[rralian]

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).

[nathan_compton]

Observation doesn't impact experiments. Interaction does. In fact, it is quite difficult to formulate the "collapse" of the wavefunction as a physical interaction and to the extent that we can, the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is not. This is a common misconception about quantum mechanics, partly because even undergraduate texts conflate the uncertainty principal with observation.

[deepfriedchokes]

Isn’t the act of observation an interaction?

[082349872349872]

The logical explanation: "observation" has nothing to do with conscious woo, it's just that in order to have a definite answer we build experiments so they collapse the wavefunction.

It's like asking someone on a date: maybe they were in a superposition before, but now they have to answer, and having answered ("been observed"), that answer is highly likely to stay constant in the short term.

(when you think about it from this point of view, it's classical physics that's counterintuitive: why should we expect that asking questions about one projection of state doesn't affect the answers we get from later asking about others, not even in the slightest?)

Does that make sense?

[catanama]

The point I was trying to make is that if we are indeed in a simulation, and I'm not saying that we definitely are, but if we are - one possibility to design such a simulation in a way to make it more efficient is to actually make computations depend on the observer, meaning that sorry, but in this case it would have conscious "woo" built in.

Just in the same way as that only visible from current perspective objects are being drawn on a frame of a 3D game.

Currently unobserved parts of the simulation might exist in different form.

It's okay to disagree with simulation theory, but it is a perfectly valid possibility according to everything we know.

Personally, I don't think it's the only possibility, but i think it's quite probable and should be taken seriously.

[goatlover]

Decoherence from the measuring device is why the wave function appears collapsed.