Does the World Exist Independently of You Observing It?

Schrodinger read the Upanishads. Then he changed physics.

Chandogya Upanishad vs Berkeley and Schrodinger. Consciousness is singular and fundamental, not a byproduct of matter.

The Bowl of Saltwater

In a forest hermitage somewhere in the north of the subcontinent, sometime before 600 BCE, a boy named Svetaketu came home from twelve years of Vedic school and found his father waiting for him. The boy was twenty-four. He had memorized most of the Vedas and was quietly proud of it. He walked into his father's hut expecting a welcome and perhaps a meal. What he got was a bowl, a lump of rock salt, and a single question.

Uddalaka Aruni, his father, looked him over. The hut smelled of cooking smoke and the river beyond the trees. 'Did you ask for that teaching,' Uddalaka said, 'by which the unheard becomes heard, the unthought thought, the unknown known?' Svetaketu had not. Nobody at the school had mentioned such a teaching. Nobody had told him it existed. He was, the Chandogya Upanishad tells us plainly, furious and curious at the same time.

Uddalaka did not begin with a doctrine. He handed the boy the lump of salt. 'Put it in this bowl of water,' he said, 'and come see me tomorrow.'

What would pass between father and son across that bowl of saltwater would become, twenty-five centuries later, the cleanest answer anyone had ever given to a question that would eventually keep Bishop Berkeley awake in Dublin and Erwin Schrödinger awake in a room in Arosa. The question was the one every child has already asked without knowing its name. When you close your eyes in the kitchen, is the kitchen still there?

The Chandogya's Classroom

The Chandogya Upanishad, compiled sometime before 600 BCE, contains the teaching scene Svetaketu walked into in its sixth chapter. It should be in every physics syllabus.

Uddalaka begins with a statement that would not have been out of place in Parmenides two centuries later, and that modern physicists quietly struggle with today. 'In the beginning, my son, this was Being alone, one only, without a second.' Sat, Being, singular. Everything that appears to be many is actually this one Sat showing up under different conditions. The proof is not offered as doctrine. It is offered as a set of experiments.