Related papers: Changing the past by forgetting
In this brief note, we argue that contrarily to what is still often stated, the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is not in principle impossible to test. It is actually not more difficult (but not easier either) to…
How humans and machines make sense of current inputs for relation reasoning and question-answering while putting the perceived information into context of our past memories, has been a challenging conundrum in cognitive science and…
Memory formation in matter is a theme of broad intellectual relevance; it sits at the interdisciplinary crossroads of physics, biology, chemistry, and computer science. Memory connotes the ability to encode, access, and erase signatures of…
We investigate whether quantum theory can be understood as the continuum limit of a mechanical theory, in which there is a huge, but finite, number of classical 'worlds', and quantum effects arise solely from a universal interaction between…
The Delayed-Choice Quantum Eraser experiment is commonly interpreted as implying that in quantum mechanics a choice made at one time can influence an earlier event. We here suggest an extension of the experiment that results in a paradox…
We argue that the many-worlds of quantum mechanics and the many worlds of the multiverse are the same thing, and that the multiverse is necessary to give exact operational meaning to probabilistic predictions from quantum mechanics.…
In resisting attempts to explain the unity of a whole in terms of a multiplicity of interacting parts, quantum mechanics calls for an explanatory concept that proceeds in the opposite direction: from unity to multiplicity. It concerns the…
A short foreword has been added for the archive version of this article, which otherwise appears as originally published in 1990, except for the updating of references. The original abstract follows. This is a critical review of the…
Interpretational problems with quantum mechanics can be phrased precisely by only talking about empirically accessible information. This prompts a mathematical reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of classical mechanics. We survey…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Quantum nonlocality may be an artifact of the assumption that observers obey the laws of classical mechanics, while observed systems obey quantum mechanics. I show that, at least in the case of Bell's Theorem, locality is restored if…
This paper uses possible-world semantics to model the changes that may occur in an agent's knowledge as she loses information. This builds on previous work in which the agent may forget the truth-value of an atomic proposition, to a more…
Machine learning and data systems increasingly function as infrastructures of memory: they ingest, store, and operationalize traces of personal, political, and cultural life. Yet contemporary governance demands credible forms of forgetting,…
Many theoretical predictions derived from quantum mechanics have been confirmed experimentally during the last 80 years. However, interpretative aspects have long been subject to debate. Among them, the question of the existence of hidden…
Quantum measurement resolves a superposition into a definite outcome by correlating it with an observer's memory -- a reality register. While the global quantum state remains coherent, the observer's local reality becomes singular and…
It is argued that the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics, and the philosophical problem of consciousness, both have their roots in the same set of misguided Cartesian assumptions. The confusions underlying those assumptions are…
A model is presented for the quantum memory, the content of which is a pure quantum state. In this model, the fundamental operations of writing on, reading, and resetting the memory are performed through scattering from the memory. The…
In complete erasure any arbitrary pure quantum state is transformed to a fixed pure state by irreversible operation. Here we ask if the process of partial erasure of quantum information is possible by general quantum operations, where…
We extend to materials with fading memory and materials with internal variables a result previously established by one of us for materials with instantaneous memory: the additive decomposability of the total energy into an internal and a…
Quantum annealers can provide non-local optimization by tunneling between states in a process that ideally eliminates memory of the initial configuration. We study the crossover between memory loss and retention due to quantum fluctuations,…