SCHRODINGER X hit a conceptual wall with consciousness.

 A

What you’re touching on comes straight from Schrödinger’s reflections on the limits of science, especially in What Is Life? and related writings. He observed a fundamental tension:

• Western science assumes objectivity — the world is treated as an “external” thing that exists independently of the observer. To study it scientifically, consciousness must be bracketed out; the observer tries to act as if they are outside the system.

• Consciousness, however, is intrinsically subjective — it is the experiencing subject. You can’t fully remove the observer from their own experience, because the observer is the phenomenon.

Schrödinger’s point, then, is subtle but profound: if science is designed to study objective phenomena, it may be fundamentally incapable of fully explaining subjective experience. Any attempt to explain consciousness “from the outside” is limited by the very framework of objectifying observation.

It’s not that science can’t study the correlates of consciousness — neural activity, behavior, etc. — but the qualitative “what it’s like” aspect (often called qualia) resists full objectification. Philosophers like Thomas Nagel echo this in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, arguing that subjective experience cannot be captured entirely by objective description.

In other words, Schrödinger isn’t saying science is useless — just that its traditional methods hit a conceptual wall with consciousness. Some modern approaches (integrated information theory, quantum consciousness hypotheses, or first-person neuroscience) try to bridge the gap, but the tension remains.

If you want, I can break down exactly why this “objectivity assumption” makes the scientific study of consciousness impossible, step by step, in a very concrete way. Do you want me to do that?