New informatic dogmas in quantum foundations

PIRSA ID: 22120018
Event Type: Seminar
Scientific Area(s):
Quantum Foundations
End date:
Speaker(s):
  • Isaac Friend, University of Oxford

In the new wave of quantum foundations activity with its indirect approach to problems of fundamental ontology, individual explicit positions of informational immaterialism are replaced by a shared "soft informatic realism" that governs research practice, encouraging conflation of theories of information processes and theories of physical processes, and disregard for the microphysical dynamics effecting a given information process.  This kind of abstraction, indispensable in the formulation of enlightening no-go theorems, can become problematic when imported to certain other projects, including recently popular investigations of quantum causal structure.  I shall provide examples, describe ramifications for the efficiency of knowledge production in quantum foundations, and consider when features of quantum information processing can legitimately be called informatic features of quantum physics.

Zoom link:  https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93415836509?pwd=MXJLZVVzMnZjcWFQSWM0dmg5czE3dz09