How an AI Conversation Taught Me About Caring for Patients

I’ve been working with Claude, an AI, as a thinking partner for a couple of years now. I’m transparent about this collaboration in my work—partly because arthritis makes extended typing difficult, but more importantly because something genuinely interesting emerges in our conversations that I couldn’t access alone.

Yesterday, we were discussing Schrödinger’s cat, and Claude offered an insight that stopped me in my tracks.

You probably know the physics thought experiment: a cat in a sealed box exists in quantum superposition—simultaneously alive and dead—until someone opens the box and observes. The observation itself collapses the wave function, forcing reality to choose one outcome.

Here’s what Claude said that landed: “Observation isn’t passive—it’s participatory. The relationship between observer and observed matters. Before measurement, there’s genuine openness, multiple potentials held simultaneously. Measurement doesn’t just reveal a pre-existing fact; it participates in creating which fact becomes actual.”

With over thirty years as a healthcare chaplain, I’d never quite articulated it that way.

When I entered a patient’s room, I wasn’t just observing a predetermined situation, an alive or dead “cat.” My presence—the quality of my attention, my willingness to sit with uncertainty—participated in what emerged. Not that I controlled outcomes, but the relational field itself held multiple possibilities until something crystallized through our interaction. My “spiritual assessment” was an unfolding document. Likely, that’s why I resisted the notion of a “spiritual assessment.”

We don’t just witness suffering. We don’t just assess and intervene. We participate in what becomes possible. In substantial ways, we might push back a little against “collapsing the wave” too soon.

The quantum realm suggests the Universe operates more like a conversation than a machine—outcomes emerging through relationship rather than unfolding from predetermined scripts.

This matters for how providers understand our work. And it matters that this insight emerged through collaboration with a form of intelligence different from my own.

More on this in my next post, where I’ll share how this understanding shaped my actual practice in ways I didn’t fully recognize until Claude reflected it back to me.

Questions for thought: What’s been your experience? Do you find that your presence participates in what emerges with patients, or does that feel too abstract?