CONTEXTUAL OBJECTIVITY AND THE QUANTUM FORMALISM

Observation and Quantum Objectivity

Observation and Quantum Objectivity

The paradox of Wigner’s friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated agents with resources for predicting and explaining what happens in the physical world— not conscious observations of it. Even in Wigner’s friend scenarios, di¤...

A Contextual Quantum-Based Formalism for Population Dynamics

Population ecology is mainly based on nonlinear equations of the Lotka-Volterra type, which provide mathematical models for describing the dynamics of interacting species. However, for many interacting populations, these equations entail complex dynamical behavior and unpredictability, generating such difficulties and problematical situations as illustrated by the “paradox of the plankton” and ...

The Quantum Formalism and the GRW Formalism

The Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory of spontaneous wave function collapse is known to provide a quantum theory without observers, in fact two different ones by using either the matter density ontology (GRWm) or the flash ontology (GRWf). Both theories are known to make predictions different from those of quantum mechanics, but the difference is so small that no decisive experiment can as yet...

On Classical and Quantum Objectivity

We propose a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between observables and operators in mechanics. To do so, we introduce a postulate that establishes a correspondence between the objective properties permitting to identify physical states and the symmetry transformations that modify their gauge dependant properties. We show that the uncertainty principle results from a faithf...