Human memory experiments appear to be generating "nonlocal" effects cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007}. In this paper the possibility that words might be entangled in human semantic space is seriously entertained. This approach leads to a very natural picture of the way in which context might affect word association via the standard interpretation of quantum measurement. Two possible scenarios for testing such a hypothesis are suggested, both based upon potential violations of the CHSH inequality.
Human memory experiments appear to be generating "nonlocal" effects cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007}. In this paper the possibility that words might be entangled in human semantic space is seriously entertained. This approach leads to a very natural picture of the way in which context might affect word association via the standard interpretation of quantum measurement. Two possible scenarios for testing such a hypothesis are suggested, both based upon potential violations of the CHSH inequality.
Understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing the production of meaning in the processing of natural language is critical for designing safe, thoughtful, engaging, and empowering human-agent interactions. If meaning is constituted rather than retrieved, then the search for context-independent features or circuits in the pursuit of mechanistic interpretability may be fundamentally limited. Experiments in cognitive science and social psychology have demonstrated that human semantic processing exhibits contextuality more consistent with quantum logical mechanisms than classical Boolean theories, and recent works have found similar results in large language models---in particular, clear violations of the Bell inequality in experiments of contextuality during interpretation of ambiguous expressions. In this work, we explore the CHSH ∣S∣ parameter---the metric associated with the inequality---across the inference parameter space of models spanning four orders of magnitude in scale and cross-reference our findings with MMLU, hallucination rate, and nonsense detection benchmarks. We find that the interquartile range of the ∣S∣ distribution is completely orthogonal to all external benchmarks, while overall violation rate shows weak anticorrelation with all three benchmarks. We investigate how ∣S∣ varies with sampling parameters and word order, and discuss the information-theoretic constraints that genuine contextuality imposes on prompt injection defenses and its human analogue, whereby careful construction and maintenance of social contextuality can be carried out at scale, shaping the space of possible interpretations before any particular one is reached. We consider the implications for mechanistic interpretability and how genuine contextuality sets an information-theoretic bound on the decomposability of semantic processing.
A connection between quantum theory and human memory came out of cybernetics research in the early 1950s (von Foerster, 1950). It was not until modelling the activation of a word in human memory did the connection begin to appear in mainstream psychological literature. Target word activation was speculated as being similar to quantum entanglement because the target word and its associative network were being activated “in synchrony,” the core intuition behind the “spooky-action-at-a-distance” formula (Nelson et al ., 2003). This chapter begins by developing a quantum-like model of the human mental lexicon and compares it against other memory models. Specific attention is paid to how these models describe the activation of a word in memory in the context of the extra- and intra-list cuing tasks. The chapter then covers how quantum theory can be applied to model human semantic space. The human mental lexicon A mental lexicon refers to the words that comprise a language, and its structure is defined here by the associative links that bind this vocabulary together. Such links are acquired through experience and the vast and semi-random nature of this experience ensures that words within this vocabulary are highly inter-connected, both directly and indirectly through other words. For example, the word planet becomes associated with earth, space, moon , and so on, and within this set, moon can become linked to earth and star . Words are so associatively interconnected with each other they meet the qualifications of a “small world” network wherein it takes only a few associative steps to move from any one word to any other in the lexicon (Steyvers & Tenenbaum, 2005).
Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007} suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model the activation level of words in human memory.
We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell’s inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the ‘Cirel’son bound’ for all of the considered corpuses of documents.
We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell's inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the 'Cirel'son bound' for all of the considered corpuses of documents.
This work aims at exploring whether the nonlocal correlations due to quantum entanglement could exist without nonlocal causation. This is done with the aid of a toy model which is based on a simple but decidedly unorthodox physical hypothesis: the nonlocally correlated outcomes of the wavefunction collapse of two entangled particles is driven by an exchange of information between them. Of course exchange of information between spacelike separated entities is forbidden in 3+1 space-time, thus we can wonder whether or not a way out could be found by invoking the existence of some hidden field propagating in an extra time dimension to make the mentioned exchange of information occurring at finite velocity through this extra dimension. Only the description of the wavefunction collapse would be affected by the existence of this extra-time dimension. The model proposed here is defined by borrowing Bohm-Bub’s proposal to describe the wavefunction collapse by means of nonlinear (non-unitary) dynamical equations and then elaborating this approach for an entangled system. The model so obtained is just speculative without any claim of being robust against any criticism, nevertheless, it satisfies the purpose of giving the possibility to the hypotheses formulated above to be verified experimentally; in fact, it makes the proposal of an experiment potentially interesting which would otherwise be immediately dismissed as manifestly trivial. The proposed experiment would consist of checking the possible violation of Bell’s inequality between two identical but independent systems under appropriate conditions. Beyond its theoretical interest, entanglement is a key topic in quantum computing and quantum technologies, so any attempt to gain a deeper understanding of it could be useful.