Related papers: Consciousness and the Wigner's friend problem
Steady-state coherence in open quantum systems is crucial for quantum technologies, yet its behavior is not fully understood due to the interplay between collective and individual decoherence. While collective decoherence is thought to…
It is argued that Feynman's rules for evaluating probabilities, combined with von Neumann's principle of psycho-physical parallelism, help avoid inconsistencies, often associated with quantum theory. The former allows one to assign…
Since the dawn of quantum theory, coherence was attributed as a key to understand the weirdness of fundamental concepts like the wave-particle duality and the Stern-Gerlach experiment. Recently, based on a resource theory approach, the…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
We show that the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation can be easily implemented in quantum phase space through the method of quasi-distributions. This method establishes a connection with the formalism of the Wigner function. As a by-product, we…
Wigner's Friend scenarios push the boundaries of quantum theory by modeling agents, along with their memories storing measurement outcomes, as physical quantum systems. Extending these ideas beyond quantum theory, we ask: in which physical…
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…
Quantifying entanglement is a work in progress which is important for the active field of quantum information and computation. A measure of bipartite pure state entanglement is proposed here, named entanglement coherence, which is…
This paper develops an agent-centric account of measurement that treats the preferred-basis problem is fundamentally perspectival. On this view, the system--apparatus--environment decomposition and the observables that are apt to become…
Could there be quantum superpositions of conscious states, as suggested by the Wigner's friend thought experiment? Mathematical theories of consciousness, notably Integrated Information Theory (IIT), make this question more precise by…
We examine the role of a conscious observer in a typical quantum mechanical measurement. Four rules are given that govern stochastic choice and state reduction in several cases of continuous and intermittent observation. It is found that…
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…
We discuss various definitions of decoherence and how it can be measured. We compare and contrast decoherence in quantum systems with an infinite number of eigenstates (such as the free particle and the oscillator) and spin systems. In the…
The "measurement problem" of quantum mechanics, and the "hard problem" of cognitive science are the most profound open problems of the two research fields, and certainly among the deepest of all unsettled conundrums in contemporary science…
Discussions about whether quantum theory is determinism or indeterminism has lasted for a century. A new approach to standard quantum mechanics called many-interacting-worlds method based on many-worlds interpretation and de Broglie-Bohm…
Decoherence is the phenomenon of non-unitary dynamics that arises as a consequence of coupling between a system and its environment. It has important harmful implications for quantum information processing, and various solutions to the…
The only evidence we have for a discrete reality comes from quantum measurements; without invoking these measurements, quantum theory describes continuous entities. This seeming contradiction can be resolved via analysis that treats…
We present a discussion of the extended Wigner's friend thought experiment proposed by Frauchiger and Renner in [1]. We show by using various arguments, including textbook quantum mechanics and the ontological approach of Contexts, Systems,…
In Everett's many worlds interpretation, quantum measurements are considered to be decoherence events. If so, then inexact decoherence may allow large worlds to mangle the memory of observers in small worlds, creating a cutoff in observable…
Coherence is a fundamental resource in quantum information processing, which can be certified by a coherence witness. Due to the imperfection of measurement devices, a conventional coherence witness may lead to fallacious results. We show…