This is accurate, yes. The cat in the box is conscious presumably, in my opinion of cats at least, but still can be “not an observer” from the POV of the scientist observing the experiment from outside the box.

"Consciousness" is not relevant here at all. You can write down the wave function of a system relative to a rock if you wanted, in a comparable way as writing down the velocity of a train from the "point of view" of a rock. It is coordinate. It has nothing to do with "consciousness." The cat would perceive a definite state of the system from its reference frame, but the person outside the box would not until they interact with it.

QM is about quite a lot more than coordinate systems

Obviously QM is not just coordinate systems. The coordinate nature of quantum mechanics, the relative nature of it, is merely a property of the theory and not the whole theory. But the rest of the theory does not have any relevance to "consciousness."

and in my opinion will make it look weird in retrospect once physics expands to a more coherent whole

The theory is fully coherent and internally consistent. It amazes me how many people choose to deny QM and always want to rush to change it. Your philosophy should be guided by the physical sciences, not the other way around. People see QM going against their basic intuitions and their first thought is it must be incomplete and needs to have additional complexity added to it to make it fit their intuitions, rather than just questioning that maybe their basic intuitions are wrong.

Your other comment was to a Wikipedia page which if you clicked the link on your own source it would've told you that the scientific consensus on that topic is that what you're presenting is a misinterpretation.

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser#Consensus:_no_retrocausality

A simple search on YouTube could've also brought up several videos explaining this to you.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5yON4Gs3D0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQv5CVELG3U

Edit: Placing my response here as an edit since I don't care to continue this conversation so I don't want to notify.

Yes, that was what I said. Er, well… QM, as I understand it, doesn’t have to do anything with shifting coordinate systems per se (and in fact is still incompatible with relativity). They’re just sort of similar in that they both have to define some point of view and make everything else in the model relative to it. I’m still not sure why you brought coordinate systems into it.

A point of view is just a colloquial term to refer to a coordinate system. They are not coordinate in the exact same way but they are both coordinate.

My point was that communication of state to the observer in the system, or not, causes a difference in the outcome. And that from the general intuitions that drive almost all of the rest of physics, that’s weird and sort of should be impossible.

No, it doesn't not, and you're never demonstrated that.

Sure. How is it when combined with macro-scale intuition about the way natural laws work, or with general relativity?

We have never observed quantum effects on the scale where gravitational effects would also be observable, so such a theory, if we proposed one, would not be based on empirical evidence.

This is very, very very much not what I am doing. What did I say that gave you the impression I was adding anything to it?

You literally said in your own words we need to take additional things into account we currently are not. You're now just doing a 180 and pretending you did not say what literally anyone can scroll up and see that you said.

I am not talking about anything about retrocausality here, except maybe accidentally.

Then you don't understand the experiment since the only reason it is considered interesting is because if you interpret it in certain ways it seems to imply retrocausality. Literally no one has ever treated it as anything more than that. You are just making up your own wild implications from the experiment.

I was emphasizing the second paragraph; “wave behavior can be restored by erasing or otherwise making permanently unavailable the ‘which path’ information.”

The behavior of the system physically changes when it undergoes a physical interaction. How surprising!