I still like Schrodinger’s cat. I think it is a perfect expression of reality.
I’ve covered this in other posts, but they may have been elsewhere and under another mindset, so I’ll cover the concept quickly for those of you unfamiliar with the quantum mechanical koan.
From Wikipedia:
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following 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 the 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.
The koan is this:
According to quantum physics, the cat is both dead and alive at the end of an hour. Reality is determined when the box is opened and the cat is observed as either being dead or alive.
So many things can be described in both what they are and what they aren’t. Our system of language and logic pushes us into an either/or way of perceiving the world. Either something is dead or it is alive. A person is either evil or good. Objects are large or small. We set ourselves up for dichotomies by the very way our society teaches us to think.
But Schrodinger’s Cat is an example of something not placed into our dichotomy paradigm, which is why it was so problematic for those people considering the thought experiment. It is only after something is observed that it becomes either/or. Before observation, it is both the north and south, the negative and positive, the black and the white… Everything has the potential to be both. Only when we place our skewed perspective on something does it fall into one extreme or the other.
Reality isn’t weird. Our dichotomous perspective is what is flawed.
I think this is an element of Zen thinking. When you think in terms of either/or, you are living an illusion. When you see things as they are, you are really seeing.