By Erwin Schroedinger
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Sample text
Indeed in our days, more perhaps than in others, we hear this demand often enough mocked at. 'I am as I am, give room to my individuality! Free development to the desires that nature has planted in me! All the shalls that oppose me in this are nonsense, priests' fraud. ' Such slogans are heard occasionally. It is not easy to refute their plain and brutal obviousness. Kant's imperative is avowedly irrational. But fortunately the scientific foundation of these slogans is worm-eaten. Our insight into the 'becoming' (das Werden) 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.
Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simpler: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? A rationalist may be inclined to deal curtly with this question, roughly as follows.
Mind could not cope with this gigantic task otherwise than by the simplifying device of excluding itself withdrawing from its conceptual creation. Hence the latter does not contain its creator. I cannot convey the grandeur of Sherrington's immortal book by quoting sentences; one has to read it oneself. Still, I will mention a few of the more particularly characteristic. Physical science . . faces us with the impasse that mind per se cannot play the piano mind per se cannot move a finger of a hand.