Quantum social science

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Quantum social science is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research which draws parallels between quantum physics and the social sciences. Although there is no settled consensus on a single approach, [1] a unifying theme is that, while the social sciences have long modelled themselves on mechanistic science, they can learn much from quantum ideas such as complementarity and entanglement. Some authors are motivated by quantum mind theories that the brain, and therefore human interactions, are literally based on quantum processes, while others are more interested in taking advantage of the quantum toolkit to simulate social behaviours which elude classical treatment. Quantum ideas have been particularly influential in psychology but are starting to affect other areas such as international relations and diplomacy in what one 2018 paper called a "quantum turn in the social sciences". [2] [3]

Contents

History

The idea that quantum physics might play an important role in living systems has long been considered by physicists. Niels Bohr for example believed that his principle of complementarity extended into both biology and psychology, [4] while Erwin Schrödinger wrote in his 1944 book What is Life? of a "quantum theory of biology" that saw genetic mutations in terms of quantum leaps. In his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind , Roger Penrose hypothesized that quantum mechanics plays an essential role in human consciousness. His 1994 follow-up book Shadows of the Mind speculated that these quantum processes take place in microtubules inside neurons.

Some physicists have also been willing to consider an even more direct connection between mind and quantum matter, in a quantum version of panpsychism. In his 1975 book Disturbing the Universe, Freeman Dyson wrote that "mind is already inherent in every electron, and the processes of human consciousness differ only in degree but not in kind from the processes of choice between quantum states". [5] David Bohm's 1951 book Quantum Theory included a chapter on "Analogies to Quantum Processes" where he considered applications including the understanding of thought processes, [6] and in 1990 he published a paper named "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter" which asserts that consciousness permeates all forms of matter. [7] These ideas were popularised and extended by Danah Zohar in books including The Quantum Self [8] and (with Ian Marshall) The Quantum Society. [9] Karen Barad's 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway took "Niels Bohr's philosophy-physics" as a starting point to develop her theory of agential realism. [10]

Beginning in the 1990s, a separate approach to quantum social science was taken by a number of interdisciplinary researchers, working in what became known as quantum cognition, who argued that quantum probability theory was better than classical probability theory at accounting for a range of cognitive effects of the sort studied in behavioral economics. [11] [12] [13] Others worked on developing "weak" or "generalised" versions of quantum theory which extended concepts such as complementarity and entanglement to the social domain. [14] [15] In their 2013 book Quantum Social Science, Emmanuel Haven and Andrei Khrennikov developed mathematical formalisms for the application of quantum models to topics including psychology, economics, finance, and brain science. [16]

Most researchers in areas such as quantum cognition view the quantum formalism solely as a mathematical toolbox, and do not assume that human cognition is physically based on quantum mechanics. Separately however, researchers in quantum biology have uncovered evidence of quantum effects being exploited in processes such as photosynthesis and avian navigation; and some authors, notably political scientist Alexander Wendt, have argued that human beings are literally what he calls "walking wave functions". [17]

Core ideas

While quantum social scientists are divided on the question of whether social processes are physically quantum in nature, or just happen to be amenable to a quantum approach, there are a number of common ideas, themes, and concerns. The most fundamental is that, since its inception, social science has been based on a classical worldview, which needs to be updated in accordance with the teachings of quantum physics. In particular, quantum theory disputes key tenets or assumptions of the social sciences, which according to Wendt include materialism, determinism, and mechanism. [18] [ dubious – discuss ]

An example is the notion of entanglement. In mechanistic or pre-quantum science, particles are seen as individual entities that interact only in a mechanistic sense. In quantum mechanics, particles such as electrons can become entangled so that a measurement on one instantly affects the state of the other. In quantum social science, people are similarly entangled, whether through shared institutions such as language, or (according to some interpretations) through actual physical processes. [17] An implication is that people are never completely separable, but are entangled elements of society.

Another example is the idea of wave function collapse. In standard interpretations of quantum physics, a particle is described by a wave function, and attributes such as position or momentum are only discovered through a measurement procedure which collapses the wave function to one of a number of allowed states. In quantum social science, mental states are best described as potentialities that "collapse" only when a judgement or decision is made. [19] One consequence of wave function collapse in physics is that a measurement affects the system being studied, and therefore any future measurement. A corresponding phenomenon in social science is the so-called order effect, where responses to survey questions depends on the order in which they are asked. [20]

