Consciousness does not Cause Physical Collapse

Quantum mechanics is sometimes taught as wave function collapse being a real physical process, and one triggered by human consciousness, as in this new xkcd cartoon.

In an extreme version of this, it is suggested that we should not try to observe alien planets, because they could all be living happily in a cat-state, and a human conscious observation from Earth could collapse them and they would all die.

Who is responsible for this science fiction? According to some, it is the prime architect of mathematical QM, John von Neumann.

A new paper dives into the history:

the account I propose substantiates a significantly more cautious attitude by von Neumann: the time seems then ripe to tell a more balanced story on the relation between the notion of consciousness and the foundations of quantum mechanics in the work of the first scientist - Janos von Neumann - who explicitly and rigorously addressed the implication of a really universal formulation of quantum physics.

Von Neumann's hugely influential QM treatise did formalize the collapse, but he never said it was a physical process or that human consciousness played a part.

People who attack the Copenhagen interpretation are particularly unhappy about the collapse, as if that were made-up nonsense. But the collapse is observed in every quantum experiment. Any time a wave function predicts a range of values, only one is observed, and that is what the collapse means.

Whether the collapse has anything to do with human consciousness is an amusing philosophical question, but not necessarily related to what Bohr, Heisenberg, and von Neumann believed.