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Updating the Born rule
Despite the tremendous empirical success of quantum theory there is still
widespread disagreement about what it can tell us about the nature of the
world. A central question is whether the theory is about our knowledge of
reality, or a direct statement about reality itself. Regardless of their stance
on this question, current interpretations of quantum theory regard the Born
rule as fundamental and add an independent state-update (or "collapse") rule to
describe how quantum states change upon measurement. In this paper we present
an alternative perspective and derive a probability rule that subsumes both the
Born rule and the collapse rule. We show that this more fundamental probability
rule can provide a rigorous foundation for informational, or "knowledge-based",
interpretations of quantum theory.Comment: 6+2 pages; 3 figure
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