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arXiv · 2512.23325

The Quantum Rashomon Effect as a Failure of Gluing

Partha Ghose
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Abstract

Recently Szangolies has argued (in the setting of extended Wigner's-friend scenarios) that quantum theory permits ``Rashomon'' situations: multiple internally coherent accounts of events that cannot be combined into a single, consistent global narrative. This note explains why the Rashomon phenomenon can be understood as a \emph{failure of gluing}: local descriptions over different contexts exist, but they do not admit a single global ``all-perspectives-at-once'' description. This is the same mathematical obstruction that underlies modern sheaf-theoretic treatments of contextuality. I then indicate why the same perspective is useful in parts of the social sciences (quantum-like modelling of cognition, judgment, and decision-making), where ``context effects'' can likewise be interpreted as the absence of a single joint probability space.

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Partha Ghose. 2025-12-29. The Quantum Rashomon Effect as a Failure of Gluing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23325

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