I have been mislead about Schroedinger's cat, but now I get the absurdity.
However, I also feel there might be a conceptual mistake in the experiment setup: there -is- a conscious observer present inside of the sealed box: the cat. Thus there is no super-position and therefore the cat will observe itself when it dies (or stays alive), matching later experiments' results.
Science: it works! But Schrodinger's attempt at absurd comedy seems to have failed.
This usage is misleading and surprisingly common because it helps to frame the problem well. To be clear, an "observer" in the quantum context is merely anything which is measuring the outcome of an event. It need not be conscious but it can be.
Having said that, I think you're actually correct to point this out! The cat will obviously have a look around inside the box and likely cause wavefunction collapse. I believe the cat is meant to be fundamentally unable to effect things though.
After all, it's mostly an interesting problem because it posits that anything that could be "alive" inside the box would be in a superposition of alive and dead which is something that's never been observed and probably can't happen due to the unstable nature of wavefunction collapse in the real world.
