What about the many-worlds standpoint (b), then? Here the ‘reality’ of the quantum superposition of a dead and a live cat is simply accepted (as would the quantum-superposed weather patterns of the previous paragraph); but this does not tell us what an observer, looking at the cat (or the weather), actually ‘perceives’. The state of the observer’s perception is considered to be entangled with the state of the cat. The perception state ‘I perceive a live cat’ accompanies the ‘live-cat’ state and the perception state ‘I perceive a dead cat’ accompanies the ‘dead-cat’ state. … It is then assumed that a perceiving being always finds his/her perception state to be in one of these two; accordingly, the cat is, in the perceived world, either alive or dead. These two possibilities coexist in ‘reality’ in the entangled superposition …
Blogger Comments:
From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the quantum-superposition of a dead cat and a live cat is the superposition of potential construals of experience as meaning, and so the 'many worlds' interpretation mistakes potential construals for actual construals. What an observer looking at the cat actually perceives is an instance of potential: either a dead cat or a live cat.
The state of the observer's perception is entangled with the state of the cat in the sense that the state of the cat is a construal of experience as meaning by the observer. Importantly, the assumption that the meaning 'the state of the cat' transcends the meaning of semiotic systems is precisely what this experiment, and Quantum Theory generally, invalidates.
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