Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness

The phrase used as the headline of this post is the title of an essay by the philosopher Valia Allori.

Professor Allori teaches philosophy at Northern Illinois University.

Her article on QM and consciousness is available online. It will soon reach print as a contribution to an anthology on concepts of the world-soul, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

If I understand Allori properly, one important issue for her is: what counts as an observer for the purpose of collapsing the wave function? We say that the wave function incorporating the life or death of Schrödinger’s cat collapses when someone opens the box and looks. That seems to mean that someone has to become conscious of the cat in order for the cat to be definitively alive or dead. If I were sleep-walking and opened the box, then in my sleepwalking condition looked inside: would the live and the dead cat still be in a superposition?

What if a robot opens the box lid, with equipment designed to record the liveliness or the corpse-hood of the feline. Does the wave collapse then, or later when a human being gets the news from the robot?

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