Being alive and dead at the same time - Why are some animal activists outraged by Schroedinger's cat experiment?

It’s customary to have a question in the deets too.

Who the fuck is going to get mad at a game of pretend?
Unless, this is some sort of riddle, I’m not getting…

the reason they’re mad is because it can put a large dent in the whole basis of quantum mechanics.

I suspect any animal rights activists who are offended by Schrödinger’s cat are members of PETA. It’s their job to become outraged if someone looks cross-eyed (or thinks about looking cross-eyed, or doesn’t have a problem with someone else looking cross-eyed) at anything with a face, other than humans, and then terrorize them as much as possible.

@asmonet – This is no joke: some time ago I got attacked by people in some other Internet forum who had not heard about Schroedinger’s cat. They thought I would promote cruel animal experiments while I was trying to make a point about interpretations of quantum mechanics. The world wide web can be a strange place at times.

Most participants on net board forums are very young and not very savvy. They have not been around long enough to have more than knee-jerk opinions of anything. And most advanced concepts, such as Schroedinger’s Cat, go way over their heads. They have never heard of it. They just think, ‘poor kitty being tortured’. People get offended too easily which seems ridiculous.

Here’s a part of the posts: “It is horrible that they use animals for such tests. People even thinking of cats in this manner should be locked up. Unfortunately, many people don’t see animals as living creatures who can feel pain and emotions.” My replies were: “It’s not about animal torture. It’s a thought experiment. Not a real experiment! You need some basic understanding of physics, like what is a photon or a subatomic particle, fundamental forces etc. Have you every heard about the double slit experiment? I hope no one makes wrong associations for that term. I love animals. We’ve got a cat and she’s wonderful. Never in my life have I hurt an animal, except for mosquitos which were about to sting into my skin.” The forum’s moderator relaxed a bit, but one other guy resigned and left the forum.

I said it all in my question: Schroedinger’s Cat is a thought experiment. The people who attacked me are no doubt intimidated by all that “science stuff,” have no idea what a thought experiment is, nor would they be willing to learn about it because they’re so distrustful of such things. The world today is filled with people who react to appearances rather than take the time to consider what’s in front of them. It’s shame, and it’s the cause for most of the grief in the world. Some animal right’s activists seem to lack the intelligence to even understand the Schroedinger’s cat thought experiment. They’ll find a way, however, to be offended based on some twisted interpretation they have.

Because those particular activists don’t care if it is a real cat or not. It is the thought of the mere possibility that someone might simply consider harming a furry creature. In some cases it may actually be a lack of intelligence, but in others it is a lack of rational thought, or possibly extreme fixation. Some PETA members are a case in point.

I’ve actually never heard of an animal rights activist being upset about this. Sounds like a case of people thinking that a theory is an actual flesh and blood experiment, I suppose it’s akin to people getting upset if an animal dies in a movie, even if the animal actor is alive and well. Just think of it this way…if you were to plot the collective intelligence of mankind, you’d theoretically be seing a bell curve with a normal distribution, which means that 68.2% of all people are average (basically C students), an additional 13.6% are below average (D students), 2.3% are failures, which means that 84.1% of all people are of average or less intelligence, (i.e. C students or below), which means that 84% of people have an IQ of 100 or less, making the vast majority of all people walking around simply unable to grasp Schroedinger’s theory. In other words, there’s a lot of stupid fuckin people out there, or at very least those of mediocre intelligence at best…these people, who represent over 84% of humanity, probably don’t have the mental capacity to understand what a thought experiement is…they just know you’re talking about killing a cat.

Sorry to be so cynical.

@dalepetrie and @Darwin – During the discussion in the forum, one or two activists then realized that it was only a thought experiment. And they still objected. They blame Schroedinger for spreading malicious thoughts. I actually thought they had an above average IQ, but seemed to be trapped in fanaticism. A bit like the “pro-life” movement saving all unborn babies at all cost which can include killing doctors (as if born life is less valuable than the unborn one). Fanatic thoughts seem to be capable of poisoning the brains of intelligent people as well.

@mattbrowne : it seems you were involved in a malicious circle of a conversation that was chasing its own tail and your arguments with the animal activists amounted to giving them cat nip. To me, it has always seemed odd that the thought experiment involves the life and/or death of a cat. It’s an odd tail (haha) that is inseparable with the history of the quantum. Most important, at the heart of it, is the beautiful idea of quantum mechanics, regardless, and I want to leave this here with a quote for the activists and non-activists:

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~Aristotle

@mattbrowne – Fanaticism is verifiably a form of poison, capable of replacing rational thought with counter-survival responses, such as becoming a walking bomb or auctioning off your own skin.

