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What's wrong with my reasoning? Nothing! In fact you have more or less described decoherence. The idea is that any system inevitably interacts with its environment, and the more degrees of freedom the system has, i.e. the more complex it is, the faster it will interact with the rest of the universe and the superposed states will decohere.

You're right that this experiment isn't really a realistic one. In fact, it's difficult to imagine how we could even tell whether a given box were such a perfectly isolating box. However, if we put aside the (somewhat important) question of empirically determining whether we actually obtained a cat in a superposition of life and death, we can try to imagine ...

Your question effectively reduces to that of where you place the Heisenberg cut in an idealized model of the experiment. That's not different from the issues that are already probed by the original thought experiment and the Wigner's friend variant. It's implicit in the quantum formalism that (unless one introduces POVMs) one models experiments using ...

You don't explicitly say so, but you're assuming the Copenhagen interpretation (CI) rather than the many-worlds interpretation (MWI). Your analysis is a perfectly good example of why the CI doesn't fundamentally make much sense. The CI treats measurement as a process that's different from other processes, even though measurement is a physical interaction ...

I have always disliked this thought experiment because, even though it was proposed as an amplifier of quantum mechanical effects, it is really nothing more than a game on probability, and one can get random probabilities by many classical means. Toss a coin, heads cat alive tails cat dead. The concept of both alive and dead is ridiculous in the ...

See Is Schrödinger’s cat misleading? And what would happen if Planck constant is bigger?. This isn't an exact duplicate, but it explains why we do believe the cat can be in a superposition of states, but the superposition only lasts a very very short time before it decoheres. The decoherence has nothing to do with consciousness, simply the number of ...

For the same reason that macroscopic objects do not display quantum mechanical behavior, except in very special setups, as in superconductivity etc. Macroscopic systems in general, due to Avogadro's number which is something like 10^23 molecules per mole, cannot be described by one quantum mechanical wave function .They are an incoherent superposition of ...