Schrödinger: The Wave as a Misconstrued Individual: Relational Ontology and the Early Quantum Imagination

Erwin Schrödinger is the most tragic figure in the early quantum story—not for his personality, but for the ontological mistake he could never quite relinquish. He gave physics its most generative formalism, the wave equation, and then spent much of the rest of his career trying to insist that its “waves” described something like real physical undulations. The irony is exquisite: the more he insisted on ontological clarity, the more the clarity slipped from his grasp.

To refract Schrödinger’s worldview through relational ontology is to illuminate the exact point where his construal collapsed: he tried to treat an instance of a system as if it were a system in its own right, and thus misidentified the wave-function as a thing rather than as a perspectival cut across a structured potential.

Let’s take the key components one at a time.

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1. Schrödinger’s Wave Function as Substance: an Ontological Overreach

Schrödinger’s early ambition was explicit:

the wave equation was meant to describe a continuous physical field.

No probabilities. No epistemic veneers. No “tendencies.”

A literal, spatially extended, oscillating thing.

But in the relational ontology:

• A system is a theory of possible instances—structured potential.

• An instance is a perspectival construal, not a substance.

• There is no “intrinsic” phenomenon independent of construal.

Schrödinger tried to fuse these levels—collapsing system and instance into a single physical picture. The wave function becomes a quasi-classical medium: something that is actual, extended, substantial.

In relational terms, this is a category error.

The wave-function is not an “underlying stuff.”

It is a mapping of potential—a system’s internal organisation made available under a construal condition.

He turned a theory into a thing.

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2. What Schrödinger Couldn’t Accept: Possibility Without Substance

Schrödinger’s discomfort with the Born rule was not methodological—it was ontological.

He felt probability was an admission of incompleteness, a retreat from physical description.

But relational ontology reframes possibility itself:

• Possibility is not subjective ignorance.

• Possibility is not a physical mist waiting to condense into facts.

• Possibility is the form of structured potential—a system’s mode of being.

Thus, where Born sees the wave-function as a semantic abstraction—a construal of potential—Schrödinger wants it to be a phenomenon in its own right.

But relational ontology admits no unconstrued phenomena.

His desire for a “literal wave” is a desire for a phenomenon with no construal, an impossibility in this model.

He is looking for phenomena without the cut,

events without the perspectival shift,

actualities that were never potential.

The ontology simply cannot support such entities.

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3. Schrödinger’s Cat: the Monster Born of Misconstrual

The famous thought-experiment is often treated as a critique of quantum superposition. But from a relational standpoint, it is a critique of Schrödinger’s own ontology.

The paradox arises only if one assumes:

1. The wave-function describes a real physical condition of the cat;

2. That this condition persists independently of any construal;

3. That “superposed cat” is therefore an actual condition of the world.

The relational ontology dissolves the paradox:

• The wave-function is part of the system-theoretic potential;

• The “superposed cat” is not a thing, but a metaphenomenon—a theoretical image, not a possible experience;

• The actual cat only exists at the instantiated perspectival cut where event emerges.

Schrödinger accidentally constructed a horror story by treating system-level potential as if it were a phenomenal experience.

The cat is monstrous only because its creator demanded the wave-function be an instance rather than a theory.

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4. The Relational Reinterpretation: Schrödinger’s Wave as a Theory of Possibilities

A relational reframing recasts the wave-function elegantly:

• It is not a field in space.

• It is not a physical wave.

• It is not a superposed “state of the world.”

Instead:

• It is the system’s internal ordering of potential,

• Abstracted through a construal that allows prediction,

• And instantiated only through perspectival cuts (i.e. events).

Under this view, the wave-equation becomes a grammar of possibility,

a structured model of how a system radialises into potential phenomena.

Schrödinger wanted an ontology of stuff.

He discovered instead an ontology of structured potential.

He refused to make the turn.

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5. Why Schrödinger Still Matters: He Gave Us the Form Without the Substance

Even though he misidentified the wave, Schrödinger’s work remains foundational because he accidentally built the perfect mathematical expression of the relational ontology’s core insight:

Events do not unfold from hidden particles;

events are perspectival actualisations of structured potential.

The wave-function is the map of that potential.

The event is the cut.

The world is not a machine—it is a becoming.

Schrödinger delivered the mathematics of this shift.

He simply refused its metaphysics.