Observations placeholder
Schrodinger, Erwin - Mind and Matter - Death as a function
Identifier
003999
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Schrodinger believed that the systems of the universe are ‘pre-programmed’ to decay unless they are used. Decay is an important part of the evolutionary process. To move from order to disorder
A description of the experience
Erwin Schrodinger – Mind and Matter
Take as a simile a set of playing cards that you have carefully arranged, beginning with 7,8,9,10, knave, queen, king, ace of hearts, then the same in diamonds and so on. If this well ordered set is shuffled once, twice or three times it will gradually turn into a random set. But this is not an intrinsic property of the process of shuffling. Given the resulting disorderly set, a process of shuffling is perfectly thinkable that would exactly cancel the effect of the first shuffling and restore the original order. Yet everybody will expect the first course to take place, nobody the second, indeed he might have to wait pretty long for it to happen by chance. Now this is the gist of Boltzmann’s explanation of the unidirectional character of everything that happens in nature – including of course the life history of an organism from birth to death…………
This act, this mechanism is as yet innocent of any notion of past and future, it is itself completely reversible – the very notion of past and future results from statistical considerations. In our simile with the cards, the point is this, that there is only one or a very few well ordered arrangements of the cards, but billions of billions of disorderly cards