Our central proposal in the book is that general quantum-like principles guide life in totality. By totality, we mean both physical and psychological lives. Our philosophical stance is inclined towards dual-aspect monism, with a psycho-physical neutral reality underlying. However, we observe that such reality cannot be directly represented, or even conceived; only its contextual aspects can be observed. Also, the relation between such contextual aspects (simply put, mind and body) can be complex and multi-layered. We also maintain that quantum-like principles need to be conceived in the atmosphere of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and we turn to this open area of study in the sections below. We observe that in the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in quantum-like framework (QLF) in domains of political science, particularly in international relations (Der Derian and Wendt, 2020 , 2022 ). Scholars observe that Newtonian realism has to be overcome in the social sciences. It is surprising that multiple social sciences, particularly economics, are still visibly influenced by neoclassical realism, where the latter can almost be conceived as applied classical physics. The history of such a neoclassical approach to economic science is complex. Even though Newtonian-Hamiltonian formalism has always influenced equilibrium modelling in economics, some early founders of microeconomics, for example Alfred Marshall ( Cory Jr, 2022 ), thought that biology should be the central motivation for understanding economic life. We have already discussed the bio-cosmology view, which challenges the ergodic hypothesis of classical thermodynamics. In economics, 1 we find many features which are quantum-like and complex-adaptive.
Our central proposal in the book is that general quantum-like principles guide life in totality. By totality, we mean both physical and psychological lives. Our philosophical stance is inclined towards dual-aspect monism, with a psycho-physical neutral reality underlying. However, we observe that such reality cannot be directly represented, or even conceived; only its contextual aspects can be observed. Also, the relation between such contextual aspects (simply put, mind and body) can be complex and multi-layered. We also maintain that quantum-like principles need to be conceived in the atmosphere of complex adaptive systems (CAS), and we turn to this open area of study in the sections below. We observe that in the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in quantum-like framework (QLF) in domains of political science, particularly in international relations (Der Derian and Wendt, 2020 , 2022 ). Scholars observe that Newtonian realism has to be overcome in the social sciences. It is surprising that multiple social sciences, particularly economics, are still visibly influenced by neoclassical realism, where the latter can almost be conceived as applied classical physics. The history of such a neoclassical approach to economic science is complex. Even though Newtonian-Hamiltonian formalism has always influenced equilibrium modelling in economics, some early founders of microeconomics, for example Alfred Marshall ( Cory Jr, 2022 ), thought that biology should be the central motivation for understanding economic life. We have already discussed the bio-cosmology view, which challenges the ergodic hypothesis of classical thermodynamics. In economics, 1 we find many features which are quantum-like and complex-adaptive.
This book had as its main objective to discuss how (quantum) physics concepts could be used in a relevant way in the modeling of a variety of economics/finance and psychology-based processes. For those readers who have come to read this conclusion, without skipping its “backbone,” we would like to say “thank you” for keeping with us until the end. The possible claim, which says that social science driven dynamics would need analyzing with techniques from the natural sciences, may well have been tempered with this book. Although quantum physics as a theory of prediction is one of the most successful theories humankind ever devised, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the number of foundational interpretations of quantum physics is sizable. Consider now the following natural question: “How can a theory with such a wide diversity of foundational interpretations serve to inform and elucidate a non-cognate area of research (like economics or psychology)?” Indeed, we should want to stand upright and write, without hesitation, the words “non-cognate.” No theory in social science can come close to the predictive power of quantum physics. However, very few social science theories are “plagued” by foundational issues of such depth as quantum physics. As an example, consider the issue of why quantum physical wave functions do have to be complex valued. Do physicists have a satisfactory answer to this very basic question? A theory of such predictive power has a partial differential equation, the Schrödinger equation, which cannot be rigorously derived. However, in economics and finance we strive to build theoretical edifices with the utmost respect for rigor.
Is mind quantum-like? Is consciousness quantum physical? Does consciousness have a role to play in the emergence of the classical world from the underlying quantum universe? Or is this dichotomy between classical and quantum an illusion? How can world philosophies enrich our views on these matters and interact with the best scientific theories? These are some questions that motivated us to conceive the current book. We also felt an urgent need to discuss the central philosophical questions haunting the emerging frameworks of quantum cognition and quantum-like framework (QLF). We have observed that there are very good technical or mathematical works being done in the emerging fields of quantum cognition and QLF, but there is still a great need for exploring the underlying and open philosophical questions they demand. Quantum cognition developed as a frontier research programme in understanding various cognitive phenomena that are hard or impossible to describe based on classical cognitive science paradigm. Classical cognitive science draws philosophically and mathematically from classical physics and classical probability theory. For example, cognitive realism thinking is deeply motivated by the scientific realism of classical physics. However, as we explore, there are numerous empirical findings which demonstrate clearly that human mind and cognitive processes exhibit features that are more quantum-like. Central to these features are indeterminacy, context dependence, and complementarity of cognitive phenomena, for example, perception, information retrieval, and even qualia. Many good works in the previous decade have demonstrated the efficacy of quantum-like mathematical modelling in such cases. However, given that efficacy, we cannot simply conclude that mind is quantum. Rather there are features that go beyond what is allowed in standard quantum formalism.
