지난 번에 올렸던 슈뢰딩거의 "정신과 물질"이라는 타너 강연록 4장, "산술적 역설: 정신의 단일성"을 일부 교정을 봤습니다. 읽거나 갈무리하실 분을 위해 번역은 따로 포스팅합니다. The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind 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. But, of course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world however is only one. This comes from the fashion in which the world-concept produces itself. The several domains of 'private' consciousnesses partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the 'real world around us'. With all that an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: Is my world really the same as yours? Is there one real world to be distinguished from its pictures introjected by way of perception into every one of us? And if so, are these pictures like unto the real world or is the latter, the world 'in itself', perhaps very different from the one we perceive? Such questions are ingenious, but in my opinion very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from the one source, which I called the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experiences the one world is concocted. The solution of this paradox of numbers would do away with all the questions of the aforesaid kind and reveal them, I dare say, as sham questions. There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly 'Western'). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz's fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them; the monad 'has no windows', it is 'incommunicado'. That none the less they all agree with each other is called 'pre- established harmony'. I think there are few to whom this suggestion appeals, nay who would consider it as a mitigation at all of the numerical antinomy. There is obviously only one alternative, 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. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; and this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East. Let me quote as an example outside the Upanishads an Islamic Persian mystic of the thirteenth century, Aziz Nasafi, I am taking it from. a paper by Fritz Meyer[1] and translating from his German translation: On the death of any living creature the spirit returns to the spiritual world, the body to the bodily world. In this however only the bodies are subject to change. The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window. According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged. Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy[2] and which is an anthology from the mystics of the most various periods an the most various peoples. Open it where you will and you find many beautiful utterances of a similar kind. You are struck by the miraculous agreement between humans of different race, different religion, knowing nothing about each other's existence, separated by centuries and millennia,, and by the greatest distances that there are on our globe. Still, it must be said that to Western thought this doctrine has little appeal, it is unpalatable, it is dubbed fantastic, unscientific. Well, so it is because our science - Greek science - is based on objectivation, whereby it has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. But I do believe that this imprecisely the point where our present way of thinking does need to be amended perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought That will not be easy, we must beware of blunders - blood-transfusion always needs great precaution to prevent clotting. We do not wish to lose the logical precision that our scientific thought has reached, and that is unparalleled anywhere at any epoch. Still, one thing can be claimed in favour of the mystical teaching of the 'identity' of all minds with each other and with the supreme mind - as against the fearful monadology of Leibniz. The doctrine of identity 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. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary. Yet there are cases or situations where we would expect and nearly require this unimaginable thing to happen, if it can happen at all. This is the point that I should like to discuss now in some detail, and to clinch it by quotations from Sir Charles Sherrington, who was at the same time (rare event!) a man of highest genius and a sober scientist. For all I know he had no bias towards the philosophy of the Upanishads. My purpose in this discussion is to contribute perhaps to clearing the way for a future assimilation of the doctrine of identity with our own scientific world view, without having to pay for it by a loss of soberness and logical precision. I said just now that we are not able even to imagine a plurality of consciousnesses in one mind. We can pronounce these words, all right, but they are not the description of any thinkable experience. Even in the pathological cases of a 'split personality' the two persons alternate, they never hold the field jointly; nay this is just the characteristic feature, that they know nothing about each other. When in the puppet-show of dream we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply, whether he is going to fulfil my urgent request. That I could really let him do and say whatever I please does not occur to me - in fact it is not quite the case. For in a dream of this kind the 'other one' is, I dare say, mostly the impersonation of some serious obstacle that opposes me in waking life and of which I have actually no control. The strange state of affairs, described here, is quite obviously the reason