This quote, from Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner (2006), illustrates what is perhaps the biggest psychological obstacle to the 'Smearland Interpretation' of quantum physics...
"Since your looking collapsed the superposition state of the cat, are you guilty of killing the cat if you find it dead? ... You could not have chosen how the wavefunction of this entire system would collapse. The collapse into either the living or the dead state was random." (p. 119)
The quote is referring to Schrodinger's cat, but it brought to mind a discussion about another cat. (Bear in mind that the 'Smearland Interpretation' of quantum mechanics disagrees with the idea that you could not have chosen the outcome.)
A cat-loving friend of mine had several cats. One day one of the cats got sick and had to be rushed to the vet. I don't remember the details of its illness, but I do remember the discussion I had with my friend later about what she was thinking about in the car while racing to the vet. (The cat died en-route to the vet.)
My friend knew about my theory wherein one can 'pick the universe' but she had never had the 'lightbulb moment' wherein her worldview was irreversibly altered. She did know enough to wonder about how her thoughts and expectations might have contributed to her ending up in the universe where the cat died. We started to have the discussion, but because of the painful nature of the topic, I didn't push the point by going into explicit details about 5-dimensional navigation.
Was she guilty of killing the cat? Absolutely not. 'Guilty' requires intent to kill, and she had none.
Nor do I argue that selecting the universe where the cat lived would necessarily have been an easy task. Evidence from psi research shows that 'selecting outcomes' at will is a hard task. I spent three years simply investigating the effect and what it took to produce it before I decided to look for a possible physical mechanism.
The good news is the effect gets easier to produce. Just as you would train to master various types of motion in 4 dimensions, you train to master them in 5 dimensions.
Oh, and one more thing while we're talking about this quote... We assume that the wavefunction collapses because most of the time subsequent observations are consistent with the first observation. Most of the time. If it were possible for subsequent observations to be incompatible with prior observations, we would assume that some type of law of conservation or energy dynamic was responsible for observational consistency, rather than assuming an absolute and irreversible wave collapse. Enter the UNDO project...
