Related papers: Quantum mechanics and rational ignorance
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
In a previous preprint (quant-ph/0012122) we introduced a ``contextual objectivity" formulation of quantum mechanics (QM). A central feature of this approach is to define the quantum state in physical rather than in mathematical terms, in…
A fundamental question in the debate about the interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) is whether the universe is fundamentally deterministic or fundamentally probabilistic. This self-contained paper shows for a microsystem made up of a…
QBism is currently one of the most widely discussed 'subjective' interpretations of quantum mechanics. Its key move is to say that quantum probabilities are personalist Bayesian probabilities and that the quantum state represents subjective…
We have executed for the first time an experiment on mental observables concluding that there exists equivalence (that is to say, quantum like behavior) between quantum and cognitive entities.Such result has enabled us to formulate an…
The quantum uncertainty principle famously predicts that there exist measurements that are inherently incompatible, in the sense that their outcomes cannot be predicted simultaneously. In contrast, no such uncertainty exists in the…
An effective formalism for quantum constrained systems is presented which allows manageable derivations of solutions and observables, including a treatment of physical reality conditions without requiring full knowledge of the physical…
This paper is devoted to the application of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to social (political) science. By using the quantum dynamical equations we model the process of decision making in US elections. The crucial point…
The quantum prepare-and-measure scenario has been studied under various physical assumptions on the emitted states. Here, we first discuss how different assumptions are conceptually and formally related. We then identify one that can serve…
It is often stated that quantum mechanics only makes statistical predictions and that a quantum state is described by the various probability distributions associated with it. Can we describe a quantum state completely in terms of…
The reasoning with qualitative uncertainty measures involves comparative statements about events in terms of their likeliness without necessarily assigning an exact numerical value to these events. The paper is divided into two parts. In…
Measurement outcomes of a quantum state can be genuinely random (unpredictable) according to the basic laws of quantum mechanics. The Heisenberg-Robertson uncertainty relation puts constrains on the accuracy of two noncommuting observables.…
How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…
In quantum gravity there is no notion of absolute time. Like all other quantities in the theory, the notion of time has to be introduced "relationally", by studying the behavior of some physical quantities in terms of others chosen as a…
Entanglement is one of the pillars of quantum mechanics and quantum information processing, and as a result the quantumness of nonentangled states has typically been overlooked and unrecognized. We give a robust definition for the…
Quantum decision theory is introduced here, and new basis for this theory is proposed. It is first based upon the author's general arguments for the Hilbert space formalism in quantum theory, next on arguments for the Born rule, that is,…
Quantum uncertainty relations impose fundamental limits on the joint knowledge that can be acquired from complementary observables: perfect knowledge of a quantum state in one basis implies maximal indetermination in all other mutually…
Environmental effects on the transmission of a state result, in general, in a change in the information carried by it. To mitigate this, many techniques such as quantum error--correcting codes, decoherence--free--subspaces [Rev Mod Phys,…
Functional theories of consciousness, based on emergence of conscious experiences from the execution of a particular function by an insentient brain, face the hard problem of consciousness of explaining why the insentient brain should…
One of the key ways in which quantum mechanics differs from relativity is that it requires a fixed background reference frame for spacetime. In fact, this appears to be one of the main conceptual obstacles to uniting the two theories.…