this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Consciousness has nothing to do with it, observe in this case means "affected something we can measure".
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.