A review and analysis of six extended Wigner's friend arguments

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16220v3
• Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2024 01:22:03 GMT
• Title: A review and analysis of six extended Wigner's friend arguments
• Authors: David Schmid, Yìlè Yīng, Matthew Leifer,
• Abstract summary: Wigner's friend thought experiment was intended to illustrate the difficulty one has in describing an agent as a quantum system. We show that all of the arguments hinge on assumptions about correlations between measurement outcomes that are not accessible to any observer. Although some of these assumptions are not entirely well-motivated, all of the arguments do shed light on the nature of quantum theory.
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• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: The Wigner's friend thought experiment was intended to illustrate the difficulty one has in describing an agent as a quantum system when that agent performs a measurement. While it does pose a challenge to the orthodox interpretation of quantum theory, most modern interpretations have no trouble in resolving the difficulty. Recently, a number of extensions of Wigner's ideas have been proposed. We provide a gentle introduction to six such arguments, modifying the specifics of many of them so that they are as simple and unified as possible. In particular, we show that all of the arguments hinge on assumptions about correlations between measurement outcomes that are not accessible to any observer, even in principle. We then provide a critical analysis of each argument, focusing especially on how well one can motivate the required assumptions regarding these inaccessible correlations. Although we argue that some of these assumptions are not entirely well-motivated, all of the arguments do shed light on the nature of quantum theory, especially when concerning the description of agents and their measurements.

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