Related papers: Ontological models and the interpretation of conte…
The paper reviews and discusses four ideas scattered in previous papers of the author. First, objective properties of quantum systems are not associated with observables but are defined by preparations. Second, measurable results of…
A sharper formulation is presented for an interpretation of quantum mechanics advocated by author. As an essential element we put forward conservation laws concerning the ontological nature of a variable, and the uncertainties concerning…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
Based on a clear ontology of material individuals, we analyze in detail the factual semantics of quantum theory, and argue that the basic mathematical formalism of quantum theory is just okay with (a certain form of ) realism and that it is…
First, this article considers the nature of quantum reality (the reality responsible for quantum phenomena) and the concept of realism (our ability to represent this reality) in quantum theory, in conjunction with the roles of locality,…
Any realist interpretation of quantum theory must grapple with the measurement problem and the status of state-vector collapse. In a no-collapse approach, measurement is typically modeled as a dynamical process involving decoherence. We…
Generalisation in machine learning often relies on the ability to encode structures present in data into an inductive bias of the model class. To understand the power of quantum machine learning, it is therefore crucial to identify the…
I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other…
A new ontological view of the quantum measurement processes is given, which has bearings on many broader issues in the foundations of quantum mechanics as well. In this scenario a quantum measurement is a non-equilibrium phase transition in…
Ontological theories of quantum mechanics provide a realistic description of single systems by means of well-defined quantities conditioning the measurement outcomes. In order to be complete, they should also fulfil the minimal condition of…
Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…
In order to claim that one has experimentally tested whether a noncontextual ontological model could underlie certain measurement statistics in quantum theory, it is necessary to have a notion of noncontextuality that applies to unsharp…
In a previous preprint (quant-ph/0012122) we introduced a ``contextual objectivity" formulation of quantum mechanics (QM). A central feature of this approach is to define the quantum state in physical rather than in mathematical terms, in…
In this paper we attempt to analyze the physical and philosophical meaning of quantum contextuality. We will argue that there exists a general confusion within the foundational literature arising from the improper "scrambling" of two…
We develop an algebraic frame for the simultaneous treatment of actual and possible properties of quantum systems. We show that, in spite of the fact that the language is enriched with the addition of a modal operator to the orthomodular…
A physical theory consists of the mathematical formalism and an interpretation, which contains the definition of symbols, measurement assignments, concepts and principles, and an ontology. We present a scheme to classify these different…
This paper is a review of our recent work on three notorious problems of non-relativistic quantum mechanics: realist interpretation, quantum theory of classical properties and the problem of quantum measurement. A considerable progress has…
The aim of this article is to represent the general description of an entity by means of its states, contexts and properties. The entity that we want to describe does not necessarily have to be a physical entity, but can also be an entity…
In this paper, epistemology and ontology of quantum states are discussed based on a completely new way of founding quantum theory. The fundamental notions are conceptual variables in the mind of an observer or in the joint minds of a group…
In the framework of ontological models, the inherently nonclassical features of quantum theory always seem to involve properties that are fine tuned, i.e. properties that hold at the operational level but break at the ontological level.…