Related papers: Questions and Physical Reality -Simple Philosophic…
In QBism (or Quantum Bayesianism) a quantum state does not represent an element of physical reality but an agent's personal probability assignments, reflecting his subjective degrees of belief about the future content of his experience. In…
This paper links the conjecture that the physical world is a virtual reality to the findings of modern physics. What is usually the subject of science fiction is here proposed as a scientific theory open to empirical evaluation. We know…
We show that the modern quantum mechanics, and particularly the theory of decoherence, allows formulating a sort of a physical metatheory of consciousness. Particularly, the analysis of the necessary conditions for the occurrence of…
Even simplified models of quantum many-body systems can be difficult to analyse. However, taking inspiration from the foundations of physics, one may wonder whether there are practical advantages to constructing alternative beyond-quantum…
We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide…
The distinctive features of quantum mechanics, which set it apart from other physical theories, challenge our notions of realism. Recovering realism from purely philosophical grounds, a quantitative and operational criterion was proposed in…
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…
In classical theory, the physical systems are elucidated through the concepts of particles and waves, which aim to describe the reality of the physical system with certainty. In this framework, particles are mathematically represented by…
Inspired by philosophical ideas of Boltzmann, which are briefly recalled, we provide strong support for the possibility and convenience of a realistic world picture, properly nuanced. The arguments have consequences for the interpretation…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by being based on two…
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this article, I demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. I show that the fundamental physical question of whether a theory is…
From the premise that an observable is real after it is measured, we envisage a tomography-based protocol that allows us to propose a quantifier for the degree of indefiniteness of an observable given a quantum state. Then, we find that the…
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument on quantum mechanics incompleteness is formulated in terms of elements of reality inferred from joint (as opposed to alternative) measurements, in two examples involving entangled states of three…
The wave-particle duality is a mind-body one. In the real 3d-space there exists only the particle; the wave exists in its consciousness, as well as the reflection of the whole world. If there are many particles, their distribution in…
Does the quantum state represent reality or our knowledge of reality? In making this distinction precise, we are led to a novel classification of hidden variable models of quantum theory. Indeed, representatives of each class can be found…
How should we interpret physical theories, and especially quantum theory, if we drop the assumption that we should treat it as an exact description of the whole Universe? I expound and develop the claim that physics is about the study of…
We comment on the fact that certain mathematical models that have been proposed in the quantum gravity literature, may not be subject to experimental checks, even if they turn out to be mathematically well defined. This means that they…
The ``Hard Problem" of consciousness refers to a long-standing enigma about how qualia emerge from physical processes in the brain. Building on insights from the development of non-Euclidean geometry, this paper seeks to present a…
In this article we argue that in quantum mechanics, and in opposition to classical physics, it is impossible to say that an isolated quantum system "owns" a physical property. Some properties of the system, its mass for example, belong to…
We consider a very natural generalization of quantum theory by letting the dimension of the Bloch ball be not necessarily three. We analyze bipartite state spaces where each of the components has a d-dimensional Euclidean ball as state…