There is an underlying assumption in the social sciences that consciousness and social life are ultimately classical physical/material phenomena. In this ground-breaking book, Alexander Wendt challenges this assumption by proposing that consciousness is, in fact, a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon. In the first half of the book, Wendt justifies the insertion of quantum theory into social scientific debates, introduces social scientists to quantum theory and the philosophical controversy about its interpretation, and then defends the quantum consciousness hypothesis against the orthodox, classical approach to the mind-body problem. In the second half, he develops the implications of this metaphysical perspective for the nature of language and the agent-structure problem in social ontology. Wendt's argument is a revolutionary development which raises fundamental questions about the nature of social life and the work of those who study it.
When the revolutionary conceptual structure for the description of the physical world which we know as quantum mechanics was first formulated nearly 90 years ago, and its predictions tested in the laboratory, most of the experiments in question were on systems which were both very well characterized and reasonably well isolated from their environments, such as single electrons and atoms, small molecules and near-perfect crystalline solids. While from the very start most physicists have taken it for granted that the formalism of quantum mechanics, when combined with appropriate system-specific information, can “in principle” account for all phenomena occurring in the physical world, including those usually regarded as the subject-matter of biology, until quite recently the overwhelmingly majority opinion has been that in a biological context the role of quantum theory is confined to elucidating the equilibrium structures of the relevant molecules and their reaction processes, and that subtle phenomena such as superposition and entanglement, of which we can now routinely exhibit spectacular effects at the level of a few well-isolated photons or atoms, play at most a very indirect role in any phenomena of biological interest. A major reason conventionally given for this view has been that biological systems, at least working ones, are by their very nature “warm and wet” – a phrase which in the physicist's lexicon translates to “prone to massive decoherence”; it looks as though any interesting superposition, say of different energy eigenstates of one's system, would be rapidly decohered by the ever-present, and usually microscopically very complex, environment.
Among philosophers in particular the principle of complementarity has been considered an unreasonable limitation of natural science, and Niels Bohr’s exposition of the inevitability of a statistical description when accounting for atomic phenomena has been regarded as a renouncement directly opposed to the very spirit of scientific investigation. Indeed, fundamental limitations in the range of applicability of the causal spacetime description of physical phenomena do exist, but quantum physics is precisely the generalization of the conceptual frame of classical physics which has converted these limitations into a springboard for investigations which are among the most fruitful in the history of science. Far from raising a barrier for scientific investigation, quantum physics has extended the scope of natural science to a degree that was unimaginable before its advent. Natural science now encompasses such different objects as the constituents of atoms, processes in remote galaxies, and psycho-chemical phenomena in man. Biochemistry and psychopharmacology, for instance, both rely on one of the most important results of quantum physics: the periodical system of the elements, which is fundamental to all modern chemistry. Furthermore atomic physics and chemistry are basic sciences for technology and thus contribute to the continuous development of instruments of observation for all branches of natural science.
In the previous chapter, we referred to dual-aspect monism frames; we observe here that whether the psycho-physically neutral reality in such frames may refer to consciousness is an open question. By consciousness, however, we mean fundamental awareness, not functional consciousness, which is conventionally meant by materialistic or physicalist frames. We will turn to the issue of fundamental consciousness in the next two chapters. In this chapter, we explore possible links between consciousness (fundamental or not) and quantum mechanics (QM), and insights for quantum-like framework (QLF) or psycho-physical reality in general. Consciousness is, by far, the most enigmatic issue to conceptualise in modern science. The mainstream direction is materialism, where consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from matter, which has been given the name the hard problem. Emergence can be of different types, for example, weak and strong (goes by other names like epistemic and ontic or metaphysical, respectively). While in the case of weak emergence, in principle, higher-level descriptions of realities can be reduced to fundamental descriptions, in the strong emergence view, higher-level descriptions of realities have their own effective dynamical laws which are irreducible.