A Reality Check

Reflections on Schrödinger's cat, tipping points, the nature of reality, and caring for the world. And Charlie.

The Cat Lady

Ouch. Reality hits me hard sometimes.  

Charlie is missing. He disappeared on Saturday night, not long after I took this photo. He is thirteen years old, and he’s my daughter Annika’s beloved cat. Annika is living in Australia for a year, and last week she asked me to send her a picture of Charlie.

Now our much-loved cat is gone. I’ve been looking all over the neighborhood, and I do not know whether Charlie is dead or alive.

The fate of Annika’s cat makes me think about Schrödinger’s cat, which is a famous thought experiment in quantum physics related to the phenomenon of superposition. Superposition is the ability of a quantum system to be in multiple states at the same time, until it is measured. In this short animation, physicist Chad Orzel explains how this thought experiment works:

[Schrödinger] imagined taking a cat and placing it in a sealed box with a device that had a 50% chance of killing the cat in the next hour. At the end of that hour, he asked, "What is the state of the cat?" Common sense suggests that the cat is either alive or dead, but Schrödinger pointed out that according to quantum physics, at the instant before the box is opened, the cat is equal parts alive and dead, at the same time. It's only when the box is opened that we see a single definite state. Until then, the cat is a blur of probability,

The point of Schrödinger’s thought experiment was to demonstrate the absurdity of quantum physics, but as Orzel explains, it is actually not so absurd: “the quantum phenomenon of superposition is a consequence of the dual particle and wave nature of everything.” This relates to entanglement, a phenomenon where particles are correlated, and their superposed states are linked. But enough of this!

Back to Charlie, our darling blur of probability.

I have a choice. I can sit on the sofa staring at a box, wondering whether he is dead or alive, or I can engage with my interpretation of reality. Participatory realism. Agential realism. A reality where we have agency and we matter.

Recognizing my agency, I put up posters around the neighborhood, announce that Charlie is missing on social media groups, and go out and look for him. I also ask others to help.

One woman called me yesterday and told me she saw a very scared white cat sitting under a car. Hopeful, I ran to check it out, and since then I have spent a lot of time walking and running in that area, asking people if they have seen a white cat with brown ears.

I’m not giving up! I do not know the outcome, but I am doing everything that I can to collapse the blur of probability in our favor. I’ve become the neighborhood cat lady.

Tipping Points

Reflecting on probabilities and unknown outcomes makes me think about our future on this planet. This week I participated in an engaging panel discussion at the online R3.0 Conference on Tipping Points on Tipping Points: Building Necessary Collapse Resilience. The point of departure was the negative tipping points facing the world today, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, coral reef die-off, changing ocean currents, and so on. But the conference focused on positive tipping points, active hope, new ways of being, and what a post-collapse society might look like. I was invited to present a provocation not on tipping points, but about fractal approaches to scaling transformations.

What struck me most was how my perspective contrasted with the narrative of the first speaker on the panel, Jem Bendell. I connected and related to some of his points, but recognize that we hold slightly different views of reality. I hold a position that is both similar and different to his at the same time - a superposition!

His talk encouraged me to reflect on my own perspective. My reality.

Reality check

Bendell’s approach to deep adaptation is based on his conclusion that near-term societal collapse is inevitable because we have already passed some climate tipping points. We need to accept that and reassess what we are doing and how we are living. His Deep Adaptation Agenda is about promoting resilience, relinquishment, restoration and reconciliation. Bendell quit his academic job and moved to Bali, Indonesia, and his deep adaptation movement is helping people find meaning in their lives as they come to accept that there is nothing they can do to prevent the big collapse. They do not matter.

Quantum social change takes collapse seriously, but also recognizes that we do matter. In fact, so do our beliefs — I wrote about deep adaptation in the beliefs chapter of You Matter More Than You Think. If we believe that collapse is inevitable, we are unlikely to engage simultaneously with the practical, political, and personal spheres of transformation to shift the very systems and cultures that are having devastating outcomes for people and the planet. If we believe that we matter, and if we recognize the entanglement of mind, meaning, and matter, we will show up as both individuals and collectives to transform systems. We will respond, regardless of the probability distributions of the outcomes. We recognize that we are responsible — as in able to respond.

I do not deny collapse, and I have never underestimated the challenges facing us. My awakening to the seriousness of what we are doing to ourselves and our planet goes back decades to graduate school courses in climatology, meteorology, ecology, systems thinking, cultural ecology, and extinction of species. I am aware of the scenarios and the stakes. We are in the decade that matters, and what we do now matters.

Can collapse be both inevitable and evitable at the same time? In reality, many people have already experienced collapse, or are experiencing it right now. Collapse is contextual, and I believe we can influence this context by transforming economic, social and political systems and cultures. Not control, but influence.

As with Annika’s cat, I consider the future to be more like a blur of probability than a deterministic outcome. Yes, there is momentum in the system based on what we have done in the past. Yet we can still view the future as a wave of potential, recognizing that outcomes will be influenced by our individual and collective actions. How we show up and what we do makes a difference.

Caring

Still, the potential for loss is real, whether it relates to Charlie or the many things that we care deeply about on this planet. Why not, then, give up and accept that it is game over, and instead focus on the things that give us joy and meaning? Why bother striving for transformations to a thriving world?

I bother because I care. It’s the same reason I will go out and look for Charlie again. It’s the same reason I will focus on finishing revisions to the IPBES transformative change assessment, no matter what it takes.

I care about equity and justice, and it gives me joy and meaning to collaborate with so many people who care about it too. There are many who care deeply for the people and species suffering now, and there are many who care about young people and generations-to-come — the ones who will experience the future that we are shaping, here and now. I will do all that I can, not out of delusion, but because I know that together, we can make a difference. We can do better.

Redefining reality

It can be painful to face reality, but it can also be mind-expanding to consider that, at the deepest level, reality is not what it seems. Uncertainty is part of that reality.

I just read a New Scientist article about a group of researchers that are trying to “take reality back” from the weirdness of quantum physics by redefining its foundations. They want to tweak quantum physics so that it adheres to local realism — the idea that objects have well-defined properties, regardless of whether they are measured or observed.

I want to take back reality too. Participatory realism reminds us that we are not just observers, but instead we play an active role in how things unfold. This is not wishful or magical thinking, but an invitation for us to act from our deepest values, grounded in what we care about for everyone. It’s an invitation to engage with the blur of probability and the wave of potential that exists here and now, recognizing that we matter more than we think.

To accept the substantial uncertainty of our knowledge is to accept living immersed in ignorance and, therefore, in mystery, to accept living with questions to which we do not know the answers. Perhaps we don’t know them yet or — who knows? - we never will.

Carlo Rovelli*

UPDATE: Good news! The box has been opened, and it revealed a very hungry cat! Just after I scheduled this newsletter to go out, a neighbor came running over to say that Charlie had been locked in his garage while they were on vacation. We are all so happy. It was a great birthday present for Annika, and a reality shift for me. Now back to work. :-)

*Rovelli, Carlo. 2014. Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. UK: Random House. P. 231.