Schrödinger’s Cat, Love, Art and the foundation of design.

This morning, while working on a caricature head in artificial clay, I found myself shaping the subtle features of its face to convey a particular expression. As I adjusted the muscles and contours, the face shifted through a spectrum of emotions, inner feelings, desires, decisions, determination, and even the marks of time and ageing. Together, these elements form the essence of an individual.

In Kathakali, I have heard of actors who strive to perfect two contrasting expressions on their faces simultaneously, an ability achieved only after years of disciplined practice. In everyday life, however, such a skill is rare. We sometimes see ambiguous or puzzling expressions, yet even these usually settle into one dominant emotional state. In other words, the human face naturally collapses all possible expressions into a single one, communicating a person’s present state of mind, feeling, or intention. Without expression, no one can honestly know whether such inner states exist. They cannot be touched, seen, heard, smelled, or tasted unless they manifest through expression.

Schrödinger illustrated this principle beautifully in his famous thought experiment. He imagined a cat inside a closed box, with a device that would release poison if triggered by the random decay of a particle. The decay is possible but unpredictable. Until the box is opened, the cat’s fate: alive or dead, remains unknowable. Observation collapses all possible states into one: life or death.

As I shaped the clay figure’s face, I realised I was holding my own version of Schrödinger’s box. Until I decided on a specific expression, collapsing all other possibilities, the character did not truly exist. Without that choice, it remained a face without identity, concealing its reality from the observer.
In Mahāyāna Buddhism, there is a related concept known as dependent arising. It teaches that a phenomenon exists only in relation to other phenomena. A child exists only because there are parents; likewise, parents only truly become “parents” when a child is born. Before that, they are simply two individuals capable of imagining parenthood, but not yet inhabiting it. While conception and birth may be described as cause and effect, the concept of “parent” becomes a lived reality only with the arrival of the child. Much like Schrödinger’s cat, all other possibilities collapse when one specific reality, in this case, parenthood, is realised.

This may be a simplistic way of explaining reality. In truth, it reveals a complex relationship, a trilogy of art, artist, and observer present in all things. The observer must first grasp the concept of life and death (art), as expressed through the symbolism of the cat and the box (artist), in order to observe and collapse all possibilities into one: alive or dead, through judgment. In the same way, dependent arising requires the interplay of observer, box, and cat as epistemological factors, and observation, concealment, and life as ontological factors.

From this perspective, when I mould the clay’s facial muscles into a particular expression, collapsing all other options into one, I define the individual for all who will see it. A smile will make the person seem pleasant; a shout will make them appear angry. The reality of the individual — perhaps long dead and now existing only in the abstract realm of memory — is replaced by my chosen perception.

My perception then gives birth to a new one. By fixing one facial expression, I create a “reality” — but not necessarily the truth of that person. I work with an abstract image drawn from the many abstractions others hold. That is what we do in life: we relate to people and things through our own perceptions, treating those as reality. Like Schrödinger’s description, we collapse possibilities into a single relationship with the “other” and live according to that chosen version.

Friends, family, partners, colleagues, neighbours, rivals, even enemies — all are filtered through such perspectives. We collapse countless possibilities into one or two narratives, and from them build our actions, reactions, and relationships. In this way, we ourselves become the trilogy: artist, art, and observer.
The “reality” we experience is not the objective truth, but an abstract perspective born with us. In the closed box, the cat may be dead or alive. What moves us to open the box: curiosity, compassion, or love, shapes not only what we see, but how we experience it. If curiosity drives us, we merely check the cat’s state and move on. If compassion drives us, we respond to the trauma if the cat is dead. But if love is our motive, the moment transcends the experiment: the cat’s state becomes a profoundly personal, transformative experience.

At that point, the box, the cat, and the experiment fade into the background. The act becomes spiritual. Unlike the ordinary emotions of pain, anger, hatred, or ambition, the grace of selfless love, sacrifice, and heroism redefines the reality before us. Here, the self dissolves. Only the “other” and their perceived worth remain.

As a sculptor, when I carve another person’s likeness, I realise we are all sculptors in our own way, shaping others in our imagination and treating that abstract as their reality. But when we abandon all other perspectives and choose to carve love, sacrifice, and heroism into the face, something shifts: the person is freed from the bonds of my own perspectives. The cat, beyond my sight, does not need my observation or my reference to exist. I cease to be relevant to the cat’s reality, just as the question of whether it is alive or dead ceases to matter from the cat’s own standpoint.

Today, while making portraits, I realised that many of the confusions and complexities in our relationships with the unknown, with others, and with the future arise from our self-referential or human-centred worldview, where the act of observing, the observed, and the observer define reality, collapsing it to a single version with us at the centre. But if we release the unknown, others, and the future from this self-reference, with love, tolerance (sacrifice), and letting go (heroism), our egocentric perspectives dissolve, and with them much of our suffering and that of others.

With that awareness, as I carved the faces, I found myself for the first time in a long while holding beautiful people in my hands, people who had lived beautiful lives.

The cats of the world need not live or die because Schrödinger chooses to open or close the box in pursuit of the unknown from his self-referential quantum mechanics viewpoint.

The cat was never merely part of that thought experiment. It was the divine, the art of liberation, and the love hidden behind the unknown - the foundation of design.