Actually this happened well before I was even born lol. Galileo was among those who came up with the idea of excluding the subject as it was realised that it consisted of a different kind of reality.
For Galileo, any corporeal substance was defined entirely by quantified measures such as size, shape, location in space and time, motion or rest. It is only these kinds of properties that lend themselves to a mathematical, scientific description.
Galileo noted, that '
any other substances or instance that relate to being ‘white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor... my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary accompaniments..... I think - that tastes, odors, and colors... reside only in consciousness'. Hence if the living creature were removed all these qualities would be wiped away and eliminated’ (Galileo, 1632; see also Goff, 2017).
In other words, those basic constituents of our conscious experience, and of consciousness itself, are not part of the objective world and are to be excluded from the scientific enterprise as a matter of epistemics.
This is obviously wrong considering some interpretations posit the observer as central such as the the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, Wigners Friend and Wheelers 'Delayed choice' experiement and their modern variations.
Or the (
Consciousness causes collapse) interpretations such as
QBism (Quantum Bayesianism), or even the "Copenhagen Interpretation" which uses the act of measurement as causing a change in the wave function. In the more extreme variants, this act of observation becomes tied in with consciousness.
Stapp argued that the measuring device should be viewed the same as the rest of the world and not itself that can measure the collapse. Rather the only new addition into the equation is the conscious mind which cannot be reduced like the measuring device or the physical world around it.
From the point of view of the mathematics of quantum theory it makes no sense to treat a measuring device as intrinsically different from the collection of atomic constituents that make it up. A device is just another part of the physical universe... Moreover, the conscious thoughts of a human observer ought to be causally connected most directly and immediately to what is happening in his brain, not to what is happening out at some measuring device... Our bodies and brains thus become ... parts of the quantum mechanically described physical universe. Treating the entire physical universe in this unified way provides a conceptually simple and logically coherent theoretical foundation...[11]