Related papers: Against "knowledge"
Post-inflationary boundary conditions are essential to the existence of our highly structured universe, and these can only come about through quantum mechanical state reductions - i.e., through measurements. The choice is between: An…
This paper examines whether unitary evolution alone is sufficient to explain emergence of the classical world from the perspective of computability theory. Specifically, it looks at the problem of how the choice related to the measurement…
We show that a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the notion of event is defined without reference to measurement or observers, allows to construct a quantum general ontology based on systems, states and events. Unlike the…
Is quantum mechanics about 'states'? Or is it basically another kind of probability theory? It is argued that the elementary formalism of quantum mechanics operates as a well-justified alternative to 'classical' instantiations of a…
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…
We consider the problem of quantum behavior in the finite background. Introduction of continuum or other infinities into physics leads only to technical complications without any need for them in description of empirical observations. The…
We present an elementary proof of the quantum de Finetti representation theorem, a quantum analogue of de Finetti's classical theorem on exchangeable probability assignments. This contrasts with the original proof of Hudson and Moody [Z.…
A product state of a composite quantum system AB is customarily interpreted physically to mean subsystem A has property A1 and subsystem B has property B1. But this interpretation contradicts both the theory and observed outcomes of…
QBism pursues the real by first eliminating the elements of quantum theory too fragile to be ontologies on their own. Thereafter, it seeks an "ontological lesson" from whatever remains. Here, we explore this program by highlighting three…
According to a well-known principle of quantum physics, the statistics of the outcomes of any quantum experiment are governed by a Positive Operator-Valued Measure (POVM). In particular, for experiments designed to measure a specific…
The relational approach to quantum states asserts that the physical description of quantum systems is always relative to something or someone. In relational quantum mechanics (RQM) it is relative to other quantum systems, in the…
We consider symmetry as a foundational concept in quantum mechanics and rewrite quantum mechanics and measurement axioms in this description. We argue that issues related to measurements and physical reality of states can be better…
This paper proposes an intrinsic or background-independent quantum framework based on entangled state rather than absolute quantum state, it describes a quantum relative state between the under-study quantum system and the quantum measuring…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
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…
A colloquial interpretation of entropy is that it is the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of a random experiment. Conditional entropy is then interpreted as the knowledge gained upon learning the outcome of one random experiment…
A quantum state can be understood in a loose sense as a map that assigns a value to every observable. Formalizing this characterization of states in terms of generalized probability distributions on the set of effects, we obtain a simple…
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…
A rigorous general definition of quantum probability is given, which is valid for elementary events and for composite events, for operationally testable measurements as well as for inconclusive measurements, and also for non-commuting…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…