Sure, but the idea of the Schrödinger’s cat experiment (which is a Gedankenexperiment or thought experiment) is that it exists a priori as an isolated system, and therefore still in a state of coherent superposition of discrete states (eigenstates) until observed by an external observer. Even though the system is a vast collection of individual states all interacting with each other, the system is predicated on the strictly probabilistic (and easily calculated) state of an individual atom, and thus, the entire state exists simultaneously as two (or equivilently two) recognizable and discernable states.
Now, this obviously isn’t a realistic experiment you could perform for many reasons. For one, it’s entirely impossible to isolate the system inside the box from that outside the box; if you hear the cat meowing or scratching on the box, then you have in effect “observed” the state of the system and thus impacted the result. (Similarly, any attempt to use non-classical methods to identify the state of the system, such as telepathy or clarivoyance, fail to avoid the same issue; it makes no difference whether you open the box or uses some mystical power, you’ve still observed the system and waveform collapse occurs.)
This of course, begs the question the o.p. is asking; to wit, who gets to be the observer and why is he or she so privlidged? Erwin was speaking in the abstract about observing the box–presumably any interaction with the outside world counts as observation and results in decoherence on the larger scale–but many people have, mistakenly in my opinion, taken this to mean that a conscious observer has to perceive and cognate the state of the system before waveform collapse can be said to observed. Again, this begs the question, and Eugene Wigner asked this question explicitly with his Wigner’s Friend Gedankenexperiment, in which Wigner steps outside the room while is friend checks on the cat. Now, Wigner argues, the cat, the box, his friend, and the room all exist in a similarly coherent state of superposition: live cat/happy friend or dead cat/sad friend. (Clearly the friend is more of a lover of cats than physicists of the era.) From Wigner’s point of view, nothing in the universe exists in a “real” state until observed by consciousness, later dubbed the consciousness causes collapse interpretation.
This, in turn, begs another question, or rather two: what the hell is this consciousness thing, and why does it have an effect on waveform collapse? (We’ll neatly dodge the issue of what “waveform collapse” actually is by saying both that we don’t know and it doesn’t matter, which is a cheat that ignores the elephant, but whatever.) The fact is that we don’t have much of a handle on what consciousness actually is–neuroscience being even today in the rather primitive state of trying to identify what areas of the brain are most active when you smell a lavender bush and somehow relate that to the conceptualization of lavander–and thus any definitive connections you make between one area of almost complete unknowns and another is ascientific and about as useless as a bag full of nutrinos, which hasn’t stopped philosophers, New Age gurus, and somewhat confused pop-(pseudo)science authors (including some reputable physicists) from making a lot of money drawing unsubstantiated conclusions between quantum mechanics, religious beliefs, “dancing Wu Li Masters”, and similar nonfalsifiable phenomena.
In fact, there’s no evidence that quantum behavior has any effect on consciousness beyond being the probabilistic basis for chemical reactions, and consciousness itself, insofar as we can say anything about it at all, isn’t a single discrete process but a vast collection of different cognative processes operating on different levels to create the resultant glurge that we think of as “being aware”. Even in the cat gedanken, while the cat won’t be aware that it is dead, it will most certainly have some notion of being alive, and thus the system isn’t seperate from “observation”. (We can assume by default that Wigner’s friend is conscious of his own state.) Therefore, the waveform collapse in the “conscousness causes collapse” interpretation is relative to the conscious observer, meaning it’s either relative to the observer, or the observer is the cognative center of the universe. Either way the result is solipsistic, and as Bertrand Russell would note, this is a fundamentally useless philosophy from which to assert anything.
About that whole waveform collapse event that we’ve studiously avoided discussing: nobody, including all the people in Denmark who bandied it around so freely, have any notion to exactly what this waveform really is and why it collapses like Southern belle when observed. The whole thing is stated as a mathematical formulism which, by definition, can’t be observed in process, merely inferred by result. If this strikes you as the same kind of voodoo that got O.J. Simpson an acquital, then you’re not missing anything, and while it is the most common interpretation taught in basic classes in modern physics (mostly because it directs students to stop worrying about the meaningless and unfalsifiable interpretations and just do the damned math, which works regardless of what you speculate is happening), from what I’ve read alternate interpretations that don’t involve fuzzy concepts about collapsing waveforms are becoming more popular among scientists in the field.
Stranger
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