brain dump
I've been thinking about this so i thought id post it here! say you have schrodinger's cat, in the box, in superposition because it hasnt been observed to collapse the wave function. Say you are looking at this box but on the side you cant see, it is see through. Someone walks by, looks into the box, and thus collapses the probability to either dead or alive. So before you can observe it yourself, the state has been determined and your reality has been constructed, by someone else's observation, because you cannot open the box and have an opposing answer. This is very interesting to me because it's so hard for me to define the lines between what my brain is observing in the world, and what my brain is creating and projecting into my reality, rather than the concept we usually presume which is that we all live in one shared reality that we all view with the same observation. But this problem with the cat proves that other's observations can directly influence our lives, and to that i ask to what degree? what counts as an observation/measurement? If we consider panpsychism with concsiousness being a fundamental aspect to the universe, present in all matter to various degrees, then where are the lines drawn? Because all of our labels are just that, our own descriptions of what we have identified as different from something else, which is different for everyone! But definite enough for observation to occur, and not occur. Sorry for all the words this will be a mess to read!
schrodinger's cat observation problem
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HimejoVampire
Biology student here. Science can't fully prove if what is inside the box is alive either. There is literally no real consensus that something is alive. We may agree that if it reacts to stimuli, it exchanges matter to outside its defined body, it can procreate, it can maintain homeostasis (an internal equilibrium), it has (as an species) the capacity to evolve, and a few more characteristics that now I'm forgetting, then we COULD say it is alive.
But do you know what else accomplishes all of this things? A FUCKING ROCK. Because reproduction is not only the bee and the flower and you can picture how a rock can check the mark of any of the other ones mentioned.
Yes the cat MAY BE alive but we can't trully say it as a factfull statement because by definition even the box that contains it is alive as well. And even if the cat was dead, there is still life on it and that depending on your own (or someone else's) definition may also say that it is still alive because energy doesn't dissapear, it just transforms.
Tl;Dr: the cat is not "alive" or "dead", the cat is just there and even if it's not, it's still there, and if it's still there, it is also not there.
alexander
shoutout to physicists for giving philosophers something to have fun with
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