Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality
The original Wigner's friend paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friendThe 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.And, from the article: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.But what if Wigner was wrong?Well, obviously Wigner is wrong, sorry for being flippant.In this paper (preprint here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.05607.pdf), the magical thinking about consciousness seems to be transmuted into "“Absoluteness of Observed Events” (i.e. that every observed event exists absolutely, not relatively)". 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.In my opinion, both "Absoluteness of Observed Events", and the equivalent from the layman's article, "When someone observes an event happening, it really happened", 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".(by the way, I read the article here: https://theconversation.com/a-new-quantum-paradox-throws-the... because that site doesn't think I'm a robot and then redirects me to the homepage after filling out the captcha)