Workshop on Participatory Realism: Why We Are Here

Opening remarks by Christopher A. Fuchs for the Workshop on Participatory Realism, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch, South Africa, 6-8 June 2017. Bill Thisdell, videographer. This work was supported in part by a Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) mini-grant “Why the Quantum? A Video Series” (grant FQXi-MGB-1624), a donor advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

[markv]

1:43: "All my life I've felt like what I was really seeking was an understanding of the word .. world." This is such a gorgeous Freudian slip! Because as far as I understand QBism, the word is the world. In the beginning was the Word. (And that's not a religious statement.)

[chrisg]

"A measurement does not, as the term unfortunately suggests, reveal a pre-existing state of affairs. It is an action on the world by an agent that results in the creation of an utcome - a new experience for that agent. 'intervention might be a better term" (Your paper "An Introduction to QBism with an Application to the Locality of Quantum Mechanics").

 Can we apply this approach to the well-known geometric illusions on paper in which a pair of lines look unequal in length but which measurement "reveals" to be equal? Instead we could say that the measurement makes them equal, intervenes to impose equality upon them, before which we correctly perceived them to differ. The act of lining up a straight edge against the curvy looking parallel lines in the Hering illusion doesn't reveal them to be straight but straightens them out, so they really are curved when we're just looking at them.