1. The Measurement Problem and the Re-Emergence of the Observer
The nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century fundamentally changed our understanding of the physical world with the astounding success of the “new physics”. The theories of quantum mechanics and relativity gave us a new perspective on physical reality and that bedrock of empiricism: measurement.
First, in 1905, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published four seminal papers, two of which are most relevant here. In one, he put forward his special theory of relativity (completing the general theory of relativity ten years later in 1915 with his field equations of gravitation). In another, he described the photoelectric effect and posited light as discrete quanta (later called photons), that was relevant to the theory of quantum mechanics.
Einstein’s theories of relativity revealed that our everyday intuitions fail at high velocities and on astronomical scales. In special relativity, the passage of time depends on the observer’s motion and in general relativity the gravitational environment also affects the rate at which clocks run; there is no neutral vantage point, no universal “now” that holds across all frames. Likewise, measurements of space are relative: a moving observer can find another’s yardstick shortened, though each observer’s own yardstick remains unchanged.
The theory of quantum mechanics was developed over a few years. First, in 1925, Werner Heisenberg developed and published his work on matrix mechanics. A year later in 1926, Erwin Schrödinger formulated and published his theory of wave mechanics, and in 1928, Paul Dirac provided a relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics brought forth what has since been called the “measurement problem”. The problem is easily demonstrated with the “double slit” experiment. One light source, a beam of photons, is aimed at a barrier with two slits. Behind this barrier is a light-sensitive screen. When a device that can record which slit the photon passed through is introduced, the sum of the two single-slit diffraction patterns is observed. However, if we take away the measurement device, then the photon is in a superposition of the two paths and an interference pattern is detected on the screen as it interferes with itself, classic wave-like behavior. Delaying the timing of a measurement, what the physicist John Wheeler called “delayed choice” does not alter the outcome.
To put it another way, the choice of how to configure the measurement can be made even after the quantum system (for example, the photon in the double-slit) has entered the relevant apparatus, and yet the resulting observations are consistent with the eventual experimental configuration. In a Mach–Zehnder interferometer, the choice to insert or remove the second beam splitter can be made after the photon has already passed the first one, and yet the results still match the final configuration just as if the photon "knew" the eventual measurement setup even though that setup was decided only after the photon had already passed the point of no return.
The family of views grouped under the name “Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics” associated mainly with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the late 1920s, arose to understand the role of measurement in quantum mechanics.
Bohr suggested that quantum measurement requires a distinction between the quantum system being measured and the classical measurement apparatus used to measure it. He was careful to say that this “cut” between the quantum system and the measurement apparatus can be placed anywhere in the measurement chain. In modern parlance, this can be described in the vocabulary of “decoherence” which describes when a quantum system “interacts” with a large enough environment such that interference between alternative states becomes inaccessible in the sense of being practically unobservable/unmeasurable (as compared to, for example, two simple quantum systems entangling, where the interference can be observed and measured).
This raises the question of when the measurement chain terminates in a single outcome. When we look around us we don’t see an endless chain of events in superposition, we see one outcome. The minority von Neumann-Wigner line-of-thought attempts to answer this by positing that consciousness is what allows for the “collapse” of the superpositions into what we perceive as the single outcome of the measurement chain.
To put it another way, the attributes assigned to the photon in Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment do not correspond straightforwardly to preexisting properties. In the von Neumann-Wigner family of interpretations, the measurement chain (for example, measurement apparatus-retina-optic nerve-brain) terminates in conscious observation.
Note that the photon becomes “entangled” with increasingly large parts of that system as it interacts with them; “entanglement” here refers to the quantum correlations that arise from these interactions. Wigner used von-Neumann’s mathematical framework to argue explicitly that consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function into the single-outcome state that we experience as reality (though he later abandoned that position).
Copenhagen and von-Neumann-Wigner don’t disagree with standard quantum mechanics on predicted outcomes (in contrast to, for example, Penrose/Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction, which posits that consciousness arises due to a proposed quantum-gravitational neural process). Copenhagen-style approaches leave the question of where we make the cut between what is measured and what is being measured open and as such are silent on where (or even whether ) the transition to a single-outcome becomes physically real. Von-Neumann-Wigner makes the question not merely epistemological, but metaphysical.
The von Neumann-Wigner interpretation's emphasis on the role of measurement has an interesting parallel to older metaphysical views that suggest reality is shaped by observation. Berkeley's idealist dictum "Esse est percipi" (in the scholarly Latin rephrasing): "To be is to be perceived," resonates across the centuries, though von-Neumann-Wigner's claim is considerably narrower (a single outcome, not existence itself, requires an observer).