Applications

Ideas from quantum physics have long inspired thinkers in areas such as politics, diplomacy, and international relations. The journalist Flora Lewis spoke of the "Quantum Mechanics of Politics" in 1975. [21] In a 1997 lecture on "Diplomacy in the Information Age", former US Secretary of State George P. Shultz credits the physicist Sidney Drell for coining the term "quantum diplomacy" to describe how diplomats need to account for uncertainty and the fact that "the process of observation itself is a cause of change". [22] In a 2011 paper, James Der Derian proposed quantum diplomacy as a way to understand the entanglements brought about by a globalized media and a multiplicity of actors operating at different levels. [23] These ideas have been a theme of Der Derian's annual Q-Symposium since 2014. In a 2018 address to the Trilateral Commission, Danah Zohar argued that a mechanistic worldview has led to problems from inequality to climate change, and that we need to shift to a quantum perspective which incorporates effects such as uncertainty and entanglement. [24]

While Wendt's 2015 book Quantum Mind and Social Science [17] does not focus on political science, it does discuss the applicability of quantum theory to social systems in general, and its publication led to a great deal of analysis and discussion on this topic. [25] [26] [27] Other related areas where quantum ideas are seeing applications include quantum game theory, quantum decision theory, quantum finance and quantum economics. In a 2019 article for the Bretton Woods Committee, Andrew Sheng wrote that "A quantum paradigm of finance and the economy is slowly emerging, and its nonlinear, complex nature may help the design of a future global economy and financial architecture." [28]

Criticism

Quantum social science is contested by critics, who argue that it is inappropriately importing ideas from quantum physics to the social domain. [29] [30] [31] The most common criticism is that due to quantum decoherence, quantum effects are filtered out at the macroscopic level, so cannot affect social systems. The physicist Max Tegmark for example has argued that brains cannot sustain quantum coherence. [32]

A related topic of controversy is whether quantum science should be applied to social systems only in a metaphorical sense, or whether it should be taken as a physical description of those systems. [33] [34] This in turn relates to a broader debate in the sciences about scientific realism, which applies also to quantum physics. [1]

Related Research Articles

The Copenhagen interpretation is a collection of views about the meaning of quantum mechanics, stemming from the work of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others. The term "Copenhagen interpretation" was apparently coined by Heisenberg during the 1950s to refer to ideas developed in the 1925–1927 period, glossing over his disagreements with Bohr. Consequently, there is no definitive historical statement of what the interpretation entails.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum mechanics</span> Description of physical properties at the atomic and subatomic scale

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that describes the behavior of nature at and below the scale of atoms. It is the foundation of all quantum physics, which includes quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum information</span> Information held in the state of a quantum system

Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both the technical definition in terms of Von Neumann entropy and the general computational term.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum entanglement</span> Correlation between quantum systems

Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon of a group of particles being generated, interacting, or sharing spatial proximity in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics.

An interpretation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to explain how the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics might correspond to experienced reality. Although quantum mechanics has held up to rigorous and extremely precise tests in an extraordinarily broad range of experiments, there exist a number of contending schools of thought over their interpretation. These views on interpretation differ on such fundamental questions as whether quantum mechanics is deterministic or stochastic, local or non-local, which elements of quantum mechanics can be considered real, and what the nature of measurement is, among other matters.

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The many-minds interpretation of quantum mechanics extends the many-worlds interpretation by proposing that the distinction between worlds should be made at the level of the mind of an individual observer. The concept was first introduced in 1970 by H. Dieter Zeh as a variant of the Hugh Everett interpretation in connection with quantum decoherence, and later explicitly called a many or multi-consciousness interpretation. The name many-minds interpretation was first used by David Albert and Barry Loewer in 1988.

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Alexander Wendt is an American political scientist who is one of the core social constructivist researchers in the field of international relations, and a key contributor to quantum social science. Wendt and academics such as Nicholas Onuf, Peter J. Katzenstein, Emanuel Adler, Michael Barnett, Kathryn Sikkink, John Ruggie, Martha Finnemore, and others have, within a relatively short period, established constructivism as one of the major schools of thought in the field.

In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr regarded as an essential feature of the theory. The complementarity principle holds that certain pairs of complementary properties cannot all be observed or measured simultaneously, for examples, position and momentum or wave and particle properties. In contemporary terms, complementarity encompasses both the uncertainty principle and wave-particle duality.

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In quantum mechanics, a quantum eraser experiment is an interferometer experiment that demonstrates several fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, including quantum entanglement and complementarity. The quantum eraser experiment is a variation of Thomas Young's classic double-slit experiment. It establishes that when action is taken to determine which of 2 slits a photon has passed through, the photon cannot interfere with itself. When a stream of photons is marked in this way, then the interference fringes characteristic of the Young experiment will not be seen. The experiment also creates situations in which a photon that has been "marked" to reveal through which slit it has passed can later be "unmarked." A photon that has been "unmarked" will interfere with itself once again, restoring the fringes characteristic of Young's experiment.