why most people of old firmly believed that they were truly in communication with the persons, alive or deceased, or, maybe, gods or heroes, whom they met in their dreams. It is a superstition that dies hard. On the verge of the sixth century B.c. Heraclitus of Ephesus definitely pronounced against it, with a clarity not often met with in his sometimes very obscure fragments. But Lucretius Carus, who believed himself to be the protagonist of enlightened thought, still holds on to this superstition in the first century B.C. In our days it is probably rare, but I doubt that it is entirely extinct. Let me turn to something quite different. I find it utterly impossible to form an idea about either how, for example, my own conscious mind (that I feel to be one) should have originated by integration of the consciousnesses of the cells (or some of them) that form my body, or how it should at every moment of my life be, as it were, their resultant. One would think that such a 'commonwealth of cells' as each of us is would be the occasion par excellence for mind to exhibit plurality if it were at all able to do so. The expression 'commonwealth' or 'state of cells' (Zellstaat) is nowadays no longer to be regarded as a metaphor. Listen to Sherrington: To declare that, of the component cells that go to make us up, each one is an individual self- centred life is no mere phrase. It is not a mere convenience for descriptive purposes. The cell as a component of the body is 'not only a visibly demarcated unit but a unit-life centred on itself It leads its own life ... The cell is a unit-life, and our life which in its turn is a unitary life consists utterly of the cell-lives.[3] But this story can be followed up in more detail and more, concretely. Both the pathology of the brain and physiological investigations on sense perception speak unequivocally in favour of a regional separation of the sensorium into domains whose far-reaching independence is amazing because it would, let us expect to find these regions associated with independents domains of the mind; but they are not. A particularly characteristic instance is the following. If you look at a distant landscape first in the ordinary way with both eyes open, then with the right eye alone, shutting the left, then the other way round, you find no noticeable difference. The psychic visional t: space is in all three cases identically the same. Now this migh very well be due to the fact that from corresponding nerve-ends on the retina the stimulus is transferred to the same centre in the brain where 'the perception is manufactured' - just as, for example, in my house the knob at the entrance door and the one in my wife's bedroom activate the same bell, situated above the kitchen door. This would be the easiest explanation; but it is wrong. Sherrington tells us of very interesting experiments on the threshold frequency of flickering. I shall try to give you as brief an account as possible. Think of a miniature lighthouse set up in the laboratory and giving off a great many flashes per second, say 40 or 60 or 80 or 100. As you increase the frequency of the flashes the flickering disappears at a definite frequency, depending on the experimental details; and the onlooker, whom we suppose to watch with both eyes in the ordinary way, sees then a continuous light.[4] Let this threshold frequency be 60 per second in given circumstances. Now in a second experiment, with nothing else changed, a suitable contraption allows only every second flash to reach the right eye, every other flash to reach the left eye, so that every eye receives only 30 flashes per second. If the stimuli were conducted to the same physiological centre, this should make no difference: if I press the button before my entrance door, say every two seconds, and my wife does the same in her bedroom, but alternately with me, the kitchen bell will ring every second, just the same as if one of us had pressed his button every second or both of us had done so synchronously every second. However, in the second flicker experiment this is not so. Thirty flashes to the right eye plus alternating 30 flashes to the left are far from sufficient to remove the sensation of flickering; double the frequency is required for that namely, 60 to the right and 60 to the left, if both eyes are open. Let me give you the main conclusion in Sherrington's own words: It is not spatial conjunction of cerebral mechanism which combines the two reports ... It is much as though the right- and left-eye images were seen each by one of two observers and the minds of the two observers were combined to a single mind. It is as though the right-eye and left- eye perceptions are elaborated singly and then psychically combined to one ... It is as if each eye had a separate sensorium of considerable dignity proper to itself, in which mental processes based on that eye were developed up to even full perceptual levels. Such would amount physiologically to a visual sub-brain. There would be two such sub--brains, one for the right eye and one for the left eye. Contemporaneity of action rather than structural union seems to provide their mental collaboration.