exploration of the different functions of the formative social process (i.e. the black box) and thus deprives us of a valuable tool for exploring the human condition.

(« For the observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. ») citation from Mind and Matter.