Abner Eliezer Shimony was an American physicist and philosopher. He specialized in quantum theory and philosophy of science. As a physicist, he concentrated on the interaction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He authored many works and research on complementarity in quantum entanglement as well as multiparticle quantum interferometry, both relating to quantum coherence. He authored research articles and books on the foundations of quantum mechanics. He received the 1996 Lakatos Prize for his work in philosophy of science. Shimony is also the author of Tibaldo and the Hole in the Calendar, a 1998 children's book about the calendar reform that has been translated into many languages.

The quantum mind or quantum consciousness is a group of hypotheses proposing that local physical laws and interactions from classical mechanics or connections between neurons alone cannot explain consciousness, positing instead that quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition that cause nonlocalized quantum effects, interacting in smaller features of the brain than cells, may play an important part in the brain's function and could explain critical aspects of consciousness. These scientific hypotheses are as yet unvalidated, and they can overlap with quantum mysticism.

Dipankar Home is an Indian theoretical physicist at Bose Institute, Kolkata. He works on the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics, including quantum entanglement and Quantum communication. He is co-author with Partha Ghose of the popular book Riddles in your Teacup - Fun with Everyday Scientific Puzzles.

Quantum cognition uses the mathematical formalism of quantum probability theory to model psychology phenomena when classical probability theory fails. The field focuses on modeling phenomena in cognitive science that have resisted traditional techniques or where traditional models seem to have reached a barrier, and modeling preferences in decision theory that seem paradoxical from a traditional rational point of view. Since the use of a quantum-theoretic framework is for modeling purposes, the identification of quantum structures in cognitive phenomena does not presuppose the existence of microscopic quantum processes in the human brain.

A black hole firewall is a hypothetical phenomenon where an observer falling into a black hole encounters high-energy quanta at the event horizon. The "firewall" phenomenon was proposed in 2012 by physicists Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully as a possible solution to an apparent inconsistency in black hole complementarity. The proposal is sometimes referred to as the AMPS firewall, an acronym for the names of the authors of the 2012 paper. The potential inconsistency pointed out by AMPS had been pointed out earlier by Samir Mathur who used the argument in favour of the fuzzball proposal. The use of a firewall to resolve this inconsistency remains controversial, with physicists divided as to the solution to the paradox.

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ER = EPR is a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles are connected by a wormhole and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.

Emmanuel Haven is an academic, author and researcher. He previously held a personal Chair at the University of Leicester (UK) and is currently full professor and the Dr. Alex Faseruk Chair in Financial Management at the Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University.

