Sir Charles Sherrington's Man on his Nature

Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born etc have pushed for the topic of subject and object in quantum physics.

1. We cannot make any factual statement about a given natural object (or physical system) without ‘getting in touch’ with it.

This ’touch’ is a real physical interaction. Even if it consists only in our ’looking at the object’ the latter must be hit by light-rays and reflect them into the eye, or into some instrument of observation. This means that the object is affected by our observation.

You cannot obtain any knowledge about an object while leaving it strictly isolated. The theory goes on to assert that this disturbance is neither irrelevant nor completely surveyable. Thus after any number of painstaking observations the object is left in a state of which some features (the last observed) are known, but others (those interfered with by the last observation) are not known, or not accurately known. This state of affairs is offered as an explanation why no complete, gapless description of any physical object is ever possible.

If this has to be granted - and possibly it has to be granted - then it flies in the face of the principle of unders tanda bili ty of nature. This in itself is no opprobrium. I told you at the outset that my two principles are not meant to be binding on science, that they only express what we had actually kept to in physical science for many, many centuries and what cannot easily be changed.

Personally I do not feel sure that our present knowledge as yet vindicates the change. I consider it possible that our models can be modified in such a fashion that they do not exhibit at any mornent properties that cannot in principle be observed simultaneously - models poorer in simultaneous properties but richer in adaptability to changes in the environment.

However, this is an internal question of physics, not to be decided here and now. But from the theory as explained before, from the unavoidable and unsurveyable interference of the measuring devices with the object under observation, lofty consequences of an epistemological nature have been drawn and brought to the fore, concerning the relation between subject and object. It is maintained that recent discoveries in physics have pushed forward to the mysterious boundary between the subject and the object. This boundary, so we are told, is not a sharp boundary at all. We are given to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are given to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation and of thinking about the results of our experiments that mysterious boundary between the subject and the object has broken down.

In order to criticize these contentions let me at first accept the time-hallowed or discrimination between

Some philosophers accepted the distinction between subject and object.

Few people did not emphasize that all our sensations, perceptions and observations:

• have a strong, personal, subjective tinge
• do not convey the nature of the ’thing-in-itself to use Kant’s term.

While some of these thinkers might have in mind only a more or less strong or slight distortion,

Kant gave us with a complete resignation: never to know anything at all about his ’thing-in-itself.

Thus the idea of subjectivity in all appearance is very old and familiar. What is new in the present setting is this: that not only would the impressions we get from our environment largely depend on the nature and the contingent state of our sensorium, but inversely the very environment that we wish to take in is modified by us, notably by the devices we set up in order to observe it.

Maybe this is so - to some extent it certainly is.

May be that from the newly discovered laws of quantum physics this modification cannot be reduced below certain well-ascertained limits. Still I would not like to call this a direct influence of the subject on the object. For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks.

Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the ‘world of energy’, they cannot produce any change in this world of energy as we know from Spinoza and Sir Charles Sherrington.

All this was said from the point of view that we accept the time-hallowed discrimination between subject and object. Though we have to accept it in everyday life ‘for practical reference’, we ought, so I believe, to abandon it in philosophi- cal thought. I ts rigid logical consequence has been revealed by Kant: the sublime, but empty, idea of the ’thing-in-itself about which we forever know nothing.

It is the same elements that go to compose my mind and the world. This situation is the same for every mind and its world, in spite of the unfathomable abundance of ‘cross-references’ between them. The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.