Of course, one could always blame Schroedinger for using a mental cat in his experiment instead of a mental cockroach. Not too many fanatics support kindness to cockroaches, although there are a few (I am guilty of having had hissing roaches as pets at one time).

And the pro-life movement does indeed value unborn people over born people, the idea being choice – the unborn do not choose to exist but the born choose to birth them or abort them. However, I would feel much better about their motives if the rates of adoption went way up among pro-life fanatics. Unfortunately, various studies seem to show that they see the choices as bad (abortion) and good (parenting even though it means poverty) and rarely actually consider adoption as a viable alternative.

@mattbrowne I still don’t understand how you could misinterpet that as animal cruelty, you it was a paradox. It may be that people don’t understand the true definition then perhaps.

@mattbrowne – I imagine there was a combination of things going on (or at least one of the below)....

1) A purely fanatical devotion to animals inasmuch as it’s upsetting even to hypothesize about the killing of an animal (possibly even of the “slippery slope” variety of argument favored by religious nuts and right wing zealots), and/or

2) These people who as you say seemed quite intelligent could have been making themselves out to be more intelligent than they actually were because they are insecure in their own cognitive abilities, and/or

3) And I find this to be HIGHLY likely, they felt the need to save face, and couldn’t bear to simply drop the arguments for which they had been advocating seconds before out of fear of looking stupid (which for some would be a fate worse than death).

PS – are you familiar with the work of Hugh Everett III? He first proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, which was based on the Schroedinger’s Cat paradox. I’ll be honest, this stuff is WAY over my head…I have a fascination with it, but my understanding only goes so far, maybe more than most people walking around out there, but certainly not anywhere near that of a physicist. Anyway, I learned about Everett while watching a documentary about his son Mark Oliver Everett who is the leader of a band called the Eels…it was about the search for his father whom he never really got to know all that well. It was interesting to me that he produced offspring with this great artistic mind, who just had zero grasp of what his father was onto, so when he encountered many of his father’s colleagues, they went out of their way to explain his father’s many-worlds theory in terms that just about anyone could understand.

@majamin – Thanks for sharing this great quote!

@Darwin – The best was to reduce the number of abortion is reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. We need good sex education and the notion of engaging in sex is a responsibility.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 – I didn’t misinterpret it as animal cruelty. Of course not. I was totally caught off guard when confronted with this interpretation. I’m trying to understand how the minds of those folks work.

@dalepetrie – Yes, I’m familiar with Hugh Everett. Great scientist. Quantum suicide is also a thought experiment. It was independently published in 1987 by Hans Moravec and in 1988 by Bruno Marchal, and further developed by Max Tegmark in 1998. It attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment.

@mattbrowne – Whether we successfully educate people to reduce unwanted pregnancies by being responsible about sex or not, I would still feel much better about pro-lifers if they were more willing to take on the raising of these unwanted children rather than forcing the parents to take them on as a sort of burden.

If you really care about an unborn child’s rights, then that should include its rights to have a loving and stable family raising it. Yet statistics show that as a group pro-lifers (and pro-lifers I have met) seem unwilling to accept adoption as a third solution for once an unwanted child exists, and in particular, do not adopt these children they say they care about.

Because they’re ignorant. It’s just a thought experiment.

@mattbrowne: Thank you for clarifying, I just laughed my ass off. Some people are genuine morons.

@Darwin – Yes, of course. And I would feel much better about pro-lifers if they were more willing to make sure everyone in the US gets health insurance. It’s a great tradegy that low-income earners don’t get the same level of prenatal care. It’s one of the reasons the infant mortality rate in the US is several times higher than in Germany. Every pregnant woman over here whether she’s unemployed or has a low income gets access to all services.
The political right and religious right in the US hate the concept of solidarity and shared responsibility mistaken it for socialism. The result is the killing of unborn babies due to the lack of general health insurance. Talk about abortion is murder. Politics can result in murder if people want to use the term in relation to unborn babies.

@asmonet – They are indeed. But they are real and part of our society and I like to understand their motives. Or understand the root cause, like what poor education can lead to.