Schrodinger's Cat: Introduction

I Am Schrödinger's Cat: Introduction

The tale of Schrödinger's Cat is a famous thought experiment in which a cat is imprisoned in a box which contains a mechanism to kill it at a random time. The random device uses the probability of a a radioactive substance emitting an electron, so that the cat's life is truly subject to fundamental randomness -- the randomness of quantum mechanics. One tenet of quantum mechanics is that there is no way to actually predict the behavior of quantum particles; one can only calculate probabilities that they will do this or that. But this behavior generally applies only to very small things, such as electrons and photons, whereas larger objects obey the classical, deterministic laws of mechanics as described by Newton and Einstein. So, generally, you can (in physics) predict the behavior of ordinary sized objects if you know the initial conditions.

The magic of Schrödinger's thought experiment is that it transforms the cat into something which acts like a quantum particle: it is or isn't alive, and we know only the probability and can't ever know which without opening the box. In quantum terms, we'd have to make a second observation of our object, which collapses its wave function into the deterministic, simple formula given by classical mechanics. [Click on the Schrödinger particle for the original description of the experiment.]

Being tender of heart, and since falling ill with a mental disorder, I am no longer the hard -headed, scientific type I once was. So now, instead of thinking about the equations, when I hear about Schrödinger's Cat, I identify with the cat. Indeed, there are many similarities between the fate of this poor animal (or more broadly, the behavior of quantum particles), exploited by its betters, and the fate of the mentally ill.

These are illustrated with interactive presentations and texts, available by clicking on the particles, but I will outline the analogy here in a more detailed manner:

Mentally ill folks spend a lot of time neither dead nor alive. When you are mentally ill, you often are in a stupor in whch you cannot think, move, work, or take care of the activities of daily living (e.g. showering, making food, etc.). This can be caused by medication, of course, but it can also be a symptom of depression or of certain psychotic states in which one is overloaded by extraneous (false) information such as "the Martians are about to attack and I can hear them" and thus can't deal with ordinary, more minor, facts such as the fact that one is beginning to smell bad and one hasn't eaten for 12 hours.
Mentally ill folks get locked up in boxes in which they have no control over their lives. In its most literal aspect, this happens when a hospitalized person is locked in a euphemistically-named "quiet room" (i.e. no one will hear your screams) and They decide whether you can eat or defecate or stay awake and not be drugged into oblivion. More generally, the lives of mental patients are controlled by the mental health system to a large degree. Case workers are sent into our houses, where they decide if they like what food we have in our refrigerators, the way our rooms are kept up, what we are wearing, and even what books we have on our shelves. Mentally ill people are also controlled by their families, who decide when and whether they take medication, what they eat, what programs they attend, and what attitudes are acceptable.
The act of observing a mentally ill person induces the appearance of deviant behavior. A mentally ill person may be going along quite well, but the mere fact that they are mentally ill and that this is known to others makes the others see their behavior as disturbed. This is analogous to the the way observing an electron causes its behavior to change: The state of the observer's knowledge about the electron affects its properties. For example, consider the two slit experiment, in which interference patterns appear according to whether we observe which slit the electron went through.
Mentally ill people behave in non-deterministic ways. It is difficult or impossible to predict how a mentally ill person will react in a given situation. This is because behavior is affected by internal factors such as levels of depression, mania, psychosis (hallucinations and delusions), anxiety, and so forth, and just knowing the external conditions does not provide enough information to predict behavior. Moreover, the internal factors are fundamentally unknowable to others, and rather unknowable to the person herself. This is not why electrons act unpredictably, as far as we know: no internal structure is posited to explain the electron's probabilistic behavior. Instead, we think in terms of natural laws which describe quantum mechanical behavior, and those laws involve probability. In the case of people, mentally ill or not, we don't know any universal laws to describe behavior.