Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science

Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter in the context of contemporary science

Harald Atmanspacher

Pauli’s thoughts on topics beyond physics are likely to be appreciated as inspiring sources for the present and future development of Western science and culture. In recent years many of his ideas, expressed in his letters,5provokedan increasing interest in the communities of philosophers, psychologists, and natural scientists. Pauli understood that physics necessarily gives an incomplete view of nature, and he was looking for an extended scientific framework. However, the fact that the often colloquial and speculative style of his letters is in striking contrast to his careful and refined publications should advise us to act with caution. His accounts are extremely stimulating, but they should be considered as first groping attempts rather than definitive proposals.

In this contribution, we will give an overview of Pauli’s extra physical interests. He himself reviewed the main body of his corresponding views in three publications, the Kepler article (Pauli 1952), the paper on Jungs’s ideas of the unconscious (Pauli 1954b), and the contribution to a conference at Mainz (Pauli1956b). But his extensive correspondence provides a much more comprehensive source of material in this respect. Pauli’s interest in Jung’s depth psychology was mainly focused on its structural, conceptual aspects. Therefore, we will not enter into the discussion of questions of psychological therapy as they maybe recognized in parts of the Pauli-Jung dialog.6Pauli’s scientific work in the narrow sense and its impact on specific problems of contemporary theoreticalphysics7will be addressed only insofar as they arise in the context of more general issues

The following sections 2, 3 and 4 provide the basis for a detailed under-standing of Pauli’s ideas on mind and matter. Section 2 is devoted to the basicimportance that Pauli ascribed to symmetry principles and to symmetry break-ing. Section 3 addresses the role of symbols (in the Jungian sense) in theoryformation. In section 4 we introduce Pauli’s ideas, based on those of Bohr,concerning a generalized notion of complementarity. In section 5, we presentthe key issue of Pauli’s extraphysical interests: the psychophysical problem ofhow relations between mind and matter can be reasonably circumscribed andconceived. Section 6 extends this theme into the significance of concepts oftime for the psychophysical problem. Section 7 gives some material concerningPauli’s ideas on biological evolution and the nature of mutations. We concludethis overview in section 8.