Related papers: Accommodating Retrocausality with Free Will
In this letter, we point to three widely accepted challenges that the quantum theory, quantum information, and quantum foundations communities are currently facing: indeterminism, the semantics of conditional probabilities, and the spooky…
Recent experiments (gedanken or otherwise) and theorems in quantum mechanics (QM), such as new iterations on Wigner's friend and delayed choice, have led many people to claim that QM is not compatible with determinate and intersubjectively…
Time-symmetric interpretations of quantum theory are often presented as featuring "retrocausal" effects in addition to the usual forward notion of causation. This paper examines the ontological implications of certain timesymmetric…
Free will is sometimes summarised in the philosophical literature as the subjective impression felt by an individual that he or she is the ultimate source or cause of his or her own choices. The two most common arguments for denying the…
The so-called "free will axiom" is an essential ingredient in many discussions concerning hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In this paper we argue that "free will" can be defined in different ways. The definition usually employed is…
Quantum correlations can be stronger than anything achieved by classical systems, yet they are not reaching the limit imposed by relativity. The principle of information causality offers a possible explanation for why the world is quantum…
We develop a new interpretation of quantum theory by combining insights from extended Wigner's friend scenarios and quantum causal modelling. In this interpretation, which synthesizes ideas from relational quantum mechanics and consistent…
The predictions that quantum theory makes about the outcomes of measurements are generally probabilistic. This has raised the question whether quantum theory can be considered complete, or whether there could exist alternative theories that…
The density matrix yields probabilistic information about the outcome of measurements on a quantum system, but it does not distinguish between classical randomness in the preparation of the system and entanglement with its environment.…
While the microscopic laws of physics are often symmetric under time reversal, most natural processes that we observe are not. The emergent asymmetry between typical and time-reversed processes is referred to as the arrow of time. In…
Quantum theory is a mathematical formalism to compute probabilities for outcomes happenning in physical experiments. These outcomes constitute events happening in space-time. One of these events represents the fact that a system located in…
On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information…
Causal asymmetry is one of the great surprises in predictive modelling: the memory required to predict the future differs from the memory required to retrodict the past. There is a privileged temporal direction for modelling a stochastic…
The intrinsic multivaluedness of interaction process, revealed in Part I of this series of papers, is interpreted as the origin of the true dynamical (in particular, quantum) chaos. The latter is causally deduced as unceasing series of…
Observing the violation of Bell's inequality tells us something about all possible future theories: they must all predict nonlocal correlations. Hence Nature is nonlocal. After an elementary introduction to nonlocality and a brief review of…
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of…
Huw Price has proposed an argument that suggests a time-symmetric ontology for quantum theory must necessarily be retrocausal, i.e. it must involve influences that travel backwards in time. One of Price's assumptions is that the quantum…
Capacity of conscious agents to perform genuine choices among future alternatives is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Determinism that pervades classical physics, however, forbids free will, undermines the foundations of ethics, and…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
The spread of the time arrows from the environment to an observed subsystem is followed within a harmonic model. A similarity is pointed out between irreversibility and a phase with spontaneously broken symmetry. The causal structure of…