Related papers: The Observer Class Hypothesis
Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…
I describe reasons to think we are living in an eternally inflating multiverse where the observable "constants" of nature vary from place to place. The major obstacle to making predictions in this context is that we must regulate the…
A characteristical property of a classical physical theory is that the observables are real functions taking an exact outcome on every (pure) state; in a quantum theory, at the contrary, a given observable on a given state can take several…
Every theory of information, including classical and quantum, can be studied in the framework of operational probabilistic theories--where the notion of test generalizes that of quantum instrument, namely a collection of quantum operations…
A realist description of our universe requires a twofold concept of locality. On one hand, there are the strictly Einstein-local interactions which generate the time evolution. On the other hand, the quantum state space calls for a…
Is it possible to encompass the full extent of the universe within a theory based on a finite set of first principles and inference rules? The r\^{o}le of observers and observations in physics theories is considered here in the light of…
In this position paper we suggest a possible metric approach to shape comparison that is based on a mathematical formalization of the concept of observer, seen as a collection of suitable operators acting on a metric space of functions.…
A functional analysis of the task of observing multiple macroscopic quantum systems over an extended period of time and then reporting the accumulated results is used to investigate the information that must be encoded in the "ready" state…
We analyse the wave function collapse as seem by two distinct observers (with identical detectors) in relative motion. Imposing that the measurement process demands information transfer from the system to the detectors, we note that…
We analyze the notion that physical theories are quantitative and testable by observations in experiments. This leads us to propose a new, Bayesian, interpretation of probabilities in physics that unifies their current use in classical…
Information plays an important role in our understanding of the physical world. We hence propose an entropic measure of information for any physical theory that admits systems, states and measurements. In the quantum and classical world,…
The place and role of an Observer in quantum mechanics has been a subject of an ongoing debate since the theory's inception. Wigner brought this question to the fore in a celebrated scenario in which a super-Observer observes a Friend…
The observer effect in quantum physics states that observation inevitably influences the system being observed. This work introduces an epistemic framework that treats the observer as an integral part of sensory information processing…
For two causal structures with the same set of visible variables, one is said to observationally dominate the other if the set of distributions over the visible variables realizable by the first contains the set of distributions over the…
Since the appearance of General Relativity, its intrinsec general covariance has been very often misinterpreted as implying that physically meaningful quantitities (and conclusions extracted from the theory) have to be absolutely…
This paper develops a connection between the asymptotic stability of nonlinear filters and a notion of observability. We consider a general class of hidden Markov models in continuous time with compact signal state space, and call such a…
The inflationary hot big bang model of cosmology explains the birth of the universe, the appearance of atoms and that of large-scale structures, altogether omitting any reference to the living world. Yet, like the physical world, the living…
The anthropic explanation for the peculiarly small observed value of the cosmological constant $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ argues that this value promotes the formation of stars, planets, and ultimately of observers such as ourselves. I show that a…
We introduce a class of information measures based on group entropies, allowing us to describe the information-theoretical properties of complex systems. These entropic measures are nonadditive, and are mathematically deduced from a series…
We show that the natural scaling of measurement for a particular problem defines the most likely probability distribution of observations taken from that measurement scale. Our approach extends the method of maximum entropy to use…