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Information Causality, the Tsirelson Bound, and the 'Being-Thus' of Things

Cuffaro, Michael E. (2017) Information Causality, the Tsirelson Bound, and the 'Being-Thus' of Things. [Preprint]

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Abstract

The principle of `information causality' can be used to derive an upper bound---known as the `Tsirelson bound'---on the strength of quantum mechanical correlations, and has been conjectured to be a foundational principle of nature. To date, however, it has not been sufficiently motivated to play such a foundational role. The motivations that have so far been given are, as I argue, either unsatisfactorily vague or appeal to little if anything more than intuition. Thus in this paper I consider whether some way might be found to successfully motivate the principle. And I propose that a compelling way of so doing is to understand it as a methodological generalisation of Einstein's principle of the mutually independent existence---the `being-thus'---of spatially distant things. In particular I first describe an argument, due to Demopoulos, to the effect that the so-called `no-signalling' condition can be viewed as a generalisation of Einstein's principle that is appropriate for an irreducibly statistical theory such as quantum mechanics. I then argue that a compelling way to motivate information causality is to in turn consider it as a further generalisation of the Einsteinian principle that is appropriate for a theory of communication. I describe, however, some important conceptual obstacles that must yet be overcome if the project of establishing information causality as a foundational principle of nature is to succeed.

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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Cuffaro, Michael E.mike@michaelcuffaro.com
Keywords: Tsirelson Bound, Information Causality, Mutually Independent Existence, Popescu-Rohrlich Boxes, Super-quantum correlations
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Computation/Information > Quantum
Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
General Issues > Structure of Theories
Depositing User: Dr. Michael Cuffaro
Date Deposited: 13 Sep 2017 16:36
Last Modified: 13 Sep 2017 16:36
Item ID: 13421
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Computation/Information > Quantum
Specific Sciences > Physics > Quantum Mechanics
General Issues > Structure of Theories
Date: 12 September 2017
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/13421

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