Building the Observer into the System: Toward a Realistic Description of Human Interaction with the World

Abstract

Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a~priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's statement, "the theory of the Black Box is merely the theory of real objects or systems, when close attention is given to the question, relating object and observer, about what information comes from the object, and how it is obtained" (Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956, p. 110), I develop here an alternate picture of the world as a black box to which the observer is coupled. Within this framework I prove purely-classical analogs of the "no-go" theorems of quantum theory. Focussing on the question of identifying macroscopic objects, such as laboratory apparatus or even other observers, I show that the standard quantum formalism of superposition is required to adequately represent the classical information that an observer can obtain. I relate these results to supporting considerations from evolutionary biology, cognitive and developmental psychology, and artificial intelligence.

Expanded, published version

References in corpus (17)

• Reference frames, superselection rules, and quantum information
• Quantum Darwinism
• The Free Will Theorem
• Characterizing quantum theory in terms of information-theoretic constraints
• Quantum origins of objectivity
• Constructor Theory of Information
• Objectivity in the Photonic Environment Through State Information Broadcasting
• The Rise and Fall of Redundancy in Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism
• Radiation from a collapsing object is manifestly unitary
• Experimental motivation and empirical consistency in minimal no-collapse quantum mechanics
• No Return to Classical Reality
• Quantum Theory, namely the pure and reversible theory of information
• Amplification, Redundancy, and the Quantum Chernoff Information
• Quantum information becomes classical when distributed to many users
• Quantum Darwinism requires an extra-theoretical assumption of encoding redundancy
• Entanglement for all quantum states
• Decompositional equivalence: A fundamental symmetry underlying quantum theory

Cited by in corpus (2)

• A free energy principle for generic quantum systems
• Some Consequences of the Thermodynamic Cost of System Identification