Related papers: Agency cannot be a purely quantum phenomenon

Quantum game theory is a multidisciplinary field which combines quantum mechanics with game theory by introducing non-classical resources such as entanglement, quantum operations and quantum measurement. By transferring two-player-two…

Darwinian evolution requires (i) heritable records, (ii) repeatable copying with variation, and (iii) routine irreversibility. Categorical quantum mechanics (CQM) makes precise why ``copy'' and ``delete'' are not generic quantum operations:…

AI systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes contexts (medical diagnosis, legal research, financial analysis) under the assumption they can be governed by norms. This paper demonstrates that the assumption is formally invalid for…

After two decades of research on indefinite causality, a philosophical lesson emerges: the tension between operational quantum theory and dynamical spacetime physics is unbridgeable if one believes both types of theories to be fundamental.…

Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Determining if a system exhibits agency is a notoriously difficult…

Due to the no-cloning theorem, the unknown quantum state can only be cloned approximately or exactly with some probability. There are two types of cloners: universal and state-dependent cloner. The optimal universal cloner has been found…

The point of building a quantum computer is that it allows to model living things with predictive power and gives the opportunity to control life. Its scaling means not just the improvement of the instrument part, but also, mainly,…

Dividing the world into subsystems is an important component of the scientific method. The choice of subsystems, however, is not defined a priori. Typically, it is dictated by experimental capabilities, which may be different for different…

The world runs on communicated sequences of symbols, e.g. numerals. Examining both engineered and natural communications networks reveals an unsuspected order that depends on contact with an unpredictable entity. This order has three roots.…

Central to the success of adaptive systems is their ability to interpret signals from their environment and respond accordingly -- they act as agents interacting with their surroundings. Such agents typically perform better when able to…

Traditional models of rational action treat the agent as though it is cleanly separated from its environment, and can act on that environment from the outside. Such agents have a known functional relationship with their environment, can…

We can recognize two modes in which 'quantum appears' in macro domains: (i) a 'micro-physical appearance', where quantum laws are assumed to be universal and they are transferred from the micro to the macro level if suitable 'quantum…

An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…

This paper is a review of our recent work on three notorious problems of non-relativistic quantum mechanics: realist interpretation, quantum theory of classical properties and the problem of quantum measurement. A considerable progress has…

A common way of stating the non-cloning theorem -- one of distinguishing characteristics of quantum theory -- is that one cannot make a copy of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. Even though this theorem is an important part of the ongoing…

Quantum state exclusion is the task of identifying at least one state from a known set that was not used in the preparation of a quantum system. A set of quantum states is said to admit state exclusion if there exists a measurement whose…

The hypothesis of quantum self-interference is not directly observable, but has at least three necessary implications. First, a quantum entity must have no less than two open paths. Second, the size of the interval between any two…

We describe a general approach to modeling rational decision-making agents who adopt either quantum or classical mechanics based on the Quantum Bayesian (QBist) approach to quantum theory. With the additional ingredient of a scheme by which…

We consider an unsupervised classifying agent that evolves by enforcing self-consistency of its labels under continual exposure to a data-generating environment. Because the agent's predictions feed back into its own regularized updates,…

Can quantum mechanics help us in building intelligent robots and agents? One of the defining characteristics of intelligent behavior is the capacity to learn from experience. However, a major bottleneck for agents to learn in any real-life…