The Wigner's friend thought experiment posits a friend of Wigner who performs the Schrödinger's cat
experiment after Wigner leaves the laboratory. Only when he returns
does Wigner learn the result of the experiment from his friend, that is,
whether the cat is alive or dead. The question is raised: was the state
of the system a superposition
of "dead cat/sad friend" and "live cat/happy friend," only determined
when Wigner learned the result of the experiment, or was it determined
at some previous point?
Wigner designed the experiment to illustrate his belief that consciousness
is necessary to the quantum mechanical measurement process. If a
material device is substituted for the conscious friend, the linearity
of the wave function implies that the state of the system is in a linear
sum of possible states. It is simply a larger indeterminate system.
However, a conscious observer (according to his reasoning) must be in
either one state or the other, hence conscious observations are
different, hence consciousness is not material. Wigner discusses this
scenario in "Remarks on the mind-body question", one in his collection
of essays, Symmetries and Reflections, 1967. The idea has become known as the consciousness causes collapse interpretation.
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