In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger introduced what would become one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics: a cat sealed in a box, its fate entangled with a quantum event. If a radioactive atom decays, a mechanism triggers and the cat dies. If it does not decay, the cat lives.
According to the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics of the time—associated particularly with Niels Bohr—the atom exists in a superposition of decayed and not decayed states until observation. Schrödinger’s provocation was simple and devastating: if that description is taken literally, then the cat must be both alive and dead until the box is opened.
The image is absurd.
That was the point.
But the absurdity does not lie in quantum mechanics.
It lies in a confusion between potential and instance.
Superposition as Structured Potential
Superposition is often described as if it were a strange kind of ghostly actuality — as though reality itself becomes internally contradictory. The cat is imagined to be phenomenally both alive and dead at the same time.
This interpretation quietly reifies mathematical description into ontology. It assumes that the formal description of a system is itself a description of an actualised state of affairs.
If, instead, a system is understood as structured potential — as a theory of possible instances — then superposition ceases to be paradoxical.
It is not co-actualisation.
It is the specification of mutually exclusive possible actualisations.
When the box is unopened, there is no first-order phenomenon of “alive-and-deadness.” There is only a structured space of possibility in which incompatible instances are defined as possible.
Superposition is not an event.
It is the multiplicity internal to potential.
The Cut Is Not a Temporal Event
The most persistent misunderstanding concerns “collapse.” It is often imagined as something that happens in time — a mysterious physical transition whereby a blurred state sharpens into definiteness.
But this imports precisely the confusion the thought experiment exposes.
Actualisation is not a process unfolding within potential.
It is a perspectival cut.
The cut is not a transformation of one kind of being into another. It is the shift from describing a structured potential to describing an instance. It is the move from theory to event.
Nothing travels from indeterminacy to determinacy. No metaphysical cloud condenses.
Rather, a different level of construal is in play.
These are not two stages of the same thing.
They are two perspectives on structured reality.
To treat collapse as a temporal process is to confuse levels of description.
The opening of the box does not repair a contradiction. It marks the perspectival shift by which one possible instance is actualised.
There Is No Half-Dead Phenomenon
No first-order phenomenon corresponds to “both alive and dead.” There is no experienced superposition of contradictory states. There is no unconstrued limbo in which the cat hovers between life and death.
The wavefunction does not describe a ghostly twilight. It articulates the formal structure of possible instances.
Collapse is not a physical explosion in the fabric of the universe.
It is the shift from structured potential to actualised instance.
The cat was never both alive and dead.
Only the theoretical articulation encompassed both possibilities.
From the Cat to Gödel: The Evolution of Possibility
The deeper resonance of this clarification becomes visible when placed alongside the reframing of incompleteness developed earlier in this series.
In 1931, Kurt Gödel demonstrated that any sufficiently powerful formal system contains truths it cannot prove. The common interpretation treats this as a limitation — an epistemic wound.
But from the perspective of structured potential, incompleteness is not a defect. It is the mark of open possibility.
A formal system is a structured potential of derivable instances. Its incompleteness is precisely what prevents the closure of possibility into totalised actuality.
The parallel is striking.
In both cases:
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A formal system specifies a structured space of possible instances.
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That specification is mistaken for a total description of actuality.
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A paradox emerges from conflating levels.
Both reveal the irreducibility of potential to any one actualisation.
The evolution of possibility lies not in the accumulation of instances, but in the ongoing articulation of structured potential that always exceeds its actualisations.
Physics Without Ontic Substance
What, then, becomes of physics?
If the system is a structured potential — a theory of instances — then physics does not describe ontic substance evolving in time. It articulates formal structures of possibility within which instances may be actualised.
This is not instrumentalism. It is not the claim that physics is “merely” calculational.
It is a shift in ontological grammar.
It is a formal articulation of structured potential.
When we mistake that articulation for a direct description of phenomenal actuality, paradox appears. When we maintain the distinction between theory and instance, coherence returns.
Physics operates within structured potential.
Actuality occurs as perspectival cut.
There was never a half-dead cat suspended in metaphysical twilight.
There was only a theoretical multiplicity misconstrued as phenomenal simultaneity.
The cat was never both.
The paradox was never in the world.
It was in our failure to distinguish potential from instance.
And once that distinction is restored, the box opens quietly.
The cat steps out.
Not resurrected.
Not resolved.
Simply actualised.
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