The new physics confirmed Locke’s skepticism that we could never perceive what was “really” out there given the limits of our senses, yet it also showed that what he supposed was the bedrock of matter: extension, motion, causality, was relative, probabilistic, or scale-bound. Even as we used quantum mechanics to unlock the energy bound within atoms and relied on relativity to synchronize the clocks of our GPS satellites, the ultimate nature of reality grew even more mysterious.
The American philosopher William James, in his 1897 essay “The Will to Believe” called “live” hypotheses, those with the potential to be taken seriously, while “dead” hypotheses were those which would be dismissed outright. He argued that each person made the decision as to what was “live” versus “dead” based on their individual world view.
With the new physics, hypotheses that would have hitherto been “dead” for those with an empirical bent, were now “live”. The “measurement problem” as demonstrated by the double slit experiment suggested that the everyday familiar world held secrets tied to the nature of the thing most familiar to us: experience itself.
2. Erwin Schrödinger: From Negative Entropy to the Unity of Consciousness
Isaac Newton’s seminal 1687 work, where he introduced his world-changing theory of universal gravity and laws of motion, is commonly referred to as The Principia, but the actual title was Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In Newton’s time, what he was doing was considered “natural” philosophy. After Newton, the notion that mental phenomena would have a role in physics was seen as incidental, even if true.
The new physics changed all that. Physicists began to consider the role of mental phenomena, not just as filter for what we can know, as in Locke, but as a factor that can actively affect what is being observed. Notably, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), the author of the foundational Schrödinger equation, explored the nature of biological organisms in What is life? (1944).
Other physicists were doing the same. Max Delbrück, for example, was a physicist who turned his attention to the chemical processes underpinning biological life; Schrödinger credits Delbrück for sparking his interest in the topic. In turn, Delbrück credited the “Light and Life” 1932 lecture by Niels Bohr at the International Congress on Light Therapy in Copenhagen (published a year later in Nature) for igniting his interest in the field.
Delbrück predicted that hereditary was in the form of molecules; Schrödinger refers to these molecule as likely taking on the form of an “aperiodic crystal” containing the alleles, “some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state”; indeed Watson and Crick discovered the DNA molecule in 1953 with exactly this structure.
In What is Life? Schrödinger explores the nature of consciousness and its observed connection with the brain: “Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought? … The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness. This has two consequences. First, a physical organization, to be in close correspondence with thought (as my brain is with my thought) must be a very well-ordered organization, and that means that the events that happen within it must obey strict physical laws, at least to a very high degree of accuracy. Secondly, the physical impressions made upon that physically well-organized system by other bodies from outside, obviously correspond to the perception and experience of the corresponding thought, forming its material, as I have called it. Therefore, the physical interactions between our system and others must, as a rule, themselves possess a certain degree of physical orderliness, that is to say, they too must obey strict physical laws to a certain degree of accuracy.”
He explains how probability resides at the very heart of physics by describing the observed exponential relation between the energy (W) required to move a quantum system from one state to the other and the average energy expressed as a function of temperature (t): “ It recurs again and again in the statistical theory of heat, forming, as it were, its backbone. It is a measure of the improbability of an energy amount as large as W gathering accidentally in some particular part of the system, and it is this improbability which increases so enormously when a considerable multiple of the 'average energy' kT is required.”
The primary question explored in the work he describes: “What is the characteristic feature of life? … When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so, temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of ‘maximum entropy’.”
He thus posited that there are two essential components for life. The first was for physical cohesion and accuracy of measurement of physical laws, a threshold number of atoms has to be present within even the smallest unit of life: a living cell: “It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.” This he called “order from disorder”.
The second essential components for life was the ability, unique to living systems, to maintain what Schrödinger called “negative entropy” that he defined as the ability to extract material from the environment, and through a process of metabolization or photosynthesis convert this material into energy for the organism’s own use. The key distinguishing factor was that the organism was releasing extra entropy, usually in the form of waste heat, into the environment so it could maintain internal entropy. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics still held from the point of view of the combined organism+environment: releasing the extra entropy into the environment causes overall entropy to rise.
As to the nature of the conscious self, Schrödinger restricts himself to an epilogue: “As a reward for the serious trouble I have taken to expound the purely scientific aspects of our problem sine ira et studio, I beg leave to add my own, necessarily subjective, view of the philosophical implications.”
He rejects Kantian transcendental idealism: “E.g. it has been said that there is a tree there outside my window but I do not really see the tree … I see my tree and you see yours (remarkably like mine), and what the tree in itself is we do not know. For this extravagance Kant is responsible.”
