Being and change: foundations of a realistic operational formalism (2002)
| Venue: | in Probing the Structure of Quantum Mechanics: Nonlinearity, Nonlocality, Probability and Axiomatics |
| Citations: | 13 - 12 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Aerts02beingand,
author = {Diederik Aerts},
title = {Being and change: foundations of a realistic operational formalism},
booktitle = {in Probing the Structure of Quantum Mechanics: Nonlinearity, Nonlocality, Probability and Axiomatics},
year = {2002}
}
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Abstract
The aim of this article is to represent the general description of an entity by means of its states, contexts and properties. The entity that we want to describe does not necessarily have to be a physical entity, but can also be an entity of a more abstract nature, for example a concept, or a cultural artifact, or the mind of a person, etc..., which means that we aim at very general description. The effect that a context has on the state of the entity plays a fundamental role, which means that our approach is intrinsically contextual. The approach is inspired by the mathematical formalisms that have been developed in axiomatic quantum mechanics, where a specific type of quantum contextuality is modelled. However, because in general states also influence context – which is not the case in quantum mechanics – we need a more general setting than the one used there. Our focus on context as a fundamental concept makes it possible to unify ‘dynamical change ’ and ‘change under influence of measurement’, which makes our approach also more general and more powerful than the traditional quantum axiomatic approaches. For this reason an experiment (or measurement) is introduced as a specific kind of context. Mathematically we introduce a state context property system as the structure to describe an entity by means of its states, contexts and properties. We also strive from the start to a categorical setting and derive the morphisms between
