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One hundred years after the creation of quantum theory, there is no consensus on the kind of reality that is described by the theory. Here, I attribute the lack of progress to the prevailing interpretative methodology, which invariably…
For a century, quantum theory has posed a fundamental challenge to philosophical thinking. On its face, it repudiates many of the key features of the mechanical conception of physical reality. However, the challenge of developing a precise,…
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,…
We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the…
Quantum information is an emerging field which has attracted a lot of attention in the last fifteen years or so. It is a broad subject which covers from the most applied questions (e.g., how to build quantum computers or secure…
I suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature (the "measurement problem") could derive from the use of an incorrect notion, as the unease with the Lorentz transformations before…
The mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully employed in the last years to model situations in which the use of classical structures gives rise to problematical situations, and where typically quantum effects, such…
The program of reconstructing quantum theory based on information-theoretic principles enjoys much popularity in the foundations of physics. Surprisingly, this endeavor has only received very little attention in philosophy. Here I argue…
We reconstruct the explicit formalism of qubit quantum theory from elementary rules on an observer's information acquisition. Our approach is purely operational: we consider an observer O interrogating a system S with binary questions and…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable…
There has been a strong recent interest in applying quantum mechanics (QM) outside physics, including in cognitive science. We analyze the applicability of QM to two basic properties in opinion polling. The first property (response…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…
Quantum theory brings into question the compatibility of the twin desiderata of exact knowability of the present state of the physical world and perfect predictability of its future states. Bohr's coordination-causality complementarity…
Quantum information processing is the use of inherently quantum mechanical phenomena to perform information processing tasks that cannot be achieved using conventional classical information technologies. One famous example is quantum…
We reformulate the problem of the "interpretation of quantum mechanics" as the problem of DERIVING the quantum mechanical formalism from a set of simple physical postulates. We suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as…
The rather unintuitive nature of quantum theory has led numerous people to develop sets of (physically motivated) principles that can be used to derive quantum mechanics from the ground up, in order to better understand where the structure…
Quantum information science is a source of task-related axioms whose consequences can be explored in general settings encompassing quantum mechanics, classical theory, and more. Quantum states are compendia of probabilities for the outcomes…
We reconstruct quantum mechanics by introducing "information operators" and excluding the concept of wave functions. Multiple information operators simultaneously describe a single system and continuously develop in time even in the process…
There have been suggestions within the Information Retrieval (IR) community that quantum mechanics (QM) can be used to help formalise the foundations of IR. The invoked connection to QM is mathematical rather than physical. The proposed…
In quantum foundations, there is growing interest in the program of reconstructing the quantum formalism from clear physical principles. These reconstructions are formulated in an operational framework, deriving the formalism from…