This post carries further on in the vein of my earlier writings on how the way most physicists talk about “the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics” is largely ahistorical.
It’s common to present “the Copenhagen interpretation” as a kind of dynamical collapse model, in which wavefunctions are ontic entities (like a sophomore’s picture of the electromagnetic field) that evolve according to the Schrödinger equation, except in moments of “measurement” that take place in unspecified conditions. This portrayal is typically intended to make “the Copenhagen interpretation” sound like a mutant form of Newtonian mechanics where $F = ma$ almost always, except at peculiar instants when $F$ suddenly becomes $ma/2$ and then switches back again. Of course, this is abhorrent and pathological.
When I was a child, my parents bought me a magnet from a museum gift shop. It had a long handle, likely made deliberately to resemble a magic wand, and as educational toys go, it served its function, since I went around poking all sorts of things to see if the magnet would grab them. I suspect this is a common enough type of learning experience. One discovers, for example, that it will pick up paperclips but not pennies. Having calibrated one’s understanding of the magnet, one can then use it as a tool — say, by telling which of two matchboxes is filled with paperclips, or that something is different about a wire coil connected to a battery versus one that is not.
What concerned Bohr himself was that this transition — between the calibration phase, when an object is under scrutiny, and its later use as a laboratory instrument — is conceptually nontrivial. First a lens is a strangely curved block of glass we must work to comprehend, and then it is a means to overthrow Aristotle. There are not two different dynamical laws, but two different languages.
Here’s how John Wheeler put it:
“Bohr stresses […] that the stick we hold can itself be an object of investigation, as when we run our fingers over its surface. The same stick, when grasped firmly and used to explore something else, becomes an extension of the observer or—when we depersonalize—a part of the measuring equipment. As we withdraw the stick from the one role, and recast it in the other role, we transpose the line of demarcation from one end of it to the other. The distinction between the probed and the probe, so evident at this scale of the everyday, is the without-which-nothing of every elementary phenomenon, of every closed quantum process.”
[From “Law Without Law”, in the Wheeler–Zurek collection, p. 206]
The commonalities and contrasts with QBism should be evident enough. Extension of the observer, yes; depersonalize to mere dead “equipment”, no, for it is the latter move that gets one into trouble with Wigner’s Friend. And, on a perhaps more practical level where the choice of research problems is concerned, Bohr takes the quantum formalism pretty much as given and leaves “the quantum principle” not explicitly defined.
It may also be illustrative to consider how Rovelli’s “Relational Quantum Mechanics” treats this point. I tentatively infer that Rovelli thinks giving a special role to an agent means imposing two different dynamical laws, one for systems of agent-type and another for all nonagent physical entities. Even if he doesn’t spell it out, that seems to be the mindset he operates with, and the background he relies upon. Of course, he balks at that dichotomy. I would, too!