“Not the Measurement Problem’s Problem: Black Hole Information Loss with Schrödinger’s Cat”

Saakshi Dulani (Johns Hopkins University)

Abstract: Recently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the black hole information loss discourse and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Though I share their distaste over the philosophical bias, I disagree with their strategy of still privileging certain interpretations of quantum theory. I argue that information-restoring solutions can be interpretation-neutral because the manifestation of non-unitarity in Hawking’s original derivation is unrelated to what’s found in collapse theories or generalized stochastic approaches, thereby decoupling the two puzzles.