Coordinating quantum agents' perspectives: convex operational theories, quantum information, and quantum foundations

TL;DR

This paper explores how convex operational theories can serve as a framework for understanding quantum information, perspectives, and the potential for a unified objective view of quantum mechanics through the coordination of subsystem perspectives.

Contribution

It proposes using quantum information science as a source of axioms within convex operational theories to investigate perspectival information and the possibility of a unified physical view.

Findings

Convex frameworks are suitable for describing perspectival information.

Understanding perspective coordination is key to unifying quantum views.

The approach may shed light on the nature of quantum information and objective reality.

Abstract

In this paper, I propose a project of enlisting quantum information science as a source of task-oriented axioms for use in the investigation of operational theories in a general framework capable of encompassing quantum mechanics, classical theory, and more. Whatever else they may be, quantum states of systems are compendia of probabilities for the outcomes of possible operations we may perform on the systems: ``operational theories.'' I discuss appropriate general frameworks for such theories, in which convexity plays a key role. Such frameworks are appropriate for investigating what things look like from an ``inside view,'' i.e. for describing perspectival information that one subsystem of the world can have about another. Understanding how such views can combine, and whether an overall ``geometric'' picture (``outside view'') coordinating them all can be had, even if this picture is very different in nature from the structure of the perspectives within it, is the key to understanding whether we may be able to achieve a unified, ``objective'' physical view in which quantum mechanics is the appropriate description for certain perspectives, or whether quantum mechanics is truly telling us we must go beyond this ``geometric'' conception of physics. The nature of information, its flow and processing, as seen from various operational persepectives, is likely to be key to understanding whether and how such coordination and unification can be achieved.