Paper detail

Notes on the firewall paradox, complexity, and quantum theory

We investigate what it means to apply the solution, proposed to the firewall paradox by Harlow and Hayden, to the famous quantum paradoxes of Schödinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend if ones views these as posing a thermodynamic decoding problem (as does Hawking radiation in the firewall paradox). The implications might point to a relevance of the firewall paradox for the axiomatic and set theoretic foundations underlying mathematics. We reconsider in this context the results of Benioff on the foundational challenges posed by the randomness postulate of quantum theory. A central point in our discussion is that one can mathematically not naturally distinguish between computational complexity (as central to the approach of Harlow and Hayden and further developed by Susskind) and proof theoretic complexity (since they represent the same concept on a Turing machine), with the latter being related to a finite bound on Kolmogorov entropy (due to Chaitin incompleteness).