Mason, Lucy
(2023)
Quantum Darwinism: Redundant Records of Emergence.
[Preprint]
Abstract
Records frequently appear in explanations of the emergence of classicality from quantum mechanics. Quantum Darwinism in particular argues that the interaction between a system and its environment produces redundant records in the environment. The records allow the state of the system to be determined independently by many observers, which is identified as a key criterion for classicality. This models the emergence of the classical world in an information theoretic framework. This differs from the more commonly used standard for emergence in the philosophy of physics literature which relies on the instantiation of classical dynamics, motivated by the focus on the dynamics of the reduced density matrix in quantum decoherence. The goal of this paper is to examine the use of records in quantum darwinism and show how understanding what a record is allows us to relate the information theoretic emergence described by quantum darwinism to the accounts of the emergence which focus on dynamical laws. This tells us why records play such a central role in emergent classicality.
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