The Vedantic vision of Erwin Schrödinger

The second post on Erwin Schrodinger’s metaphysics in which he expresses support for the Vedantic vision of a single consciousness constituting all reality.

In the previous post exploring Erwin Schrödinger’s metaphysics, we saw how he rebelled against the death of metaphysics as declared by Kant and most philosophers since then. He saw the loss of transcendence required by the elimination of metaphysics may be necessary for scientific understanding, but that if you consider all knowledge as a house, metaphysics is not one room or part of it that can be discarded but is the very scaffolding on which the house is built.

He asked penetrating questions related to the existence of Self and an external world. Following Kant’s realization that our perceptions are but internal events that reflect some object, he agreed we cannot know the thing-in-itself. But the content of consciousness is not merely subjective because the shared experience of perceiving, say, a tree, shows that the content or the “constituents of experience” are shared in common. Two people looking at the same scene will have the same content of experience. This applies not only to the perceptions of the constituents of external objects but also of shared thoughts. Therefore, he concludes that though we are distinct Selves bodily, conscious experience cannot be considered distinct in the same way.

This leads to perhaps the crucial section in the first essay and perhaps of his book titled My View of the World. That section is…