Speaker
Description
Although there are good reasons to believe that quantum states are sometimes relativized to observers, there are difficulties for the view that quantum states can only be relativized to conscious macroscopic observers, and also for the view that quantum states can be relativized to any physical system. In this talk, I will argue for an alternative `emergence' approach such that we can indeed write down a description relative to any physical system, but the full formalism of quantum theory emerges only in the limit as the reference system becomes large. If this is true, it poses a challenge for attempts to understand the emergence of the classical regime from the quantum world, since our standard quantum descriptions may presuppose a classical system to which they are relativized. I will describe how this idea might give new insight into Extended Wigner's Friend paradoxes and the measurement problem, and then sketch some ideas for how we might generalize beyond quantum mechanics to characterize descriptions relative to other kinds of reference systems.
