Schrödinger's Cat

I've never understood this, and I still don't get it. The cat is both dead and alive until I make my observation? Huh? It's dead, or it's alive and I don't know which until I look. My looking can't change an outcome that has already happened. It's like saying there's a 50% chance of rain, so it's raining and not raining until I look out the window. That's just silly.

"Look" is meaningless in this context.
Does it mean when the photons hit the observer's retina? When the resulting image is processed? When the processed image reaches the visual cortex? When the processed image is bound into consciousness? When the observer contemplates the bound image?
The take-away here is that physicists use "look" to mean "we don't know what the hell happens here, but accept this meaningless word so that we appear to know what's happening."

By the way, it's worse than you imagine. Physicists claim that absolutely nothing exists until it is observed.

Perception, whether visual, auditory or simply based in reason is inherently dualistic. We cannot perceive a contradiction like a square-circle and can only perceive in opposites. We imagine that something is either "Dead" or "Alive" and cannot imagine a state of being both-and-neither, but this is the quantum state.

So, the quantum superposition collapses into human perception, into an observable and de-finit-e thing as opposed to other things, but Reality (with a capital R) is an interdependent totality and the only thing beside which there is no other. This superordinal Reality comports to the limitations of dualistic impression creating the schismatic dualistic world of apparent opposites we perceive. But the Reality is, there are no opposites as such.

Take for example "Nature VS Nurture" here Reality is separated schismatically into two discrete categories, and from this psychologists/biologists ask of the phenotype whether a trait is due to Nature or Nurture and imagine the two competing against each other. But this view is incorrect, the reality is Nature AND Nurture, Autopoetically-Symbiotically interpenetrating each other. They cannot literally be separated out into opposite categories and they do not "compete" with each other, they "com-plete" with each other.

Does that help?

By the way, on this subject I'd recommend "The Master Set Universe" by Maxwell Katz and "The Self-Aware Universe" by Amit Goswami. Also look up John Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle. The observer collapses the wave-function, but "The Observer" as principle is what does this, it is the principle of observation which demands contrasts and renders the universe dualistically. That a thing is not a thing unless it is not something else, can be seen in Leibniz's commentary on Aristotle's Laws of Thought and more readily in Easter Logic with such logicians as Nagarjuna. Thus, in order that awareness-of-being-aware arises, a complete self-referential/self-representational loop would simultaneously require unaware objects and multiple aware objects with an infinitude of gradiant matter permeating between them. This is a tough theory that is not well reflected in much literature, but check out "The Master Set Universe" for an introduction to the idea. It probably parallels religious concepts of a "Self-mortifying" or Self-Limiting God.

I don't get it either. I looked at several videos concerning this experiment. They always explain that the cat is both dead and alive until we look. OK, but why? Why is it dead AND alive instead of dead OR alive? This experiment fails to explain, from my perspective, the difference between what any normal human would conceive (the cat is either dead or alive) or the quantum state supposedly represented (the cat is both dead and alive at the same time). Anybody care to explain ?

Poor kitty :(