[5] This is followed by very general considerations, of which I shall again pick out only the most characteristic passages: Are there thus quasi-independent sub-brains, based on the several modalities of sense? In the roof-brain the old 'five' senses instead of being merged inextricably in one another and further submerged under mechanism of higher order are still plain to find, each demarcated in its separate sphere. How far is the mind a collection of quasi- independent perceptual minds integrated psychically in large measure by temporal concurrence of experience? ... When it is a question of 'mind' the nervous system does not integrate itself by centralization upon a pontifical cell. Rather it elaborates a millionfold democracy whose each unit is a cell ... the concrete life compounded of sublives reveals, although integrated, its additive nature and declares itself an affair of minute foci of life acting together ... When however we turn to the mind there is nothing of all this. The single nerve-cell is never a miniature brain. The cellular constitution of the body need not be for any hint of it from 'mind' ... A single pontifical brain-cell could not assure to the mental reaction a character more unified, and non-atomic than does the roof-brain's multitudinous sheet of cells. Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does 'life', but not so mind. I have quoted you the passages which have most impressed me. Sherrington, with his superior knowledge of what is actually going on in a living body, is seen struggling with a paradox which in his candidness and absolute intellectual sincerity he does not try to hide away or explain away (as many others would have done, nay have done), but he almost brutally exposes it, knowing very well that this is the only way of driving any problem in science or philosophy nearer towards its solution, while by plastering it over with 'nice' phrases you prevent progress and make the antinomy perennial (not forever, but until someone notices your fraud). Sherrington's paradox too is an arithmetical paradox, a paradox of numbers, and it has, so I believe, very much to do with the one to which I had given this name earlier in this chapter, though it is by no means identical with it. The previous one was, briefly, the one world crystallizing out of the many minds. Sherrington's is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it. Yet we know that a sub-mind is an atrocious monstrosity, just as is a plural-mind - neither having any counterpart in anybody's experience, neither being in any way imaginable. I submit that both paradoxes will be solved (I do not pretend to solve them here, and now) by assimilating into our Western build of science the Eastern doctrine of identity. Mind is by its very nature a singulare tantum. I should say: the over- all number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations. But I grant that our language is not adequate to express this, and I also grant, should anyone wish to state it, that I am now talking religion, not science - a religion, however, not opposed to science, but supported by what disinterested scientific research has brought to the fore.. Sherrington says: 'Man's mind is a recent product of our planet's side.'[6] I agree, naturally. If the first word (man's) were left out, I would not. We dealt with this earlier, in chapter 1. It would seem queer, not to say ridiculous, to think that the contemplating, conscious mind that alone reflects the becoming of the world should have made its appearance only at some time in the course of this 'becoming', should have appeared contingently, associated with a very special biological contraption which in itself quite obviously discharges the task of facilitating certain forms of life in maintaining themselves, thus favouring their preservation and propagation: forms of life that were late-comers and have been preceded by many others that maintained themselves without that particular contraption (a brain). Only a small fraction of them (if you count by species) have embarked on 'getting themselves a brain'. And before that happened, should it all have been a performance to empty stalls? Nay, may we call a world that nobody contemplates even that? When an archaeologist reconstructs a city or a culture long bygone, he is interested in human life in the past, in actions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, in joy and sorrow of humans, displayed there and then. But a world existing for many millions of years without any mind being aware of it, contemplating it, is it anything at all? Has it existed? For do not let us forget: to say, as we did, that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliche', a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experience does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that - as Berkeley was well aware. But the romance of a world that had existed for many millions of years before it, quite contingently, produced brains in which to look at itself has an almost tragic continuation that I should like to describe again in Sherrington's words: The universe of energy is we are told running down. It tends fatally towards an equilibrium which shall be final. An equilibrium in which life cannot exist. Yet life is being evolved without pause. Our planet in its surround has evolved it and is evolving it. And with it evolves mind. If mind is not an energy-system how will the running down of the universe affect it? Can it go unscathed? Always so far as we know the finite mind is attached to a running energy-system. When that energy-system ceases to run what of the mind which runs with it? Will the universe which elaborated and is elaborating the finite mind then let it perish?