We close this book with a very simple
argument that may have profound philosophical implications: that life's
purposeful nature, broadly understood, has thermodynamic origins. Although purpose has religious connotations, it also
describes the observable phenomenon of being oriented
toward a future goal. Such future orientation ranges from a bacterium swimming along
a chemical gradient toward a food source (or away from a toxin) to a
CEO planning to make a hostile bid for a rival company. We would argue
that purpose in this inclusive sense, ranging from directed movement
to long-term conscious planning, reflects the advantages that accrue
to living systems that ensure access to energy gradients. Thus, for us,
the purposefulness of life has a thermodynamic origin. Chemotaxis is
the technical name for movement along a chemical gradient. The simplest
organisms show chemotaxis. Magnetobacteria, for example, swim toward
the Earth's magnetic poles. More complex cells show more complex behaviors.
Linking our purposeful behavior to life's function
as a gradient-reducing complex system seems to be another move in the
scientific tradition of increasing our knowledge while deflating our
arrogance. Copernicus's view that Earth was not the center of the solar
system was upsetting to those wed to the notion of humans as literally
at the center of the universe. Making the sun central was a blow to
our ego but a mathematically more elegant description of our position
and movement in space. Darwin did not help matters when he pointed
out that we evolved from common ancestors with the apes. This was another
blow to our ego. Molecular biology and microbiology continue applying
pressure by showing, with genetic evidence that is difficult to dispute,
that our "animal" cells
contain remnants of bacteria—symbiotic bacteria that merged to
form the cellular basis of all amoebae, algae, plants, fungi, and animals,
including, of course, humans. Our end-directedness, our planning can
be seen in this same light. NET systems organized to reduce ambient gradients
and funnel their energy into our own growth, we are like nonliving NET
systems that increase their complexity in areas of energy flux. Just
as the matter of life (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and
phosphorus atoms) has been found distributed throughout the universe,
so the process of life (local pockets of increasing organization) is
not unique. We are connected to other energy-flow systems that have functional
organization.
"I Am God"
Schrödinger finished his lectures in April 1943 and submitted them
for publication to a respected Dublin publisher, Cahill and Company.
In the final manuscript Schrödinger inserted a short four-page epilogue
on determinism and free will. He noted that in his three lectures he
had spoken only on the scientific aspects of life, but now he wished
to suggest his own subjective thoughts on the philosophical implications
of his new view on life.
According to the evidence put forward in the preceding
pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond
to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions,
are, . . . if not strictly deterministic, at any rate statistico-deterministic
. . . For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I
believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well
known, unpleasant feeling about "declaring one's self a pure mechanism." For
it is deemed to contradict free will as warranted by direct introspection.
So let us see whether we can draw the non-contradictory conclusion from
the following two premises. (1) My body functions as a pure mechanism
according to the Laws of Nature.
Schrödinger warns us here to take this mechanism idea with a grain
of salt. Throughout his lecture, he reminded his audience time and again
that life was not a mechanism, like a clock or the motions of the planets.
We now recognize that intelligent mechanisms, technology, flow outward
from intelligent, gradient-reducing life. Machines are not "built-in" to
life in some superhuman way. Rather, the more-than-mechanical equilibrium-seeking
intrinsic intelligence of energy-based material flow systems produces
living matter in all its cunning, including the machine-making global
consumer society of modern humanity.
"Yet I know by incontrovertible experience," writes Schrödinger
in What Is Life?
that I am directing its motions of which I foresee
the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case
I feel and take full responsibility. The only possible inference from
these two facts is I think that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say,
every conscious mind that has ever said or felt "I"—am
the person, if any who controls the "motion of the atoms" according
to the Laws of Nature . . . it is daring to give to this conclusion the
simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say "Hence
I am God Almighty" sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please
disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the
above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God
and immortality at one stroke.
As one can well imagine, such a Vedic epilogue
shocked the Catholic Church and Schrödinger's sponsoring institution,
Trinity College. He was asked to remove his private subjective thoughts
from the manuscript. With his characteristic stubbornness he refused
to change the epilogue; in turn the publisher refused to publish the
book. The small green book of ninety-one pages was published the following
year, in 1944, by Cambridge University Press, in a much more secular
England.
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