How loud a sound? Suppose I let off a delayed-action bomb in the forest. By the time it goes off I am out of earshot. A month later you walk through the forest and find a clearing levelled by the blast. Or you notice that the local animals are more nervous there than elsewhere? Had those animals not been alarmed or those trees not been levelled by the sound before you were there to see them? Suppose no one ever noticed the clearing before it was overgrown, but after a few hundred years an ecologist noticed an anomaly in the distribution of species in the forest, consistent with certain sources of certain kinds of tree seed being absent from that spot some hundreds of years before. Had that bomb not gone off before he did his study?
Ask Schroedinger's cat.
Suppose you did the Schroedinger's cat experiment (sadistic hound!!!). Is the cat dead before you sneak a look? Suppose the cat (black) was already dead when you put it in the box, but instead of cyanide your device releases bleach. What colour is the cat? Suppose you do not know the outcome, but also do not know whether someone else had sneaked a look? Suppose you ask him, but he lies to you. Or suppose you ask him and he doesn't lie, but refuses to tell you the colour of the cat, or the sound that the tree made when the bomb went off?
How do you define reality? In terms of causes and consequences? How do you define observations? In terms of consciousness? Suppose that you enquire from an inanimate machine? How does that differ from enquiring from a man? A dead man? How do you define? How do you define define? How do you define the time of night I read the question? How do you define the question? What did Schroedinger's bottle-blonde dead cat reply? How did bottles get into this?
