Riedel, Timotheus
(2024)
Is Quantum Relativism Untameable? Revenge Wigner Arguments for Relative Facts.
[Preprint]
Abstract
Recent no-go theorems for absolute facts in single-world interpretations are widely considered the strongest arguments in favour of ‘quantum relativism’: interpretations according to which measurement results are observer-relative. In this article, however, I show that relativist interpretations are themselves vulnerable to mathematically identical ‘revenge’ theorems, unless they assume a particularly radical form. To this end, a novel distinction between tame and feral varieties of quantum relativism is introduced, where a relativist interpretation counts as tame if and only if it postulates absolute facts about relative facts (absolute facts of second order) and the possibility of communication across perspectives. While at first sight preferable to feral views, tame relativism turns out to be subject to revenge problems: arguments against absolute measurement outcomes can be modified and turned against absolute facts about which outcome a measurement has relative to a particular observer. This observation is developed in detail for the case of the ‘local friendliness’ extended Wigner’s friend theorem. Moreover, it is shown to generalize to absolute facts about the facts that obtain relative to sequences of specified reference systems of arbitrary length. This suggests that only the most radical types of relativist interpretations have a hope of being motivated with recourse to extended Wigner’s friend scenarios.
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