Like Peirce, but by a route neither religious nor synechistic, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger embraced the idea of a Universal Self. In an ‘Epilogue’ to his classic and influential What Is Life? – an epilogue rejected for publication by the sponsor of his lecture series, Trinity College of Dublin, due to its ties with the Catholic Church (Schneider and Sagan 2005, 326) – he reached the conclusion
that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I’—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature … Hence I am God Almighty.
— (Schrödinger 1944, 87)
Schrödinger conceded that in the ‘cultural milieu’ he was addressing, ‘it is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires’ – indeed it ‘sounds both blasphemous and lunatic’ (87). However he claims to be in accord not only with the Upanishads but with ‘the mystics of many centuries,’ who ‘have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: Deus factus sum (I have become God).’ But what’s to prevent this ‘grandest of all thoughts,’ as Schrödinger termed it, from turning into a grand delusion? His own claim was expressed dualistically, being inferred from the two premises that the body ‘functions as a pure mechanism’ (which therefore cannot be a free agent or experiencing subject), and ‘that I am directing its motions’ (86-7). Further developments in science (as recounted in this book) have called into question both of those premises – the purely mechanistic nature of the body, and the claim of conscious will to be in full control of it. Wegner (2002) even refers to the latter as The Illusion of Conscious Will.
Schrödinger argued that subjectivity is singular while bodies are many, which implies that the plurality of conscious selves must be an illusion derived from the plurality of bodies. He denied the existence of individual souls as incompatible with the singleness of the One Self (88). But except for that, his idea resembles Cartesian dualism more than Peircean synechism. He considered it ‘the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke’ (87). But long before Schrödinger, his ‘grandest of all thoughts’ was recognized by Buddhists as concealing a pitfall: that the Big Self may turn out to be a mere inflation of the ego.