I came in on this discussion very late, and skimming the foregoing postings I kept wondering when something like Mike's point would come up. I am no physicist, but all my adult life it has seemed to me that the widespread habit of speaking of an "observer" as though it meant someone with a microscope and a measuroo spotting an item or an event, made no sense. They often speak as though if his microscope were pointing somewhere else, then the subject under discussion doesn't exist or cannot be said to be in anyone of conceivably alternative states. It even seemed that they thought that if no one was watching the measuroo (ie no "observer") then there would be no observer-initiated collapse of alternative states.
To me it seemed obvious from waaay back, both
that the rest of the universe (lightspeed delayed of course) had to amount to an observer of any object (though I remain agnostic about event horizons etc)
and more particularly
that for large articles such as moons and cats in boxes
that other parts of the system under consideration, amount to distant observers. For example, the tip of the cat's ear is an altogether adequate observer of whether the cat's tail (well over a light-nanosecond away) has been dead for a nanosecond or so, and hence that the atom HAS decayed, no matter whether anyone outside the box knows it, and so does the broken glass vial of cyanide "observe" it.
And the meteor that hits the moon "observes" the moon and the moon's core "observes" the moon's crust.
It takes very, very little of the universe to observe in such a sense. Only while a (more or less macroscopic) system is unaffected by the outcome of a quantum event, is it possible to maintain the uncollapsed state.
Could anyone finally tell me where I am wrong here?
Please?