system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why isn't Schrödinger's cat considered an observer?

Serious question. Assuming the cat has some conscious experience, his reality would either continue or end before the box is opened. Would a human in the box be an observer? Likewise, what if the scientists were in a second box. They could open the cat's box within this second box, but according to the outside world, would the scientists both know the cat's fate and not know it? I understand that the thought experiment is more of an analogy, but the mere fact that I have these questions means I'm missing the point! Thanks!
gpt
Observation in quantum mechanics has, at least in the mainstream interpretations, nothing to do with human observers or indeed consciousness. 

An observation is merely any kind of information (e.g. a photon which leaves the box, telling us about what's going on inside) which can in principle obtained about a system.

The idea behind the observer in the Schrödinger cat Gedankenexperiment is that you can (again, in principle) always treat the observer as part of the quantum system, which should then again be capable of exhibiting superposition. The cat is an observer for the atomic decay process, but once it's in a black box, we have no idea what it observes, so an observer outside the box can treat the whole thing as one quantum system and it should be possible that the cat is indeed in a superposition of being alive and dead.

It should be noted that no one thought that this is what would actually happen (superposition of a living macro-organism), and that the Gedankenexperiment was devised to illustrate that there must be some boundaries of the quantum world. Whether or not such boundaries really exist is however still an open question even today.