Resolutions Of 'Schrödinger's Cat' Type Paradoxes Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 212):

It is clear from scenarios such as this that the wave properties of matter applied to macroscopic objects — and especially to conscious observers — raise very deep issues about the nature of reality and the relationship between the observer and the physical world. The cat scenario is deliberately contrived to tease out the paradoxical nature of quantum weirdness in a dramatic way, but the same essential phenomenon occurs every time an alpha particle is emitted by a nucleus, and is busily at work in the radioactive paint on the hands of your luminous clock. 

There is still no general agreement on how to resolve paradoxes like that involving Schrödinger's cat. Some physicists believe that quantum mechanics will fail for systems as large and complex as cats. Another opinion is that quantum physics can tell us nothing about individual alpha particles or cats, but only about the statistics of collections of identical systems, so that we can say that if we were to perform the same experiment with a thousand cats in identical boxes then a certain fraction of the cats (as determined by the quantum rules) will be found alive and the rest dead. But that simply dodges the question of what happens to any individual cat.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the Schrödinger cat experiment supports the view of meaning as immanent (construed in semiotic stems) and invalidates the view of meaning as transcendent of semiotic systems. In the 'immanent' view, it is the construal — the meaning — that constitutes reality. Moreover, Quantum physics, in general, demonstrates the probabilistic nature of construing experience as instances of potential (such as instances of 'what happens to any individual cat').