While I was listening to my teacher present the basic idea's of Schrodinger's famous thought experiment, he said that because we can not SEE the cat, the cat exists in some sort of position in which it is both dead and alive.
I was wondering if "see" encompasses all the other senses? Surely if we can hear the cat meow, we can deduce that the cat is still alive. If we smell the cat, it must be alive. So shouldn't "see" be changed to "sense"?
You are correct, it is not required that you visually see the cat. Any form of observation would qualify for this thought experiment, whether you hear, feel, smell, or even taste the cat. The concept of an "observer" is somewhat nebulous in this thought experiment, but any type of ability to sense whether the cat is alive or dead would count.
I think your teacher is misconstruing Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics section 12.4 has a very good discussion about the philosophy behind it.
Schrodinger originally posed it as an example as to why the concept of wave-function collapse from measurement is an absurd idea. Our intuition says, as it should, that a macroscopic living being such as a cat cannot possibly occupy an alive/dead superposition. Griffith's argues that the measurement doesn't occur when we open the box and observe the cat, but rather when the geiger counter is triggered by the decay, i.e. the microscopic measurement influences the macroscopic system.
As such, it doesn't matter whether or not we can see, hear, or smell the cat: we are not doing any measuring ourselves.