Instead, he favors a realist position about the external world, as evidenced by our everyday experience and physics. However, for this to be true, he radically argues in a series of abductive moves that the real world cannot be “out there” as posited by empiricists like Locke and the transcendental idealism of Kant, but must be contained within consciousness itself.
Schrödinger argues that two undeniable facts: (1) the body operates as a pure physical mechanism governed by natural laws, and (2) direct personal experience shows I deliberately direct its motions, foresee their consequences, and bear full responsibility, lead to the inference that the conscious “I” (every mind that has ever said “I”) is the entity controlling the motion of atoms according to those very laws. In science: “I” is the observer, the measurer, the one who records that the body obeys physics. In experience: “I” is the chooser, the one who chooses to raise a hand or to speak. Schrödinger refuses to split them: the same “I” is doing both. So, if the body’s atoms move only by law, and I am the one moving them (not just predicting or correlating, but directing), then I must be the lawgiver. It’s not “my brain causes my choice” but “I cause the brain’s atoms to move under lawful constraints.” That flips the hierarchy of reductionism. Physics doesn’t contain the self. The self contains physics. He acknowledges that this idea is culturally explosive in the West (sounding like “I am God Almighty”), but that this insight echoes the Upanishadic identity of Ātman = Brahman.
Schrödinger describes consciousness as a singulare tantum (a kind of thing that can only be referred to in the singular and for which there is no plural, for example, dust, information, wealth etc.). He discards the hypothesis of many minds arising solely from the existence of many bodies, as it spawns absurd questions about souls (whether women have them, animals etc.). Instead, he favors the alternative to recognize one consciousness appearing as many through illusion (māyā), with the enduring “I” being the unchanging ground beneath shifting memories and experiences, never lost and never multiplied.
3. Bertrand Russell: Neutral Monism and the Liberal Empiricist Outlook
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) made seminal contributions to mathematics, logic and philosophy, while also becoming famous for his takes on politics. In what follows, I draw primarily from 2 works: The Analysis of Matter (1927) and Unpopular Essays (1950).
In The Analysis of Matter, Russell argues in favor of Locke-style empiricism and epistemic humility, given the implications of the new physics. He agrees with Hume about causation (we can't know necessary connections empirically) but rejects Hume’s radical skepticism, arguing instead for a lowering of epistemic ambitions: properties that account for the intrinsic nature of the universe, the “stuff” that things are made of, fall outside what we can know.
Like Kant, Russell adopts a structuralist stance: we can know the formal, relational structure of the world but not its intrinsic qualities. Physics, though empirically verified by experiments contrived for this purpose (he often cites the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington who validated the theory of relativity), will always fall short of complete description; we must lower epistemic ambition: “As to intrinsic character, we do not know enough about it in the physical world to have a right to say that it is very different from that of percepts; while as to structure we have reason to hold that it is similar in the stimulus and the percept. This has become possible owing to the facts that “matter” can be regarded as a system of events, not as part of the stuff of the world, and that space-time, as it occurs in physics, has been found to be much more different from perceptual space than was formerly imagined.”
Russell does still acknowledge that our sensory apparatus influences how raw perceptual data appear to us, but he distinguishes this mundane physiological filtering from Kant’s transcendental explication of space, time, and categories of understanding. For Russell, space and time are not forms of intuition. They are elements of the world’s objective structure that physics has discovered with ever-increasing precision.
Physics describes events, perception provides evidence: “The evidence for the truth of physics is that perceptions occur as the laws of physics would lead us to expect — e.g. we see an eclipse when the astronomers say there will be an eclipse.” Russell's argument rests on the idea that the structures of our perceptions match the structures of the external world. For example, he contrasts the perceptual experience of seeing an object with the unaided eye versus with a microscope. He argues that the microscope reveals a different structural level of reality than what we perceive with our eyes, not because the underlying reality is different, but because the microscope has a different structure (a different kind of perceptual mechanism) that also matches the structure of the world. This supports the idea that our perceptual systems allow us to infer the structure of the external world (the stimulus) from the structure of our percepts (the effect).
Unlike Kant, Russell does not treat space, time, or the “categories of understanding” (e.g., substance, causality, and necessity) as a priori contributions of the mind. Instead, they are discovered features of the external world. Likewise, logical and mathematical constructions are not transcendental but are merely the most precise language we have for describing observations. The unity of experience arises from the actual structure of events, therefore rendering unnecessary, the Kantian “transcendental subject”, the unifying “I”.
