ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 places the little book What Is Life? in the life of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger. It discusses three other texts written before and after What Is Life? and shows how all through his adult life Schrödinger was fascinated by the questions of somatic and spiritual memory and its inheritance and how this fascination emerged from a metaphysical search for unity and eternity of consciousness. The chapter argues that Schrödinger’s emphatic reductionist declaration in What Is Life? that the gene is nothing but physical and chemical entity emerged from an entirely non-empirical and non-reductionist metaphysics.