[7] Such considerations are in some way disconcerting. The thing that bewilders us is the curious double role that the conscious mind acquires. On the one hand it is the stage, and the only stage on which this whole world-process takes place, or the vessel or container that contains it all and outside which there is nothing. On the other hand we gather the impression, maybe the deceptive impression, that within this world-bustle the conscious mind is tied up with certain very particular organs (brains), which while doubtless the most interesting contraption in animal and plant physiology are yet not unique, not sui generis; for like so many others they serve after all only to maintain the lives of their owners, and it is only to this that they owe their having been elaborated in t ie process of speciation by natural selection. Sometimes a painter introduces into his large picture, or a poet into his long poem, an unpretending subordinate character who is himself Thus the poet of the Odyssey has, I suppose, meant himself by the blind bard who in the hall of the Phaeacians sings about the battles of Troy and moves the battered hero to tears. In the same way we meet in the song of the Nibelungs, when they traverse the Austrian lands, with a poet who is suspected to be the author of the whole epic. In D�rer's All-Saints picture two circles of believers are gathered in prayer around the Trinity high up in the skies, a circle of the blessed above and a circle of humans on the earth. Among the latter are kings and emperors and popes, but also, if I am not mistaken, the portrait of the artist himself, as a humble side-figure that might as well be missing. To me this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role of mind. On the one hand mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect. Speaking without metaphor we have to declare that we are here faced with one of these typical antinomies caused by the fact that we have not yet succeeded in elaborating a fairly understandable outlook on the world without retiring our own mind, the producer of the world picture, from it, so that mind has no place in it. The attempt to press it into it, after all, necessarily produces some absurdities. Earlier I have commented on the fact that for this same reason the physical world picture lacks all the sensual qualities that go to make up the Subject of Cognizance. The model is colourless and soundless and unpalpable. In the same way and for the same reason the world of science lacks, or is deprived of, everything that has a meaning only in relation to the consciously contemplating, perceiving and feeling subject. I mean in the first place the ethical and aesthetical values, any values of any kind, everything related to the meaning and scope of the whole display. All this is not only absent but it cannot, from the purely scientific point of view, be inserted organically. If one tries to put it in or on, as a child puts colour on his uncoloured painting copies, it will not fit. For anything that is made to enter this world model willy-nilly takes the form of scientific assertion of facts; and as such it becomes wrong. Life is valuable in itself. 'Be reverent towards life' is how Albert Schweitzer has framed the fundamental commandment of ethics. Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world. Produced million-fold it is for the greatest part rapidly annihilated or cast as prey before other life to feed it. This precisely is the master- method of producing ever-new forms of life. 'Thou shalt not torture, thou shalt not inflict pain!' Nature is ignorant of this commandment. Its creatures depend upon racking each other in everlasting strife. 'There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.' No natural happening is in itself either good or bad, nor is it in itself either beautiful or ugly. The values are missing, and quite particularly meaning and end are missing. Nature does not act by purposes. If in German we speak of a purposeful (zweckm�ssig) adaptation of an organism to its environment, we know this to be only a convenient way of speech. If we take it literally, we are mistaken. We are mistaken within the frame of our world picture. In it there is only causal linkage. Most painful is the absolute silence of all our scientific investigations towards our questions concerning the meaning and scope of the whole display. The more attentively we watch it, the more aimless and foolish it appears to be. The show that is going on obviously acquires a meaning only with regard to the mind that contemplates it. But what science tells us about this relationship is patently absurd: as if mind had only been produced by that very display that it is now watching and would pass away with it when the sun finally cools down and the earth has been turned into a desert of ice and snow. Let me briefly mention the notorious atheism of science which comes, of course, under the same heading. Science has to suffer this reproach again and again, but unjustly so. No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. We know, when God is experienced, this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one's own personality. Like them he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time - that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: God is spirit. --------------------- [1]Eranos Jahrbuch, 1946. [2] Chatto and Windus, 1946. [3] Man on his Nature, i st edn (I 940), p. 73. [4] In this way the fusion of successive pictures is produced in the cinema. [5] Man on his Nature, pp. 273-5. [6] Man on his Nature, p. 218. [7] Man on his Nature, p. 232.