Related papers: Conscious observers clarify many worlds
Current theories of perception suggest that the brain represents features of the world as probability distributions, but can such uncertain foundations provide the basis for everyday vision? Perceiving objects and scenes requires knowing…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
We combine the ideas of Dirac's orthonormal representation, Everett's relative state, and 't Hooft's ontological basis to define the notion of a world for quantum mechanics. Mathematically, for a quantum system $\mathcal{Q}$ with an…
The problem of measurement is often considered as an inconsistency inside the quantum formalism. Many attempts to solve (or to dissolve) it have been made since the inception of quantum mechanics. The form of these attempts depends on the…
The article "Physics of Consciousness" treats mind as an abstract Hilbert space with a set of orthogonal base vectors to describe information like particles, which are considered to be the elementary excitation of a quantum field. A…
Quantum theory has evolved from a set of provisional rules to an indispensable framework that underlies much of modern technology and infrastructure. Yet, after a century, Born's probability postulate remains at odds with the theory's…
The consistent histories formalism can be used to describe histories comprised of events across many systems, times, and places, plausibly rich enough to describe our experiences of the classical world; however, many consistent history sets…
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…
For a projective measurement, the Born rule provides the probability for an outcome in terms of the inner product between a projector and a quantum state. If the projector represents a pure entangled state and the state for a composite…
We formalize the hidden measurement approach within the very general notion of an interactive probability model. We narrow down the model by assuming the state space of a physical entity is a complex Hilbert space and introduce the…
Modal interpretations have the ambition to construe quantum mechanics as an objective, man-independent description of physical reality. Their second leading idea is probabilism: quantum mechanics does not completely fix physical reality but…
This paper proposes an experiment designed to distinguish between competing interpretations of quantum mechanics: those that involve wave function collapse and those that assume purely unitary evolution. The experiment tests whether an…
In deterministic theories, one can start from a set of ontological states to formulate the dynamical laws, but these may not be directly observable. Observable are only equivalence classes of states, and these will span a basis of…
We argue that measurement data in quantum physics can be rigorously interpreted only as a result of a statistical, macroscopic process, taking into account the indistinguishable character of identical particles. Quantum determinism is in…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born's rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological…
Inspired by philosophical ideas of Boltzmann, which are briefly recalled, we provide strong support for the possibility and convenience of a realistic world picture, properly nuanced. The arguments have consequences for the interpretation…
To solve the probability problem of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, D.Wallace has presented a formal proof of the Born rule via decision theory, as proposed by D.Deutsch. The idea is to get subjective probabilities from…