Reply to: Quantum mechanical rules for observed observers and the consistency of quantum theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1967, Eugene Wigner proposed a thought experiment to test the range of validity of quantum theory 1 . The experiment features two agents, Wigner and his friend, whom we call Alice (Fig. 1 ). Alice works in a perfectly isolated lab, and her task is to measure an observable X of a quantum system S . Wigner’s task is to analyse the same experiment from the outside, treating Alice’s entire lab as a quantum system. Crucial to this setup is that, when applying quantum theory, the two agents split the world differently into quantum and classical parts—i.e., they choose different ‘Heisenberg cuts’ 2 . Alice only models S as a quantum system and treats the outcome of her measurement X as part of the classical domain, yielding a definite value, x . In contrast, Wigner models Alice’s entire lab as part of the quantum domain, including Alice herself and her memory of the measurement outcome. Hence, for Wigner, Alice’s measurement is a reversible entangling operation between her and S , and x has no definite value. Alice and Wigner’s conclusions regarding x are thus different, although, at this point, they are not strictly contradictory. Fig. 1: Wigner’s friend experiment. The experiment concerns two quantum mechanics, Alice and Wigner. Alice measures a system S and records an outcome x . Alice applies the Heisenberg cut around system S : she treats S as a quantum system but regards herself, her notebook, and the outcome x as classical. Wigner analyses the situation from the outside, applying the Heisenberg cut around Alice’s entire isolated lab: he models Alice, her notebook, her measurement instruments, and everything else in her lab as quantum systems undergoing a global reversible evolution. Full size image
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".