Schrodinger's Cat

One of the most entertaining things to think about is this: it’s what Jeffrey Schwartz calls the causal effectiveness of volition. It is the idea that consciousness, or volition, or free will has a hand in causing the very fabric of reality to come into being. Jeffrey Schwartz, who is a neurologist, showed how volition is what wires the brain. And volition can rewire the brain at any moment. In fact, the brain is very finely attuned to volition. This idea of volition can also be thought of as will or attention or consciousness. I think all of those words just talk about the life force.

That reality condenses into a state because of attention (or awareness) is something that quantum mechanics brought to light. But people have had a very hard time understanding that. I don’t know how much math you’ve had, but reality, before attention, is a superposition of eigenstates. That means it doesn’t really exist. It’s just a cloud of possibilities. When someone becomes aware of it that cause the one of the eigenstates to become real and all of the others vanish.

There was a thought experiment dreamt up by Irwin Schrodinger in the very beginning of quantum mechanics which I'm sure that you have heard of. The point of the experiment is to illustrate the problem with how attention and reality interact.

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid.

If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The Psi function for the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

What's wrong with this thought experiment? Can you guess? It's a fascinating thought experiment because it touches exactly the most important thing: reality is superposition of possibilities until someone pays attention which causes it to collapse into being. Attention gives birth to reality.

But the thought experiment confuses something. Schrodinger understood that the cat must be either alive or dead. It couldn't possibly be both. But while he granted the cat the capacity of life, he denied it the capacity of attention. So a cat, according to Schrodinger can be alive, but it has no capacity to be aware. What does that mean?

The thing that Schrodinger missed is that attention is a capacity of any sentient being. A cat causes reality to come into existence the same way a human does. It's not human consciousness that cause the reality to condense it is consciousness, or life. You don't have to be human to cause reality, you just have to be alive.

That life is a kind of powerful magic is not a hard stretch for me. Life, it seems to me, is the ultimate magic in this world. I really don’t even know what life is, but I get that it’s something big. And the fact that it’s me just fills me with wave upon wave of mind bending joy.