>>12497883most people miss the point of the cat problems- including you. You assume that they thought that a person needed to observe QM phenomena, but that's not what the problem illustrates at all.
The point of the cat experiment is this: You can create a macroscale superposition by linking a macroscopic phenomena to an isolated superposition in QM.
That is:
create a superposition. Doesn't matter how; cool shit to 0, whatever. But you have to start with an object in superposition. Let's take a quibit in the EPR state, aka, it has a 50/50 chance of giving a 1 or 0 upon wave collapse. But make sure its in a superposition state.
Next, hook up a detector that will detect when that superposition wave collapse occurs. So it will detect a 1 or a 0- when collapse occurs. Next, hook up the result of detection to a poison gas that kills a cat in a box if the detector detects 1, but not if it detects 0.
In this way, you have turned a macroscopic binary state (alive/dead) into a superposition, mathematically, by specifically linking the result to the collapse of a superposition.
The point is that you can interpret it as "the cat is in a superposition state dead/alive with 1/2 chance of either occuring"
The idea is to illustrate the absurdity of the Copenhagen interpretation; but current physics suggests that the "alive/dead" macro superposition is a real possibility.
