Quantum Mind and Social Science

Professor Alexander Wendt (Ohio State University) presents the argument behind his latest book 'Quantum Mind and Social Sciences' and discusses the idea of humans as walking quantum wave functions.

Professor Alexander Wendt (Ohio State University) joins the Q3 Symposium for a discussion about his latest book 'Quantum Mind and Social Sciences' as well as to present an animated lecture on it.

Q and A: Alexander Wendt on ‘Quantum Mind and Social Science’

C: So that leads to the next question. What is your “quantum model of man”? Is there a way to explain that?

W: I think the best way to think about it is in opposition to the standard, classical model. The orthodox view has always been that human beings are classical mechanical phenomena, which means that the laws of physics apply as Newton and his successors in the 18th and 19th centuries understood them. They thought the laws of classical physics should adequately describe and explain human beings and human behavior.

Classical physics makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of reality. It assumes that all objects have well-defined properties, so they can’t be in contradictory states at the same time. It assumes that causation, the way things happen causally in the world, is through the transfer of energy or contact -- so “a” hits “b,” and “b” ricochets off into the distance.

It assumes that human beings are completely separate individuals, so we’re each encased in a body with a skin, and you can totally separate each of us physically from each other -- including our minds, because our minds are dependent, in the classical view, totally on our brains, and the brains are inside our skins, and therefore they’re completely separate. So it leads to a very atomistic picture of society in which each of us is an atom in society.

But in quantum mechanics all these assumptions, at least at the subatomic level, break down. Subatomic phenomena don’t have definite properties. They can have contradictory properties, or “x” and “not-x” at the same time, or they can be indefinite in their characteristics. You can have what’s called non-local causation, where things can influence other things far far away instantaneously. And most interestingly, subatomic systems can be what’s called entangled, which means that they can’t be defined separate from each other -- they’re not completely separable in a physical sense.

So at the sub-atomic level it’s a holistic world versus an atomistic one, which is really different than what happens at the macroscopic level. The big question for the physicists is what explains the transition from all this sub-atomic weirdness to what we observe classically, such as this stapler hitting this table – which is a classical phenomenon.

So my answer in the book is that, at least when it comes to living creatures -- and human beings specifically -- that the properties of sub-atomic systems ‘scale up” to the macroscopic level, and so we are not classical systems at all. We are giant subatomic ones or what I call “walking wave functions.” We have all the same characteristics that quantum systems have sub-atomically -- we’re non-separable, our brains can be in contradictory states at the same time, and so on.

The interesting thing part of this for me is the non-separable idea, the entanglement notion. The idea there is that even though our bodies are encased in skins and are separate from each other, our minds are entangled through language, and that language, I argue, is a quantum phenomenon that entangles our minds together.

A good example of this, I think, is something that’s been widely remarked upon in the social sciences, the master-slave relationship. You can’t be a master unless you have a slave. That to me is entanglement. It means that the properties of the master cannot be defined except in relation to the properties of the slave, so they’re not completely separable.

In classical physics you should be able to say everything there is to say about being a master as a function of the master’s body, and the slave is over there. But in the quantum world, you can’t define where one thing is without defining its relationship to the other thing. That very common-sense example, I argue, is an example of quantum entanglement through language, the language that defines what a master is and what a slave is.