He concludes with adopting “neutral monism” (where "mind" and "matter" are just different logical constructions out of the same “neutral” events), thus denying the mind/matter distinction carried down from Descartes, and also denying the idealists: “Percepts are the only part of the physical world that we know otherwise than abstractly. As regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side, and almost everything that we know of its causal laws is derived from the physical side. But from the standpoint of philosophy the distinction between physical and mental is superficial and unreal.”
While Russell’s neutral monism would not be considered a “physicalist” position, he was nevertheless a staunch empiricist, advocating for empiricism not merely as epistemological methodology, but as a blueprint for how to approach life. In Unpopular Essays (1950), he explicitly links empiricism to the ascendent post-WW2 “liberal outlook”: “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held … tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
Indeed, Unpopular Essays might strike some as remarkably current: “We are now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an “ideology.” At the moment, the Liberal philosophy is felt by many to be too tame and middle-aged: the idealistic young look for something with more bite in it, something which has a definite answer to all their questions, which calls for missionary activity and gives hope of a millennium brought about by conquest.”
He is not impervious to modernity’s shortcomings: “The modern-minded man, although he believes profoundly in the wisdom of his period, must be presumed to be very modest about his personal powers. His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in point of time …
The money rewards and widespread though ephemeral fame which those agencies have made possible places temptations in the way of able men which are difficult to resist. To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgment to the general opinion.”
Also: “Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by the artists in a revolt against the sugary insipidities of a philistine epoch and in a mood of fury in which satisfaction is to be derived only from what hurts. And so the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God’s essence as an ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance; while the individual, as a result of a crude and uncritical interpretation of sound doctrines, was left without any inner defence against social pressure.”
While Russell’s “neutral monism” is considered adjacent to some modern panpsychist theories, his exhortation for empiricism as world-view is perhaps an even more important clue as to the current dominance of physicalism and also the problems besieging modernity. I will therefore end with Russell, while noting that he was famous for changing his views (he embraced it as feature, not bug), and therefore what has been articulated here can best be understood as a snapshot of his thinking at the time of writing.
4. Conclusion: Questions More Than Answers
For this essay, my primary focus was to learn how the mind has been studied by western philosophy. It was hard to write, memories of discussions with Anand on related topics interrupted frequently and painfully. This kind of material was exactly how he loved to spend his time. The arguments that took me so long to understand, he would already have had a dozen precisely formulated counters and counters to the counters for. I am not convinced he would have approved of my quixotic efforts, but I’m heartbroken he isn’t here to say so.
It has been said that the questions matter more than the answers. Descartes posed the questions that philosophers have grappled with since. First, he asked how many kinds of things make up reality and answered two: mind and matter. Second, he asked what we can know, his answer was that each of us, as thinking “I”, can only ever know one thing: that we exist. After Newton brought forth his laws of motion, Locke in answer to the question of what we can know, answered that we can only know things that can be tested. Our sensory apparatus limits us in knowing what things are intrinsically, that is, what they are of themselves. Berkeley answered that only mind and God make up reality. Hume dispatched with causality as necessary connection and also with traditional arguments for God. Kant argued for a half-way house between empiricism (everything from senses) and idealism (everything from mind), where necessary prerequisite (a priori) structures of the mind allow for all experience. His Categorical Imperative required that God be a rational postulate of reason itself.
With the “new physics,” the questions shifted again. Radical interpretations of quantum mechanics suggested a fundamental role for observers. Schrödinger brought a physicist’s first-principles approach to biology, asked “what is life?”, and concluded that a key was the organism’s capacity to maintain negative entropy. He also argued for one consciousness, appearing as many through different lenses (Ātman = Brahman). After World War 2, with the rise of liberalism as articulated by Russell, empiricism became the safe and respectable posture of the new era. Idealism, associated with Hegel on one side and Marx on the other, retreated. Empiricism became synonymous with modernity itself, and physicalism settled into place as its metaphysical counterpart. Yet the questions were never closed, as Anand’s interest in Vedantic illuminationism suggests.
I will end on a speculative note. We live in a time when artificial intelligence systems are improving at an astonishing pace. AI systems now perform tasks that resemble reasoning, judgment and even understanding, pressing us to define what counts as “mind”. The postwar divorce between epistemology and metaphysics, the tacit agreement that we could focus on “what works” without asking “what is”, seems no longer viable.
If robust and undeniable consciousness ever arises in the physical systems we build, then perhaps physicalism will have earned a victory lap. But if the most perfect simulation still lacks the simplest brute fact of all, that of experience, then perhaps the questions Anand spent the last years of his life thinking about will return with renewed urgency, and we will ask again: not “How does the brain produce the mind?” but “Given mind, what does that say about reality?”
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