An Epistemic View of Quantum Communication

Abstract

This paper presents an epistemological perspective on quantum communication between parties that highlights the choices that must be made in order to send and obtain information. The notion of information obtained in such a communication is a property associated with the observers and while dependent on the nature of the physical system its fundamental basis is epistemic. We argue that the observation process is in accord with the principle of psychophysical parallelism that was used by Bohr, von Neumann, Schrodinger and others to establish the philosophical basis of complementarity but has since fallen out of fashion. This principle gave coherence to the original Copenhagen Interpretation without which the latter has come to have some sort of an ad hoc character.