Black and white thinking makes us feel somewhat secure–me and someone else, rich and poor, joyful and desolate, tall and short, on and off, up and down, optimist and pessimist, dead and alive. We like clear divisions, antitheses and mutually exclusive categories. So, we want Schrödinger’s Cat to be either alive or dead, but not both simultaneously.
Most of the world of experience is, however, scalar. A few notable exceptions to this lie in the life vs. death scenario. When we’re dead, we’re dead—except, of course, for all those people brought back to life by EMTs and emergency room staff.
Let’s graph Schrödinger’s Cat. Our graph has a double kurtosis, two very sharp hills that go seemingly to infinity. One sharp peak is “the cat is dead,” whereas the other sharp peak is “the cat is alive.” These are absolutes, but they are also “infinite” truths. Here’s the problem: No one knows that there could be two “infinities.” If one infinity encompasses everything—and more—then how can there be two “infinities” that encompass everything—and more? Wouldn’t one infinity have to be “in the other infinity”?
Often, at the zeniths of one’s peaks, we see them. We make our judgments of people by taking their actions through countless continua; we apply gradational perspective, seeing black through gray through white; hardest through harder and hard, through soft, softer and softest, and all the non-quantifiable emotions between love and hate, and locked into an indefinite number of gradations in any observation.
We recognize that there may be more less to the reality of physical objects, including humans than meets the eye. Hence, obviously and sometimes even knowingly, we are scared to confess thee deeper realism. Bottled up, concealed, emotions drive some well… to be seen on the other side of their peak. But, no one is asking you to attain a peak; in fact, like the cat, we don’t see the cat in any one condition, at the top of any acme; but, rather, in all conditions between alive and dead and both alive and dead. Whilst people strive to attain this peak of “aliveness” their attitudes and behaviors usually do, in fact, elicit a sense of happiness to all; yet this just serves as a mask: inside they are deteriorating.
As soon as you don’t let society define who you should be, you will be a gradation between alive and death. Smoothness. A gentle incline and decline. There will be periods of decline and there will be periods of majesty.
Take Zeno’s paradox. Between point A and point B on the graph there is another point, a halfway point, and between the halfway point and either A or B there is yet another halfway point. If the gradation is between life and death, then one can never say fully that the cat is definitely just dead or just alive. It’s both, but it can be more dead than alive or more alive than dead. In our observation of the cat we can stand back to see the whole continuum or we can zero in by the “calculus of observation,” picking a spot on the curve, zooming in.
We still have a bit of a problem. If Zeno is our guide in this, the zoom-in would have to be infinitely small. Infinity keeps getting in the way of our observation and our acknowledgement of one’s veiled contemplations. Yes, we could zoom in to a location on the curve where the cat is “mostly alive,” but we would know that we zoomed in and that, had we moved along the continuum just a bit, the cat might be mostly dead. If the macro world is supposed to communicate with the micro world, then those of us stuck in the macro will have to assume that we can’t fully get into the micro. Take off your mask. Zoom out. We cannot connect to the microscopic world of feelings, emotions, and thoughts without interacting with it.
Has the cat died? Does the cat live? When I look, I see not only a living and dead cat, but also a living dead cat and a dead living cat. You, yes you, need to only be the best version of you. You will face decline because summits are only so elevated. The pinnacle collapses only in so far as I zoom in on the graph of the universe’s condition for either quantum or macro phenomena. Remove your façade and zoom with me.
