About the nature of quantum information

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Los Angeles

Congreso; Theoretical and Foundational Problems in Information Studies; 2021

California State University (UCLA)

In the present talk Iwill deal exclusively with the statisticalview of information (different from the semanticview) and, in this framework, with the concept of information within the communicational context (by contrast tothe computational context).Despite remaining confined within these limits, the problems ofinterpretation do not disappear, even when the attention is restricted toShannon´s concept. During the last decades, new interpretivepuzzles have arisen with the advent of quantum information, which combine thedifficulties in the understanding of the concept of information with thewell-known foundational conundrums derived from quantum mechanics itself.Although there were many works on the matter before Benjamin Schumacher?sarticle "Quantum Coding", this is usually considered the first preciseformalization of quantum information theory. In this context, the question ´What is quantum information?´ is still far from having an answer that theentire quantum information community agrees with. The positions about thematter range from those who seem to deny the existence of quantum information,to those who conceive it as a new kind of information completely different fromclassical information. The aim of the present work is to consider somearguments traditionally put forward to support the idea that quantuminformation is qualitatively different from classical information. On the basisof the analysis of those arguments, I will conclude that there are no reasonsto admit the existence of quantum information as qualitatively different fromclassical information: there is only one kind of information, physicallyneutral, which can be encoded by means of classical or of quantum states.