Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is uncons… - Erwin Schrödinger

Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.

There’s another one like you sitting over there, thinking and feeling go on in him too.’ And now everything depends on how we go on: whether with ‘I am over there too, Self is over there, that is myself’; or with ‘There is a self over there, like yours, a second one’. It is the word ‘a’ which differentiates the two ideas, the indefinite article, degrading ‘self’ to a common noun. It is only this ‘a’ which makes the breach with idealism irreparable, fills the world with ghosts and drives us helplessly into the arms of animism.

We must therefore not be discouraged by the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the knowledge we have gained of the structure of living matter. We must also be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in it. Or are we to term it a non-physical, not to say a super-physical, law?

if we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom.