Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
The original Wigner's friend paradox: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend</a><p>The paradox seems to rest on magical thinking about consciousness, and if one simply accepts that a conscious observer can be in a superposition like any other piece of matter, the paradox is resolved.<p>And, from the article:<p><i>For Wigner, this was an absurd conclusion. Instead, he believed that once the consciousness of an observer becomes involved, the entanglement would “collapse” to make the friend’s observation definite.<p>But what if Wigner was wrong?</i><p>Well, obviously Wigner is wrong, sorry for being flippant.<p>In this paper (preprint here: <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf</a>), the magical thinking about consciousness seems to be transmuted into <i>"“Absoluteness of Observed Events” (i.e. that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively)"</i>. The authors (it appears to me) mean by this that if an observer performs an experiment, while this observer is himself in a superposition, we have to regard the outcome of the experiment as absolute (i.e. not in a superposition) because it was made by a (conscious) observer.<p>In my opinion, both "<i>Absoluteness of Observed Events</i>", and the equivalent from the layman's article, "<i>When someone observes an event happening, it really happened</i>", is a disingenuous and confusing way of talking about observers who are in a superposition. We have crossed over from "quantum mechanics is weird" to "these superficially intuitive but clearly false assumptions about quantum mechanics are weird".<p>(by the way, I read the article here: <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the-foundations-of-observed-reality-into-question-144426" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the...</a> because that site doesn't think I'm a robot and then redirects me to the homepage after filling out the captcha)