What Is Life

生命是什麼？
Erwin Schrodinger. What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell; With, Mind and Matter; & Autobiographical Sketches.

Preface
1. We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it.
2. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them — and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.

Chapter 1— The Classical Physicist's Approach to the Subject
1. The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness. This has two consequences. First, a physical organization, to be in close correspondence with thought (as my brain is with my thought) must be a very well-ordered organization, and that means that the events that happen within it must obey strict physical laws, at least to a very high degree of accuracy. Secondly, the physical impressions made upon that physically well-organized system by other bodies from outside, obviously correspond to the perception and experience of the corresponding thought, forming its material, as I have called it. Therefore, the physical interactions between our system and others must, as a rule, themselves possess a certain degree of physical orderliness, that is to say, they too must obey strict physical laws to a certain degree of accuracy.

Chapter 2— The Hereditary Mechanism

Chapter 3— Mutations
1. Selection has no effect — because the small, continuous variations are not inherited. They are obviously not based on the structure of the hereditary substance, they are accidental.
2. The mutations are actually due to quantum jumps in the gene molecule.

Chapter 4— The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence

Chapter 5— Delbruck's Model Discussed and Tested.
1. The molecule presents the same solidity of structure as a crystal. Remember that it is precisely this solidity on which we draw to account for the permanence of the gene!

Chapter 6— Order, Disorder and Entropy
1. How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

Chapter 7— Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?
1. These facts are easily the most interesting that science has revealed in our day. We may be inclined to find them, after all, not wholly unacceptable. An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos — of 'drinking orderliness' from a suitable environment — seems to be connected with the presence of the 'aperiodic solids', the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of — much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal — in virtue of the individual role every atom and every radical is playing here.

Epilogue— On Determinism and Free Will
1. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
2. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I'. What is this 'I'?
3. If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected.

MIND AND MATTER: THE TARNER LECTURES

Chapter 1— The Physical Basis of Consciousness
1. I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how is unconscious.
2. Our insight into the 'becoming' of the organisms makes it easy to understand that our conscious life — I will not say shall be, but that it actually is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego.
3. And thus at every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time — it is a true continued 'self-conquering'.

Chapter 2— The Future of Understanding
1. The question becomes of singular significance in its application to man, since we wish to infer that the striving and labouring of a man during his lifetime constitute an integrating contribution to the development of the species, in the quite proper biological sense.
2. The first is the biological importance of behaviour. By conforming to innate faculties as well as to the environment and by adapting itself to changes in either of these factors, behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude. While in plants and in the lower ranges of the animal kingdom adequate behaviour is brought about by the slow process of selection, in other words by trial and error, man's high intelligence enables him to enact it by choice. This incalculable advantage may easily outweigh his handicap of slow and comparatively scarce propagation, which is further reduced by the biologically dangerous regard not to let our offspring exceed the volume for which livelihood can be secured.

Chapter 3— The Principle of Objectivation
1. All science (Wissenschaft) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence. — Eranos Jahrbuch (1946), p.398.

Chapter 4— The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Chapter 5— Science and Religion
1. However, the supreme importance of Kant's statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object — the world — between them in the process of 'mind forming an idea of the world', because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two. The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing — mind or world — may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant. This liberation opens the way to belief, in the religious sense, without running all the time against the clear results which experience about the world as we know it and plain thought unmistakably pronounce. For instance — to speak of the most momentous example — experience as we know it unmistakably obtrudes the conviction that it cannot survive the destruction of the body, with whose life, as we know life, it is inseparably bound up. So is there to be nothing after this life? No. Not in the way of experience as we know it necessarily to take place in space and time. But, in an order of appearance in which time plays no part, this notion of 'after' is meaningless. Pure thinking cannot, of course, procure us a guarantee that there is that sort of thing, But it can remove the apparent obstacles to conceiving it as possible. That is what Kant has done by his analysis, and that, to my mind, is his philosophical importance.
2. To my view the 'statistical theory of time' has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of the events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgment to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.

Chapter 6— The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities
1. Many helpful devices can facilitate this work, for instance photometric recording across the plate of its transparency, which yields a magnified diagram on which the positions of the lines can be easily read. But they must be read! The observer's senses have to step in eventually. The most careful record, when not inspected, tells us nothing.
2. Galenus has preserved us a fragment (Diels, fr.125), in which Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the senses about what is 'real'. The former says: 'Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void', to which the senses retort: 'Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'
3. In this chapter I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter. Let me conclude with a general remark.
4. Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.