Conversations at the Edge of Possibility: 5 Erwin Schrödinger — The Wave That Would Not Decide

When formal elegance becomes ontology

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Relational Ontology:

You treat the wavefunction as a physical entity. But why reify the formalism?

Schrödinger:

Because it evolves continuously, deterministically, and it accounts for everything we observe. To treat it as anything less is to misunderstand the world.

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With Schrödinger, quantum theory achieves a level of formal elegance unrivalled by his contemporaries. The wavefunction obeys a smooth, continuous evolution — the famous Schrödinger equation — and predicts the probabilities of all possible outcomes. It is, in his view, a complete description.

This is not merely mathematics. For Schrödinger, the wavefunction is reality. The cat, the atom, the particle — all are subsumed under a single, continuous wave.

Here lies the first ontological overreach.

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Continuous Evolution vs Discrete Outcomes

The wavefunction flows deterministically, unbroken. Yet the world of observation is discrete. Measurement yields events, not continua.

This is the tension Schrödinger dramatises in the cat thought experiment: alive or dead, not smeared across possibilities. The cat is not a paradox. It is a symptom — a symptom of treating formal description as ontological substance rather than as a map of instantiable possibilities.

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The Wavefunction as Theory of Possible Instances

Relational Ontology:

The wave is not a thing. It is a theory of possible instances.

Schrödinger:

But it evolves, and we can calculate from it. It is the closest we have to understanding reality itself.

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From a relational standpoint:

• The wavefunction encodes what can become actualised, not what exists prior to actualisation.

• Its continuous evolution is a formal device — a landscape of potentialities — not a literal flow of being.

• The discrete outcomes we observe are instantiations, perspectival cuts from the underlying potential.

Collapse is not a mysterious physical jump.

It is the event in which the system is actualised — the cut in which a possibility becomes instantiated within a given construal.

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The Cat: Symptom, Not Paradox

The Schrödinger cat thought experiment is often cited as the ultimate paradox of quantum mechanics. From a relational perspective, it is neither paradox nor puzzle.

• The cat’s “alive” or “dead” state is an instantiation, not a property of a continuous wave.

• Superposition is not ontic fuzz; it is the formal expression of the space of potential instantiations.

• Collapse is the perspectival selection of one instantiation among many, not a sudden physical change in the wave itself.

The paradox arises only if the wavefunction is treated as an entity rather than a map of possibilities.

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Continuous Formalism vs Relational Cut

Schrödinger’s genius is undeniable. He formalised the relational space of potential outcomes with unmatched clarity and rigour. Yet the interpretive step — moving from formalism to ontological substance — obscures the relational insight:

A system is a theory of possible instances, not a thing.

Collapse is a perspectival cut, not a physical jump.

Once this distinction is grasped, the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics dissolves. The wave does not “decide.” Instantiation does.

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Schrödinger’s Achievement — and the Relational Lesson

Relational Ontology:

You mapped all possibilities in a single, continuous formalism.

Schrödinger:

And yet the world we observe is discrete.

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What Schrödinger demonstrates is the tension between formal completeness and relational actualisation:

• Formalism alone is insufficient to capture instantiation.

• Treating a theory as a thing obscures the perspectival cut that produces events.

• Discrete outcomes — cats alive or dead, electrons detected or not — are the primary reality, not the continuous wave.

This directly resonates with the system/instance distinction: the wavefunction is a system of potentialities, the instantiations are events actualised through construal.

Schrödinger’s work is indispensable: it provides the map of potential instances.

Relational ontology completes the interpretation: it names the cut.

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The next conversation will confront someone who refuses to allow any of these subtleties: a thinker for whom realism remains absolute, and the relational cut remains unthinkable.

Next: Albert Einstein — Reality, Locality, and the Refusal of Construal