CEFISES Seminar: MEPHISTO, George Webster, “‘It from Bit’ as a Critical Idealist Proposal: A Neo-Kantian Approach to Quantum Information”

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/@CEFISES

Series: MEPHISTO

Speaker: George Webster (Worcester College, Oxford, United Kingdom)

Title: “It from Bit” as a Critical Idealist Proposal: A Neo-Kantian Approach to Quantum Information

Abstract

Despite its influence among physicists and others working in quantum foundations, John Archibald Wheeler’s “it from bit” thesis has received relatively little philosophical attention, and it is by no means obvious what view it is supposed to communicate. Drawing on the work of Ernst Cassirer, I advance a neo-Kantian interpretation, according to which the thesis expresses the claim not that physical reality is or is reducible to information, but that the objects of scientific cognition conform to the forms of such cognition. Since every object of scientific experience (every “it”) is conceptually structured, the results of quantum information theory are shaped by information-theoretic concepts (“bits”). I argue that interpreting Wheeler in this way affords a more robust alternative to the typical quasi-Berkeleyan reading of his view, and that doing so allows us to recover Cassirer’s largely neglected analysis of quantum theory, and to extend his account into the domain of quantum information.