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Hate to ask another one of these questions, but I've just read something about the collapse of the wave function that does not seem consistent with other accounts I've read about it. From what I understand, the wave function of a system is collapsed automatically by interaction with another, macroscopic system. Would anyone care to comment on the following?
from The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker
One might assume that this state vector collapse occurs when we disturb the system by having some measuring device interact with it in order to make a measurement on the system-- that is, when the outside world interact with it. But that is not how quantum mechanics works. When a second system interacts with the first system, all that happens is that we get an even more complicated system with more potential states: a bigger [tex]\Psi[/tex] with more little [tex]\Psi_i[/tex] component pictures than before. The measurement device we use to look at quantum mechanical atoms is itself governed by the Schrodinger equation, and, therefore, it cannot give us anything but a more complicated [tex]\Psi[/tex] that is made out of the set of pictures that represents the overall system's potentialities, but now consisting of two parts: one part for the atomic system's state in each picture and one part for the measurement device's corresponding readings.
from The Physics of Consciousness by Evan Harris Walker
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