It has everything to do with QM. QM describes reality as it is rather than as we wish it to be or believe it to be. (see Feynman's earlier statement.)
Right. QM explicitly tells you jack squat about what there is; it only tells you an algorithm for calculating the probability of an observation. Any further reasoning you try to apply, to infer from consideration of the steps in the QM algorithm to a conclusion about what there is, is not QM. It's interpretation of QM. The notion that if you won't believe in some metaphysical interpretation of what QM really means about what there really is then you have to throw out the single best supported scientific theory in history, is nonsense. All you have to do is admit to yourself you don't understand QM -- that it seems to work but you don't know why it works. And if you can do that then you're already one step ahead of all the people who think they do understand it.
^^^ This ^^^. In particular, to whatever extent "Copenhagen Interpretation" is taken to mean Bohr's views, as opposed to Heisenberg's attempts at paraphrase, CI doesn't say Schrodinger's Cat exists in a quantum uncertain state until the box is opened and can thus be both alive and dead. Bohr argued against all that sort of talk. Rather than answering "Is the cat alive or dead before the box is opened?" with "Both" or "Neither" or "Definitely one or the other but we don't know which" or "In a superposition of states" or what have you, he'd have rejected the question itself as unscientific metaphysics. There's by definition no way to ask a question about the unobserved in terms of observations; and questions that can't be put in terms of observations are meaningless. Bohr was kind of into the whole Logical Positivism thing.
It's not a necessary outcome of the theory. Feynman wrote an excellent and reasonably layman-accessible account, called "QED". He doesn't say it implies the cat is neither, or both; he says trying to figure out what's really going on "under the hood" of quantum weirdness is a fool's errand.
Which means if it's wrong then it's an excellent approximation. So was Newtonian mechanics. Also, keep in mind that we have another well-established scientific model of reality that has also been thoroughly tested to extreme levels of accuracy and that also passes every test with flying colors: General Relativity. And this only raises an issue with QM because the two theories contradict each other, so we know in advance that one of the most accurate scientific models of reality ever devised is wrong. So it perfectly well might be QM that's wrong.
Yes.
You could say that, yes.In the box is an indeterminate field of catness potential (maybe).
Then that would be a whole new meaning of the word "choose" to me. I suddenly feels like I am choosing for grandma to be dead each time I open her box.
I seem to indicate precisely the reverse.
QM describes the probability of various future states of the system. In the case of Schrödinger's cat before the box is opened, QM doesn't describe the current (or actual) state of any cat but the probabilities of the various states of the cat once the box is opened. So, yes, QM describes reality, but it doesn't describe it as a dead and alive cat. It doesn't even specify that the cat will be dead or will be alive. So I don't see any logical contradiction in QM there while I see the logical contradiction of saying that the cat is both dead and alive as some people do. And I don't see that the Feynman observation could refer to any logical contradiction. Rather, I think it referred to the paradox that QM contradicts our intuition that the cat is either dead or alive even before the box is opened. As Feynman couldn't have referred to the idea that QM implies that the cat is both dead and alive without being wrong himself so the reality described by QM and referred to by Feynman can only be that our intuition that the cat is either dead or alive even before the box is opened is wrong.
I have a few questions.skepticalbip said:
If someone gives me a TV, computer, or something interesting and tells me that it uses non-classical mechanics to achieve its ends, I should just take their word for it, correct?
Spacetime would react to the cat differently if it was moving around, or if it was completely still in the box. There is always an observer, except when a single particle is not yet coupled to a classical system (freely moving electron or photon prior to interaction with a larger system).
You are right. Opening the box does not change the cat's physical state. Opening the box collapses the wave function so establishes the cat's physical state which was undefined before that.
