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A review and analysis of six extended Wigner's friend arguments
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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.
Forward citations
Cited by 6 Pith papers
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QBism on Locality and Nonlocality
QBism preserves locality by treating spacetime and probabilities as personal judgments, keeping parameter independence and recasting outcome dependence as ordinary Bayesian updating.
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Adlam's Frame: comment on "Wigner's Frame"
Quantum reference frames do not evade the Wigner's-friend no-go theorems: the proposed resolution alters quantum theory and measures a substituted observable, not the friend's outcome.
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Emergence of Classicality in Wigner's Friend Scenarios
Wigner's Friend effects survive in a quantum-Darwinism decoherence model, but they are confounded by classical ignorance and suppressed as the Friend grows larger.
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Copenhagenish interpretations of quantum mechanics
A common four-postulate definition of Copenhagenish interpretations, plus an analysis showing Wigner's friend variants force such interpretations to forbid combining certain observers' descriptions.
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Intelligent qubits
Wigner's-friend and Frauchiger–Renner paradoxes are attributed to treating non-commuting quantum propositions as Boolean variables and to assuming observers can introspect their own states.
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Are Events Absolute?
Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, under five stated assumptions, contradict the idea that a measurement outcome is an absolute fact shared by all observers.
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