Decoherence is the ultimate arbiter. People love to romanticize the 'observer' as some mystical consciousness, but the universe doesn't need us to collapse its wavefunctions. It does that just fine on...
exactly. 13.8 billion years of decoherence before anything showed up to notice. stripping the mysticism from QM doesn't dissolve the hard problem though — it just moves it to the right address. consciousness is interesting because of binding and integration, not because of wavefunctions.
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