Related papers: Quantum mechanics and rational ignorance
The cognitive state of mind concerning a range of choices to be made can effectively be modelled in terms of an element of a high-dimensional Hilbert space. The dynamics of the state of mind resulting form information acquisition is…
This paper demonstrates that some non-classical models of human decision-making can be run successfully as circuits on quantum computers. Since the 1960s, many observed cognitive behaviors have been shown to violate rules based on classical…
In classical physics, probabilistic or statistical knowledge has been always related to ignorance or inaccurate subjective knowledge about an actual state of affairs. This idea has been extended to quantum mechanics through a completely…
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 uncertainty of a quantum state is given by the composition of two components. The first is called the quantum component and is given by the probability distribution of an observable relative to the state. The second is the classical…
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…
Contemporary quantum mechanical description of nature involves two processes. The first is a dynamical process governed by the equations of local quantum field theory. This process is local and deterministic, but it generates a structure…
We argue about a conceptual approach to quantum formalism. Starting from philosophical conjectures (Platonism, Idealism and Realism) as basic ontic elements (namely: math world, data world, and state of matter), we will analyze the quantum…
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…
It is argued that the nature of probability is essentially informational rather than physical and that quantum mechanical predictions should be viewed as logical inferences made on the basis of the information content of a given…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…
We provide a decision-theoretic framework for dealing with uncertainty in quantum mechanics. This uncertainty is two-fold: on the one hand there may be uncertainty about the state the quantum system is in, and on the other hand, as is…
If conscious observers are to be included in the quantum mechanical universe, we need to find the rules that engage observers with quantum mechanical systems. The author has proposed five rules that are discovered by insisting on empirical…
A qualification is suggested for the counterfactual reasoning involved in some aspects of time-symmetric quantum theory (which involves ensembles selected by both the initial and final states). The qualification is that the counterfactual…
Quantum uncertainty is described here in two guises: indeterminacy with its concomitant indeterminism of measurement outcomes, and fuzziness, or unsharpness. Both features were long seen as obstructions of experimental possibilities that…
In this paper we propose to use elements of the mathematical formalism of Quantum Mechanics to capture the idea that agents' preferences, in addition to being typically uncertain, can also be indeterminate. They are determined (i.e.,…
The problem of discriminating the state of a quantum system among a number of hypothetical states is usually addressed under the assumption that one has perfect knowledge of the possible states of the system. In this thesis, I analyze the…
In this paper and a companion paper, we attempt to systematically investigate the possibility that the concept of information may enable a derivation of the quantum formalism from a set of physically comprehensible postulates. To do so, we…
Recent tremendous development of quantum information theory led to a number of quantum technological projects, e.g., quantum random generators. This development stimulates a new wave of interest in quantum foundations. One of the most…