QBism Is Not So Simply Dismissed

Barzegar, Ali

doi:10.1007/s10701-020-00347-3

Cited by 8 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…For example, 'A QBist takes quantum mechanics to be a personal mode of thought -a very powerful tool that any agent can use to organize her own experience ... quantum mechanics itself does not deal directly with the objective world; it deals with the experiences of that objective world that belong to whatever particular agent is making use of the quantum theory.' [30] Similarly, Brukner writes of his neo-Copenhagen interpretation that 'measurement records ... can have meaning only relative to the observers; there are no "facts of the world per se,"' [13], Zeilinger emphasizes that 'it is information about possible measurement results that is represented in the quantum states,' [12] and Timpson summarizes the view of Zeilinger as the statement that 'a physical system literally is nothing more than an agglomeration of actual and possible sense impressions arising from observations' [31]. Note that in this article we will use the general term 'perspectives' to refer indiscriminately to all of these similar ontologies -we understand the 'perspective' of an observer to contain relative facts, experiences, consequences, measurement outcomes, effects, or whatever it is that a given orthodox interpretation takes the subject of quantum mechanics to be.…”

Section: Intersubjectivity In Orthodox Interpretationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a similar vein, some QBists have suggested that although SF is not true in QBism, nonetheless we can achieve intersubjective agreement after the fact: 'An agent-dependent reality is constrained by the fact that different agents can communicate their experience to each other ... Bob's verbal representation of his own experience can enter Alice's, and vice-versa. In this way a common body of reality can be constructed, limited only by the inability of language to represent the full flavor ... of personal experience' [30]. However, we have already seen that this is not the case, because QBism can provide no guarantee that M A matches M A B , and M A B could of course represent an instance of verbal communication, e.g.…”

Section: Failures Of Intersubjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…facts about the perspectives of other observers. Second, these approaches often insist that 'an agent-independent reality is constructed through intersubjective testing of the experiences of agents' [30] and that 'our scientific facts are the beliefs of the scientific community. That is, they are types of beliefs that could withstand intersubjective testing.'…”

Section: Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is, they are types of beliefs that could withstand intersubjective testing.' [30] So the idea is that although the basic ontology contains no observer-independent reality, we are supposed to get some sort of emergent external reality by using communication to build up intersubjective agreement.…”

Section: Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does Science need Intersubjectivity? The Problem of Confirmation in Orthodox Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Adlam¹

2022

Preprint

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What must an interpretation of quantum mechanics do in order to be considered viable? We suggest that one vitally important criterion is the following: Any successful interpretation of quantum mechanics must explain how our empirical evidence allows us to come to know about quantum mechanics. That is, an interpretation of quantum mechanics must be able to tell a sensible story about how empirical confirmation works in the context of quantum-mechanical experiments, otherwise the whole project will be self-defeating: we cannot rationally believe an interpretation of a theory which tells us we have no good reason to believe that the theory itself is right, because our only reason for believing the interpretation is our belief that the theory is right!The 'probability problem' and the related problem of confirmation has been much-discussed in the context of the Everett interpretation [1-5], but it is evident that other interpretations which also postulate major changes to our usual ideas about the relationship between observers and reality will be vulnerable to similar objections. In this article, we will focus on the class of interpretations sometimes known as 'orthodox' interpretations [6] or alternatively 'Copenhagenish' interpretations [7]. These are interpretations which posit nothing but 'unitary dynamics to characterize the dynamical evolution of a state vector' and which 'deny that we should think of a system as having an observer-independent state.' [6] Orthodox interpretations differ from the Everett interpretation because they tell us that measurements have unique outcomes, but those outcomes are relativized to an observer. Examples of orthodox interpretations include Copenhagen interpretations [8-10], neo-Copenhagen interpretations [11-17], QBism [18], pragmatic interpretations [19] and some versions of relational quantum mechanics [20] 1 . Certain forms of the 'It from Bit' hypothesis may also fall into this category [22, 23] 2 .It has been observed that interpretations of this kind challenge the standard scientific doctrine of intersubjectivity about measurement outcomes and other macroscopic events [24-28], i.e. they imply that measurements and other macroscopic events will not typically have the same outcome for all macroscopic observers. Proponents of orthodox interpretations have historically taken a rather cavalier attitude toward this fact -for after all, every interpretation of quantum mechanics has some features which appear strange to our classical intuition, so it might seem that orthodox interpretations are no worse off than other approaches in this regard. However, what this discussion overlooks is the fact that intersubjectivity plays a vitally important role in the process of empirical confirmation, and thus the failure of intersubjectivity in orthodox interpretations means that these approaches have serious difficulties in fulfilling the crucial criterion of showing how our empirical evidence could allow us to know about quantum mechanics. This is not just a matter of learning to accept s...

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Section: Intersubjectivity In Orthodox Interpretationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Failures Of Intersubjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Does Science need Intersubjectivity? The Problem of Confirmation in Orthodox Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Adlam¹

2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…The upshot for QBians is that, as far as rational agents are concerned, there is no Schrödinger state evolution between updating events. This is incorrect, because it is founded on a basic misconception about the treatment of time in personalist probability theory [55].…”

Section: Personalist Probabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%