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History of Jenö Wigner's Conjectures About the Role of Consciousness in Quantum Mechanical Processes From Star Trek to Doctor Who, pop culture science fiction regularly plays with the idea that human consciousness plays a significant role in quantum mechanical processes. Surprisingly, similar ideas actually appeared in the 1950s and 1960s in relatively serious physical and philosophical literature, and echoes of these ideas still resonate from time to time today. The most prominent representative of these assumptions was the Hungarian-American physicist Jenö Wigner. The reasons why he proposed these ideas and the reasons why he abandoned them at a later stage of his research will help us gain insight into this special issue. However, we will show Wigner's story in the context of more serious and still unresolved disputes in the philosophy of science about what goals scientific research has and what demands we should place on the scientific method. The biggest role will be played by the question of whether scientific models should in some way map physical reality, or whether they should only serve as tools to predict the results of measurements and observations. The lecture is organized by the Jihlava Vysočina Museum in cooperation with the Jihlava Astronomical Society and the Vysočina Branch of the Czech Astronomical Society.