The Trick of the Cat: How Observation Shapes Reality

By Haven Duddy

A Living Lattice Field Note from the series Tricks of Reality.

Quantum theory suggests that before something is seen, it exists in pure potential - and the moment we observe it, reality collapses into form. That's the heart of how observation shapes reality.

Schrodinger's cat wasn't about a literal cat, but about the astonishing truth that awareness is not passive. Attention participates. Naming something, noticing something, believing something - each act pulls possibility into shape.

This field note explores how observation creates the world we experience, and why the moment we look, the pattern shifts.

Introduction

In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger designed a mental experiment to show just how strange quantum mechanics could be.

He asked us to imagine a closed box containing a cat, a vial of poison, a detector, and a single radioactive atom.

If the atom decays, the detector shatters the vial, releasing poison and killing the cat.

If the atom doesn’t decay, the cat lives.

Quantum theory says that, until the box is opened and observed, the atom exists in a superposition—both decayed and not decayed.

By extension, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

Schrödinger’s point wasn’t that a real cat can be half-alive; it was that the act of observation forces the system to choose a state.

Before we look, every possibility is still possible.

When we look, one of them becomes real.

The Trick of the Cat

The trick isn’t that the cat might be alive and dead;

the trick is that the moment we agree there is a cat in the box,

we’ve already turned possibility into a shared reality.

If we accept the premise—there is a box, there is a cat, there is a particle that might decide its fate—then we’re agreeing to operate inside that version of truth.

Whether or not the story itself is “real” no longer matters; what matters is that within that agreement, the cat now exists as something whose outcome will eventually be revealed.

We will not know what that outcome is until we open the box,

but by agreeing that the experiment is happening, we’ve already chosen the frame that will contain it.

Energy in its pure form is both nothing and everything—a field of infinite potential.

Once we name it, define it, or even agree that it’s something,

the potential collapses into form.

It enters the world of what we call “real,”

holding the space of its most likely expression.

From that moment on, it can evolve, grow, or dissolve,

but it cannot return to being pure potential while it’s still recognized as something.

It has crossed from the unformed into the world we experience as reality.

We think we’re simply describing the world,

but every description is a decision.

Each label, belief, or story is a small act of creation.

Lessons of the Lattice

1. Observation is Participation.

   Consciousness doesn’t watch the field; it activates it.

   The moment awareness meets energy, a pattern takes shape.

2. Naming Collapses the Field.

   Words aren’t passive—they sculpt probability into form.

   What we call something becomes the architecture through which it behaves.

3. Belief Anchors Reality.

   Once defined, energy begins to echo the vibration of that definition.

   Our repeated focus stabilizes it inside the Lattice.

4. Freedom Lives Before Form.

   Every possibility exists before we look.

   The more gently we name the world, the more room we leave for it to keep unfolding.

Treats of the Lattice

The treat is remembering that because everything begins as potential,

we always hold the ability to re-open the box.

By loosening our definitions—by seeing a situation not as fixed but as in motion—

we allow energy to shift again.

We can rename, reinterpret, or simply look with new awareness,

and the field responds.

Creation isn’t a single act; it’s a continual conversation between attention and possibility.

The moment we stop insisting on what something must be,

it quietly begins to show us what else it can become.

“The trick is thinking that naming something reveals the truth.

The treat is realizing that naming it creates the truth — and that we can always look again.”

If the Cat shows how awareness shapes form, the Switch shows how intention moves it. Together they reveal how the Living Lattice responds to both observation and choice.