What Do Black Holes Teach Us About Wigner's Friend?

TL;DR

This paper explores the analogy between black hole paradoxes and Wigner's Friend scenarios, suggesting that the former supports relational and retrocausal interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Contribution

It analyzes the connection between black hole paradoxes and Wigner's Friend scenarios, proposing that black hole paradoxes favor relational and retrocausal views.

Findings

Black hole paradoxes support relational interpretations of quantum mechanics.

They also suggest the plausibility of retrocausality in quantum scenarios.

The analogy influences interpretations of Wigner's Friend experiments.

Abstract

Recently, Hausmann and Renner have pointed out that several famous paradoxes relating to black holes have a similar character to various Extended Wigner's Friend paradoxes. In this paper I consider what the connection between these things could teach us about the Wigner's Friend scenarios. I argue that if we take the analogy between these cases seriously, the black hole paradoxes appear to favour a certain class of response to the Wigner's Friend scenario - specifically, those which posit intrinsic relationality, rather than effective and emergent relationality, and also those which posit some kind of retrocausality.