Schroedinger's Cat, Nansen's Cat
How Two Cats – Each Neither Dead nor Alive – Can Help Us in Our Decision Making
Not too long ago, our young grandchild ran into my home office and asked if I would read him the book he held in his hand. “Not now,” I said, for no good reason. He cheerfully assented and left. But now I don’t see him, as the family has moved away. The family has moved away, and the world has moved on, and what I might have done I did not. I made a fateful decision.
We are all familiar with decisions and decision making, and there is even a field called Decision Science. But the fateful quality of our choices is something we can usefully think more about. Two stories, both involving a cat, might help.
In 1935, physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) presented a puzzling story about a cat that was neither dead nor alive. Curiously enough, about eleven hundred years earlier, a Zen master named Nansen (748-835) had created the same scenario.
Schrödinger, along with Einstein, was uncomfortable with the picture of the universe described by the emerging science of quantum mechanics. Central to this picture were strange ideas like “uncertainty,” “superposition,” and “entanglement.” Superposition, for example, is a state of indeterminate identity, where an entity may be said to exist in two states at once – such as both a wave and a particle. Entanglement means that this double state can spread, as it were, to involve other entities.
That these phenomena could actually characterize reality seemed absurd to Schrödinger. To illustrate this absurdity, Schrödinger created his box scenario. In that box are three objects. Two are large: a cat, and a beaker of acid. One object is small, namely a radioactive atom. Now the life of the cat is life entangled with and dependent on the atom, in this way: If this atom decays (a probabilistic event), it will cause the beaker to break– killing the cat. Otherwise not. An observer, looking at the closed box cannot know its state, because until observed the atom is in a state of superposition, both decayed and not. The cat itself can therefore be said to be this weird state – neither specifically dead nor yet specifically alive. When the lid is opened, however, the state of the cat will be definitive, alive or dead.
You may be aware of Schroedinger’s thought experiment about the cat. Here is the story of Nansen’s Cat (Mumonkan Case 14):
Once the monks of the Western and Eastern Halls were arguing about a cat. Nansen, holding up the cat, said, “You monks! If you can say a word of Zen, I will spare the cat. Otherwise I will kill it.” No one could answer, so Nansen cut the cat in two.
We don’t know from this story what the monks were actually quarreling about. Mumonkan commentator Zenkei Shibayama suggests that “from the context it may be inferred that they were engaging in some speculative religious arguments referring to a cat.”[1] This seems likely. I prefer, however, to think that the two monks are at a standoff because each would like to “adopt” the cat and take it to their room to feed and play with. Regardless, Nansen grabbed the cat and asked for a “word of Zen.” In that instant, the cat is neither dead nor alive – if they manage to say something, it is alive, if they don’t, it is dead. Life and death are completely and utterly “entangled.”
The point I wish to draw from these two dramatic pictures – the cat in the box, the cat held up by Nansen, is: you make a decision, and in a blink of an eye, the cat will be either alive or dead. Open the box and it is no longer both dead and alive, but one or the other, depending on the decay (or not) of the atom. In the second story, you hold the cat, which will be dead or alive depending on the reaction (or not) of the monks. In that instant, the world has branched onto one set of tracks, moving in a certain direction, and it is impossible to go back to the diverging point.
Each day brings us, in some mysterious fashion, to decision points. It is as if our day travels along, but in unpredictable ways small or large crescendos are reached and there we are – having to decide what to do or say. Many of these nodes are easily handled – I will help with the shopping or I will not, I will say a kind word, or I will not. We barely feel the click of the switch beneath us as we move onto one set of tracks or the other. Sometimes we do sense the momentous nature of a decision, and then all our energies are engaged in trying to reach the “right” choice – what college to go to, which job offer to accept.
At other times, though, what may appear a routine decision may, in fact, be a fateful one. You don’t visit with a neighbor when it is possible, and the next thing you know she is in the hospital. You don’t read a book with a grandchild, and the next thing you know the family has moved away. Maybe being more mindful of the potential largeness of small decisions might help us make better choices?
Dōgen thinks that the story of the cat and Nansen is exaggerated, and that he could not really have killed the cat. Modern physicists think Schrödinger, with his cat, was incorrect and quantum phenomena are real. But what seems neither exaggerated nor incorrect is that, even today, there are forces that will present us with decisions to make. And in response we will make choices, and each time a switch beneath us will click quietly, and our personal train will travel down one set of tracks rather than another.
[1] Shibayama, Zenkei. Zen comments on the Mumonkan. Harper & Row 1974.