The Open Systems View

Abstract

There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is always described in terms of a coupling between it and a separate system, which taken together are isolated. There is an alternative, the open systems view, according to which systems interacting with their environment are conceived of as fundamental, and the environment's influence is represented via the dynamical equations that govern the system of interest's evolution. In this paper we propose (although the formalism is not original to us) a theoretical framework which we call the general quantum theory of open systems (GT), within which one can make sense of the dynamics of open quantum systems in fundamental terms, and we argue that the open systems view, as formalized in GT, is fundamental in quantum theory.