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Human Perception as a Phenomenon of Quantization Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Jonito Aerts Arguëlles
For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the ...

A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Lester Beltran
As a result of the identification of 'identity' and 'indistinguishability' and strong experimental evidence for the presence of the associated Bose-Einstein statistics in human cognition and language, we argued in previous work for an extension of the research domain of quantum cognition. In addition to quantum complex vector spaces and quantum probability models, we showed that quantization itself, with words as quanta, is relevant and ...

On the Irreversible Journey of Matter, Life and Human Culture Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Massimiliano Sassoli De Bianchi
Following in the footsteps of Schrödinger, we propose a unified view of matter, life and human culture, with particular emphasis on the role played by the second law of thermodynamics and the primordial matter–antimatter separation. In doing so, we highlight the fragility of ‘construction’ (order) and the robustness of ‘destruction’ (chaos), when they locally and contextually face each other within a same reality layer, and the power of ...

Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Lester Beltran
In previous research, we showed that ‘texts that tell a story’ exhibit a statistical structure that is not Maxwell–Boltzmann but Bose–Einstein. Our explanation is that this is due to the presence of ‘indistinguishability’ in human language as a result of the same words in different parts of the story being indistinguishable from one another, in much the same way that ’indistinguishability’ occurs in quantum mechanics, also there leading to the ...

Violation of the Bell-CHSH inequality and marginal laws in a single-entity Bell-test experiment Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Massimiliano Sassoli De Bianchi
We describe a simple experimental setting where joint measurements performed on a single (classical or quantum) entity can violate both the Bell-CHSH inequality and the marginal laws (also called no-signaling conditions). Once emitted by a source, the entity propagates within the space of Alice’s and Bob’s detection screens, with the measurements’ outcomes corresponding to the entity being absorbed or not absorbed in a given time interval. The ...

A Non‐Spatial Reality Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Massimiliano Sassoli De Bianchi
It is generally assumed, and usually taken for granted, that reality is fully contained in space. However, when taking a closer look at the strange behavior of the entities of the micro-world, we are forced to abandon such a prejudice and recognize that space is just a temporary crystallization of a small theatre for reality, where the material entities can take a place and meet with each other. More precisely, phenomena like quantum ...

Modeling Human Decision-Making: An Overview of the Brussels Quantum Approach Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Massimiliano Sassoli De Bianchi, Sandro Sozzo, Tomas Veloz
We present the fundamentals of the quantum theoretical approach we have developed in the last decade to model cognitive phenomena that resisted modeling by means of classical logical and probabilistic structures, like Boolean, Kolmogorovian and, more generally, set theoretical structures. We firstly sketch the operational-realistic foundations of conceptual entities, i.e. concepts, conceptual combinations, propositions, decision-making entities, ...

Quantum-Theoretic Modeling in Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Diederik Aerts, Lester Beltran, Suzette Geriente, Sandro Sozzo

We work out a quantum-theoretic model in complex Hilbert space of a recently performed test on co-occurrencies of two concepts and their combination in retrieval processes on specific corpuses of documents. The test violated the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell’s inequalities (‘CHSH inequality’), thus indicating the presence of entanglement between the combined concepts. We make use of a recently elaborated ‘entanglement scheme’ and ...