The 'Schrödinger's Cat' Paradox Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [6]

Gribbin (1990: 205-7):

Moving in the other direction, since this is only a thought experiment we can imagine a human volunteer taking the place of the cat in the box… .  The human occupant is clearly a competent observer who has the quantum–mechanical ability to collapse wave functions.  When we open the box, assuming we are lucky enough to find him still living, we can be quite sure that he will not report any mystic experiences but simply that the radioactive source failed to produce any particles at the allotted time.  Yet still, to us outside the box the only correct way to describe conditions inside the box is as a superposition of states, until we look.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, any humans inside the box construe their experience as (an instance of) meaning, whereas the humans outside the box construe their experience as (an instance of) different meaning.  When humans outside the box look into the box, they construe that experience as (an instance of) meaning, that can be compared with that construed by the human inside the box.  The "superposition of states" is the potential meaning that can be construed by those outside the box until they look and construe one instance of that potential.