Schrödinger’s Beaver
I was out on my walk around the lake the other day, and I passed the beaver lodge. This lodge has been there as long as we’ve lived here, but I’ve never seen a beaver. No one seems to know for sure whether they are still active.
This brought to mind that old quantum mechanics thought experiment, Schrödinger’s Cat, where the cat is either dead or alive depending on whether a radioactive atom has decayed. In the experiment, the cat is only probabilistically alive. It exists in-between states. Of course, this is from the perspective of the experimenter. From the cat’s perspective, it is either dead or alive.
So how does this relate to my beavers?
Well, in my mind, they are neither alive nor dead, present nor absent. I have a sense that they might be there, the lodge doesn’t seem to be breaking apart, and I have noticed a fresh branch with green leaves seemingly added to the lodge. Of course, the branch could have fallen from a tree, and maybe the weather hasn’t been bad enough to wreck the lodge.
I don’t know.
But there’s something to see here. How much of our experience is like this? We assume one thing to be true, without real evidence, or we assume the opposite to be true, with equal ignorance.
The better thing would be to just admit that we don’t know. It’s an unknown, full stop.
But the nature of the human mind is to operate in terms of certainties, even when they aren’t supported by anything meaningful.
I like to take some time to look at my assumptions, and see where I’m just making things up. There’s a great exercise created by Nancy Kline that she calls ‘Incisive Questions’.
The exercise involves seeing where you have a counterproductive assumption, asking what a more true and more empowering assumption might be, then asking how you would act if that empowering assumption were true.
This might be one of the most powerful exercises I’ve come across for changing behavior.
And I’m going to assume those beavers are alive and fine in their little home, and I’ll keep checking as I walk by, just in case I catch a glimpse of them.
