Related papers: Are Events Absolute?

Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this…

A physical theory is proposed that obeys both the principles of special relativity and of quantum mechanics. As a key feature, the laws are formulated in terms of quantum events rather than of particle states. Temporal and spatial…

Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics can be understood as a reflection of a deep and unexpected unity between the fundamental structures of mathematics and of physics. Some of the history of evidence for this is…

Leibniz thought experiment of perception, sensing, and thinking is reconsidered. We try to understand Leibniz picture in view of our knowledge of basic neuroscience. In particular we can see how the emergence of consciousness could in…

In recent decades there has been a resurge of interest in the foundations of quantum theory, partly motivated by new experimental techniques, partly by the emerging field of quantum information science. Old questions, asked since the…

Conceptual problems in quantum mechanics result from the specific quantum concept of reality and require, for their solution, including the observer's consciousness into quantum theory of measurements. Most naturally this is achieved in the…

At the heart of both black hole physics and Wigner's friend scenarios lies the question of unitarity. In Wigner's friend setups, sealed-lab measurements are modeled unitarily, probing the measurement problem. In black hole physics, the…

A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. It does not make use of the familiar language of wave functions and observers. Instead it pictures the state of the physical world as a vector in a Fock space and, therefore…

Eugene Wigner famously argued for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" for describing physics and other natural sciences in his 1960 essay. That essay has now led to some 55 years of (sometimes anguished) soul searching ---…

A recent paper "Single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent" [arXiv:1604.07422] by D. Frauchiger and R. Renner has attracted a considerable interest of a broader physics audience and shortly elicited a number of…

We consider communication scenarios where one party sends quantum states of known dimensionality $D$, prepared with an untrusted apparatus, to another, distant party, who probes them with uncharacterized measurement devices. We prove that,…

A simple way, accessible to undergraduates, is given to understand measurements in quantum mechanics. The ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics is natural and provides this simple access to the measurement problem. This paper…

The famous gedanken experiments of quantum mechanics have played crucial roles in developing the Copenhagen interpretation. They are studied here from the perspective of standard quantum mechanics, with no ontological interpretation…

Recently a study of the first superposed mechanical quantum object ("machine") visible to the naked eye was published. However, as we show, it turns out that if the object would actually be observed, i.e. would interact with an optical…

The article suggests that quantum mechanics is a science of a new type, which refutes the classical metaphysical concept of reality. The notion of a quantum concept is introduced. The possibility of a Wittgensteinian 'dissolution' of the…

I wish to discuss a large, interwoven set of topics pointed at in the title above. Much of what I say is highly speculative, some is testable, some is, at present, surely not. It is, I hope, useful, to set these ideas forth for our…

Epistemological consequences of quantum nonlocality (entanglement) are discussed under the assumption of a universally valid Schr\"odinger equation in the absence of hidden variables. This leads inevitably to a {\it many-minds…

Quantum mechanics is a theory that is as effective as it is counterintuitive. While quantum practices operate impeccably, they compel us to embrace enigmatic phenomena like the collapse of the state vector and non-locality, thereby pushing…

In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…

This study utilises an experiment famous in quantum physics, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, to inform the structure of an experimental protocol from which a quantum cognitive decision model can be developed. The 'quantumness' of this model…