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Originally Posted by Suave
Philosophical discussions are not concerned with practicality. That aspect is left to the other ten dozen branches of scholarly insight.
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That is one Philosophical position. Others use practicality as a means of measuring and deciding between Philosophical points.
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Originally Posted by fckm
Actually, you have it wrong. Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment designed to show the absurdity of applying quantum mechanics to macroscopic objects. The cat can't be in a superposition of dead and alive. They are mutually exclusive states of being. It makes no sense. The cat, being a macroscopic object, has to either be alive, or dead. And must be so without the intervention of a self-aware being to do the "observing". The point is that interactions between particles which number on the order of 10^23 cause the quantum states to be decoherent, and this interaction is what in fact causes collapse of the wavefunction.
The only example of quantum coherence at the macroscopic level that I am aware of is this one:
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In Science, the exception breaks the rule.
I don't see anything wrong with a box containing a cat that is both alive and dead, with both states existing in superimposition. Possibly this would be
very hard to arrange.
Personally, I don't believe in collapsing waveforms. I abhor the look of naked discontinuities, and something 'collapsing' from a 'waveform' state to a 'non-waveform' state arouses this abhorance.
Luckily, there are consistent interpritations of Q-M that don't require waveform collapse. In at least one of them, that cat is both alive and dead, for at least one interpritation of the term 'that cat'.
(when the cat is in two states at once, should we call it 'those cats'?)
But, once again, this discussion isn't about Q-M observer/observation/existance. If we start with a definition of 'exists' that makes 'that chair exists' true whether or not someone is observing the chair, do colours exist?