Related papers: Delirium Quantum
This essay provides a short introduction to the ideas and potential implications of quantum physics for scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Quantum-inspired ideas pepper current discourse in all of these fields, in ways…
The paradox of Wigner's friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated…
It is shown that the formalism of quantum theory naturally incorporates the psychophysical parallelism and thereby interprets itself, if the subjective aspects are taken as equal partners alongside the objective aspects as determinants of…
This paper is a response to some recent discussions of many-minds interpretations in the philosophical literature. After an introduction to the many-minds idea, the complexity of quantum states for macroscopic objects is stressed. Then it…
The proper resolution of the so-called measurement problem requires a "top-down" conception of the quantum world that is opposed to the usual "bottom-up" conception, which builds on an intrinsically and maximally differentiated manifold.…
The quantum theory of decoherence plays an important role in a pragmatist interpretation of quantum theory. It governs the descriptive content of claims about values of physical magnitudes and offers advice on when to use quantum…
How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…
A geometric framework for describing quantum particles on a possibly curved background is proposed. Natural constructions on certain distributional bundles (`quantum bundles') over the spacetime manifold yield a quantum ``formalism'' along…
In this article I aim to provide an intuitive and non-technical introduction to decoherence and quantum Darwinism. Together these theories explain how our classical reality emerges from an underlying quantum mechanical description. Here I…
Recently people started to understand that applications of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory are not reduced to physics. Nowadays, this formalism is widely used outside of quantum physics, in particular, in cognition, psychology,…
Quantum theory is extremely successful in explaining most physical phenomena, and is not contradicted by any experiment. Yet, the theory has many puzzling features : the occurrence of probabilities, the unclear distinction between the…
In this paper we attempt to provide a physical representation of quantum superpositions. For this purpose we discuss the constraints of the quantum formalism to the notion of possibility and the necessity to consider a potential realm…
It is proposed to define "quantumness" of a system (micro or macroscopic, physical, biological, social, political) by starting with understanding that quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. It says us only about probability…
I make the case that the Universe according to unitary (no-collapse) quantum theory has a branching structure, and so can literally be regarded as a "many-worlds" theory. These worlds are not part of the fundamental ontology of quantum…
Quantum mechanics in the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation is presented. This is characterized by 1) a quantum dualism between matter and consciousness unified within an informational neutral monism, 2) a quantum perspectivism which is…
Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if…
Based on ideas of quantum theory of open systems we propose the consistent approach to the formulation of logic of plausible propositions. To this end we associate with every plausible proposition diagonal matrix of its likelihood and…
It is well-known that decoherence is a crucial barrier in realizing various quantum information processing tasks; on the other hand, it plays a pivotal role in explaining how a quantum system's fragile state leads to the robust classical…
There are several important philosophical problems to which quantum mechanics is often said to have made significant contributions: - Determinism: quantum theory has been taken to refute determinism; -Free Will: in turn, this is thought to…
QBism regards quantum mechanics as an addition to probability theory. The addition provides an extra normative rule for decision-making agents concerned with gambling across experimental contexts, somewhat in analogy to the double-slit…