[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] - you thought that was jumbo? I'm not done yet!
Maybe it did. Maybe dogs have enough sentience for that. I'm good with that idea. Frankly, I'm good with the idea that the cat is sentient enough too, such that there actually isn't any issue - that's something Schrodinger didn't worry about at the time, to be honest. He wasn't talking about sentience and free will, just about the absurdity of a cat being both dead and alive at the same time.
Or, maybe the dog isn't sentient/free-willed enough. It left the area of your perception - now the dog is in as much an unresolved quantum state as the cat. Maybe the dog+cat doesn't resolve until you *look* into the doorway, and the system falls into a known state.
This way lies an uneasy idea - none of the Universe actually exists as "reality" outside the range of perception of qualified observers.
There's a basic way out of this, which amounts to, "actually, the observer isn't important, the form of interaction is important". We still end up in the same place, though, so bear with me...
Here's the thing: The uncertainty principle doesn't actually seem to mean much for large objects. We notice the effect for very small things, like electrons and atoms, but as the mass of an object gets big, the effect shrinks.
I can go into why that is, but it requires math to fully express. So, for the moment, I'll assume you all trust me on that - for micro-scale objects, the uncertainty principle means large effects. For macro-scale objects, it means very little. So, for things like atoms and electrons, we have large ranges of uncertainty. For things like cats and bowling balls, not so much.
We could consider that in Schrodinger's cat, we aren't considering the interaction between a quantum effect and an observer, but between a quantum effect and a macro-scale object (which just happened to be an observer). Normally, single quantum-scale events mean very little to macro-scale objects. Schrodinger just set up a particular case where a quantum effect was very potent - his original had a radioactive atom in the box, and if it decayed, a mechanism broke a poison vial, killing the cat. So, we needed interaction with a large object to resolve it - Schrodinger's large object just happened to be a human being. But maybe anything macro-scale outside the box would do - say a ball that bounces off the lid, and opens the box.
Thus, maybe any time we have a quantum effect interacting notably with a macro-scale object, we have the macro-scale object able to collapse the quantum probabilities into one reality. This doesn't affect our free will idea one bit. We still get that if the activity of the mind/brain/thought-process has quantum properties, and still have the person (who is macro-scale) collapsing the wave of probability of his or her own mind.
So if I've got a Shroedinger's Box sitting in the kitchen, and I'm watching TV, and my dog goes into the kitchen and sniffs at the box. Does my dog have Free Will if she comes back to me with a dead cat in her mouth? (I mean that the dog opened the box and extracted the dead cat, not that the dog killed the cat).
After all, my dog has resolved a quantum situation and finalized it to being a live or dead cat?
Maybe it did. Maybe dogs have enough sentience for that. I'm good with that idea. Frankly, I'm good with the idea that the cat is sentient enough too, such that there actually isn't any issue - that's something Schrodinger didn't worry about at the time, to be honest. He wasn't talking about sentience and free will, just about the absurdity of a cat being both dead and alive at the same time.
Or, maybe the dog isn't sentient/free-willed enough. It left the area of your perception - now the dog is in as much an unresolved quantum state as the cat. Maybe the dog+cat doesn't resolve until you *look* into the doorway, and the system falls into a known state.
This way lies an uneasy idea - none of the Universe actually exists as "reality" outside the range of perception of qualified observers.
There's a basic way out of this, which amounts to, "actually, the observer isn't important, the form of interaction is important". We still end up in the same place, though, so bear with me...
Here's the thing: The uncertainty principle doesn't actually seem to mean much for large objects. We notice the effect for very small things, like electrons and atoms, but as the mass of an object gets big, the effect shrinks.
I can go into why that is, but it requires math to fully express. So, for the moment, I'll assume you all trust me on that - for micro-scale objects, the uncertainty principle means large effects. For macro-scale objects, it means very little. So, for things like atoms and electrons, we have large ranges of uncertainty. For things like cats and bowling balls, not so much.
We could consider that in Schrodinger's cat, we aren't considering the interaction between a quantum effect and an observer, but between a quantum effect and a macro-scale object (which just happened to be an observer). Normally, single quantum-scale events mean very little to macro-scale objects. Schrodinger just set up a particular case where a quantum effect was very potent - his original had a radioactive atom in the box, and if it decayed, a mechanism broke a poison vial, killing the cat. So, we needed interaction with a large object to resolve it - Schrodinger's large object just happened to be a human being. But maybe anything macro-scale outside the box would do - say a ball that bounces off the lid, and opens the box.
Thus, maybe any time we have a quantum effect interacting notably with a macro-scale object, we have the macro-scale object able to collapse the quantum probabilities into one reality. This doesn't affect our free will idea one bit. We still get that if the activity of the mind/brain/thought-process has quantum properties, and still have the person (who is macro-scale) collapsing the wave of probability of his or her own mind.
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