QBism.org

…is the title of a new popular article by Blake, which just appeared on iai news. In it, Blake says provocatively:

[B]oth Alice and the atom participate in the measurement event; both partake in the creation of a new fact for the pair of them. And if the atom can participate in such ongoing acts of creation when the other player is an agent, surely it can do so when the other player is not. […]

I love that line because it touches on something that sets QBism’s idea of reality apart from all the rest: it is not just dead and inert matter, but matter with an extra dynamic: it must be able to (somehow) “participate” in its own creation. What does that mean? I don’t know yet, but I think we need to start by changing our metaphors.

Traditionally, physics treats the building blocks of reality as things like Lego bricks: the bricks themselves are eternal and immutable, and it is only their reconfiguration into different arrangements that gives rise to dynamics and change. QBism says reality is more like soil: it allows things to grow out of it organically, which are essentially made out of the soil, but the soil itself is changed by the presence of what grows in it.