References

  1. 1 2 Höne, K. E. (27 April 2017). "Quantum Social Science". Oxford Bibliographies.
  2. ↑ de Freitas, E.; Sinclair, N. (2018). "The Quantum Mind: Alternative Ways of Reasoning with Uncertainty" (PDF). Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Education. 1 (3): 271–283. Bibcode:2018CJSMT..18..271D. doi:10.1007/s42330-018-0024-1.
  3. ↑ Pan, Chengxin (2020-09-28). "Enfolding wholes in parts: quantum holography and International Relations". European Journal of International Relations. 26 (1_suppl): 14–38. doi:10.1177/1354066120938844. hdl: 10536/DRO/DU:30143429 . ISSN   1354-0661.
  4. ↑ Bohr, N. (1933). "Light and Life". Nature. 131 (3308): 421–423. Bibcode:1933Natur.131..421B. doi: 10.1038/131421a0 .
  5. ↑ Dyson, F. (1979). Disturbing the Universe. Basic Books. pp. 168–172.
  6. ↑ Bohm, D. (1951). Quantum Theory. Prentice Hall.
  7. ↑ Bohm, D. (1990). "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter". Philosophical Psychology. 3 (2): 271–286. doi:10.1080/09515089008573004.
  8. ↑ Zohar, D. (1990). The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics . William Morrow.
  9. ↑ Zohar, D.; Marshall, I. (1993). The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics, and a New Social Vision. Bloomsbury.
  10. ↑ Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. p. 24.
  11. ↑ Aerts, D.; Aerts, S. (1994). "Applications of quantum statistics in psychological studies of decision processes". Foundations of Science. 1: 85–97. doi:10.1007/BF00208726.
  12. ↑ Khrennikov, A. (1999). "Classical and Quantum Mechanics on Information Spaces with Applications to Cognitive, Psychological, Social, and Anomalous Phenomena". Foundations of Physics. 29 (7): 1065–1098. doi:10.1023/A:1018885632116. S2CID   122919181.
  13. ↑ Busemeyer, J.R. (2013). "Introduction to Quantum Probability for Social and Behavioural Scientists". In Rudolph, L. (ed.). Qualitative Mathematics for the Social Sciences: Mathematical Models for Research on Cultural Dynamics. Routledge. pp. 75–103.
  14. ↑ Atmanspacher, H.; Römer, H.; Walach, H. (2002). "Weak Quantum Theory: Complementarity and Entanglement in Physics and Beyond". Foundations of Physics. 32 (3): 379–406. doi:10.1023/a:1014809312397. S2CID   118583726.
  15. ↑ Walach, H.; von Stillfried, N. (1994). "Generalised Quantum Theory: Basic Idea and General Intuition; A Background Story and Overview". Axiomathes. 21 (2): 185–209. doi: 10.1007/s10516-010-9145-5 . S2CID   54848009.
  16. ↑ Haven, E.; Khrennikov, A. (2013). Quantum Social Science. Cambridge University Press.
  17. 1 2 3 Wendt, A. (2015). Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge University Press.
  18. ↑ Wendt, A. (2006). "Social Theory as Cartesian Science: An Auto-Critique from a Quantum Perspective". In Guzzini, S.; Leander, A. (eds.). Constructivism and International Relations: Alexander Wendt and his Critics. Routledge. pp. 181–219.
  19. ↑ Busemeyer, J. R.; Bruza, P. (2012). Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision. Cambridge University Press.
  20. ↑ Wang, Z.; Solloway, T.; Shiffrin, R. S.; Busemeyer, J. R. (2014). "Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 111 (26): 9431–6. Bibcode:2014PNAS..111.9431W. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1407756111 . PMC   4084470 . PMID   24979797.
  21. ↑ Lewis, F. (6 November 1983). "The Quantum Mechanics of Politics". New York Times.
  22. ↑ Shultz, G. P. (30 January 1998). "Diplomacy, Wired". Hoover Digest.
  23. ↑ Der Derian, J. (2011). "Quantum Diplomacy, German–US Relations and the Psychogeography of Berlin". The Hague Journal of Diplomacy. 6 (3–4): 373–392. doi:10.1163/187119111X598152.
  24. ↑ Zohar, D. (16 November 2018). "Talk at the David Rockefeller Fellows Lunch - 42nd European Meeting of the Trilateral Commission".
  25. ↑ Fuller, S. (2018). "A quantum leap for social theory". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 48 (2): 177–182. doi:10.1111/jtsb.12166.
  26. ↑ Arfi, B.; Kessler, O. (2018). "Forum Introduction: Social Theory Going Quantum-Theoretic? Questions, Alternatives and Challenges". Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 47 (1): 67–73. doi: 10.1177/0305829818779510 .
  27. ↑ Katzenstein, P. J. (2018). "The Second Coming? Reflections on a Global Theory of International Relations". The Chinese Journal of International Politics. 11 (4): 373–390. doi: 10.1093/cjip/poy012 .
  28. ↑ Sheng, Andrew (July 2019). "A New Bretton Woods Vision for a Global Green New Deal". Revitalizing the Spirit of Bretton Woods: 50 Perspectives on the Future of the Global Economic System. Bretton Woods Committee. pp. 360–367.
  29. ↑ Waldner, D. (2017). "Schrödinger's Cat and the Dog That Didn't Bark: Why Quantum Mechanics is (Probably) Irrelevant to the Social Sciences". Critical Review. 29 (2): 199–233. doi:10.1080/08913811.2017.1323431. S2CID   148580024.
  30. ↑ Donald, MJ. (2018). "We are not walking wave functions. A response to "Quantum Mind and Social Science" by Alexander Wendt". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 48 (2): 157–161. doi:10.1111/jtsb.12162.
  31. ↑ Little, D. (2018). "Entangling the social: Comments on Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science". Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 48 (2): 167–176. doi:10.1111/jtsb.12165. hdl: 2027.42/144305 .
  32. ↑ Tegmark, M. (2000). "Why the Brain Is Probably Not a Quantum Computer". Information Sciences. 128 (3): 155–179. doi:10.1016/S0020-0255(00)00051-7.
  33. ↑ Arfi, B. (2018). "Challenges to a Quantum-Theoretic Social Theory". Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 47 (1): 99–113. doi: 10.1177/0305829818781691 .
  34. ↑ Murphy, M.P.A. (2012). "Analogy or Actuality? How Social Scientists Are Taking the Quantum Leap". Quantum Social Theory for Critical International Relations Theorists. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 37–57.
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