The very concept of a superposition of live-cat and dead-cat states waiting to be resolved when someone looks in the box seems absurd, because presumably the cat itself knows whether it is dead or alive. Does this knowledge not constitute an observation leading to a collapse of the quantum wave into a definite state one way or the other? Surely it is not necessary for all quantum observations to be conducted by human beings before they can be regarded as producing a definite state of reality? But if a cat can do the job, what about an ant? Or a bacterium? Or can we dispense with a living component in the experiment altogether, and leave it all up to a computer, or even a camera?
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the 'very concept of a superposition of live-cat and dead-cat states waiting to be resolved when someone looks in the box' is not absurd, because the superposition is of potentiality, not of actuality, and it is only by looking in the box that one of those two potentials can be instantiated.
To be clear, the cat does not know whether it is dead or alive. On the one hand, a dead cat cannot know anything, because knowing requires a functioning brain. On the other hand, the meaning 'I am alive' is linguistic meaning, and so not meaning that can be construed by a species without language. What is true is that a live cat in the box construes its experience as perceptual meaning, at the very least, whereas a dead cat does not.
On this basis, other species, computers and cameras cannot collapse the wave function, because this requires the ability to construe experience as an instance of linguistic meaning.
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