________________________________ Dear Hans and FIS colleagues, Thanks for the elegant text! It marks a great beginning for the FIS tradition of celebrating a Lecture with the New Year!
Not being very conversant with QM interpretations let me restrict myself to general aspects of QBism that grab my attention. First, about the reinterpretation of the relationship between subject and object. In my own views, as discussed in the recent Xian meeting, self-production and communication (signaling) should go hand with hand in the definition of the basic informational entities. The way these two aspects interlock and how inferences are made by the informational entity strongly reminds me the reappraisal of human experience proposed by QBism. How should we contemplate the necessarily social dimension of human knowledge? The quotations in the text and those from Schrodinger and Freud in Ref. 2 are excellent. About that, in middle 90's I worked (following maverick K.P. Collins) on "the automatization of knowledge within central nervous systems". I think some of those ideas are still valid and in strong sync with these Bayesian inspired views. The intrinsic duality of knowledge was one of the outcomes. Information in QM, whatever the interpretation, becomes itself a big word. Technically, Quantum Information Science has become a pan-inclusive term also encompassing Q Computing. Let me put a minor question then: would "QBism" become the most natural framework for "Qbitsm"? Or perhaps the "subjective" understanding of qubits might not be totally compatible with their applied use in quite definite computations? But it is really a minor thing. What I most like of this new quantum approach is the radicalism regarding meaning, experience, knowledge, science... This is good news for the people who sees information science as an occasion to contemplate anew the relationship of the individual with the increasing stock of knowledge accumulated by our civilization, where the ratio of our individual experience to the total is acceleratedly approaching zero!, and where the blind spots of collective intelligence are shining in too many areas of global life... It is healthy that the explicit limitation of the individual is also a message contained in QBism, at least in my understanding --seemingly, one of the proponents of QBism, Robert Spekkens, has developed some of the fundamental characteristics of QTheory by imposing a "knowledge balance principle" on the bits that a limited observer can exchange with its environment. In comparison with other interpretations, there is QBism's good sense (Occam's razor) in not "multiplying the universes" just to save a theory, like the many-worlds interpretation does. Probably, as John says, there is something visceral in how realist and antirealist positions are taken, or in how the Bayesian or the frequentist approach to probability are taken. In any case, we have a lot to gain in information science by staying closer and cooperating with our Q Information colleagues, particularly with this new QBism interpretation. Altough these topics are really difficult, we should try to connect... at least I promise to re-read the references and get more to the point during next weeks. Thanks again for your brilliant opening lecture Hans, in the best style. Hopefully there will be great continuators too in the coming years. ---Pedro
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