Logic Meets Wigner’s Friend (and their Friends)

Abstract

We take a fresh look at Wigner’s Friend thought-experiment and some of its more recent variants and extensions, such as the Frauchiger-Renner (FR) Paradox. We discuss various solutions proposed in the literature, focusing on a few questions: What is the correct epistemic interpretation of the multiplicity of state assignments in these scenarios? Under which conditions can one include classical observers into the quantum state descriptions, in a way that is still compatible with traditional Quantum Mechanics? Under which conditions can one system be admitted as an additional ‘observer’ from the perspective of another background observer? When can the standard axioms of multi-agent Epistemic Logic (that allow “knowledge transfer” between agents) be applied to quantum-physical observers? In the last part of the paper, we propose a new answer to these questions, sketch a particular formal implementation of this answer, and apply it to obtain a principled solution to Wigner Friend-type paradoxes.