Respecting One's Fellow: QBism's Analysis of Wigner's Friend

TL;DR

This paper uses QBism to resolve Wigner's friend paradoxes by treating all agents equally, emphasizing personal experiences and judgments, and removing paradoxical features in modified thought experiments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that Wigner's friend paradoxes dissolve when both agents are modeled as equals with personal quantum judgments, offering a new perspective within QBism.

Findings

Wigner's action on his friend is reciprocal from the friend's perspective.

Paradoxical features in recent no-go theorems disappear under QBist interpretation.

All agents are on equal footing, with no privileged perspective in quantum theory.

Abstract

According to QBism, quantum states, unitary evolutions, and measurement operators are all understood as personal judgments of the agent using the formalism. Meanwhile, quantum measurement outcomes are understood as the personal experiences of the same agent. Wigner's conundrum of the friend, in which two agents ostensibly have different accounts of whether or not there is a measurement outcome, thus poses no paradox for QBism. Indeed the resolution of Wigner's original thought experiment was central to the development of QBist thinking. The focus of this paper concerns two very instructive modifications to Wigner's puzzle: One, a recent no-go theorem by Frauchiger and Renner, and the other a thought experiment by Baumann and Brukner. We show that the paradoxical features emphasized in these works disappear once both friend and Wigner are understood as agents on an equal footing with regard to their individual uses of quantum theory. Wigner's action on his friend then becomes, from the friend's perspective, an action the friend takes on Wigner. Our analysis rests on a kind of quantum Copernican principle: When two agents take actions on each other, each agent has a dual role as a physical system for the other agent. No user of quantum theory is more privileged than any other. In contrast to the sentiment of Wigner's original paper, neither agent should be considered as in "suspended animation." In this light, QBism brings an entirely new perspective to understanding Wigner's friend thought experiments.