{"id":215139,"date":"2025-05-31T09:03:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T14:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/schrodingers-vat-and-the-evolution-of-consciousness"},"modified":"2025-05-31T09:03:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T14:03:09","slug":"schrodingers-vat-and-the-evolution-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/schrodingers-vat-and-the-evolution-of-consciousness","title":{"rendered":"Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s Vat and the Evolution of Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/schrodingers-vat-and-the-evolution-of-consciousness.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s famous thought experiment has always been deeply misunderstood. In this article I\u2019d like to explain how, if understood properly, it might shed new light on the mechanism by which consciousness evolved.<\/p>\n<p><b> Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat and schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s hat<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The purpose of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s thought experiment was to highlight serious problems in the (then very new) \u201cCopenhagen Interpretation\u201d of Quantum Mechanics (CI). The CI was a bit of a botch-job, because the founders of QM had no idea how to \u201cinterpret\u201d the strange new physics they had discovered. The CI says quantum systems remain in a superposition (a \u201csmeared out\u201d state where everything than can happen is somehow happening in parallel) until measured, but does not define what counts as a \u201cmeasurement\u201d, or why. Schr\u00f6dinger always rejected this idea, and his thought experiment was intended to demonstrate why. He proposes a sealed box (so no \u201cmeasurements\u201d can take place), in which has been placed a cat, and a quantum source with a 50% probability of releasing poison. According to the CI, so long as the system inside the box remains \u201cunmeasured\u201d, the poison has both been released and not-released and therefore that cat is both dead and alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s famous thought experiment has always been deeply misunderstood. In this article I\u2019d like to explain how, if understood properly, it might shed new light on the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat and schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s hat The purpose of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s thought experiment was to highlight serious problems in the (then very new) \u201cCopenhagen [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,47,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-neuroscience","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}