Entanglement as a Method to Reduce Uncertainty

In physics, entanglement 'reduces' the entropy of an entity, because the (von Neumann) entropy of, e.g., a composite bipartite entity in a pure entangled state is systematically lower than the entropy of the component sub-entities. We show here that this 'genuinely non-classical reduction of entropy as a result of composition' also holds whenever two concepts combine in human cognition and, more generally, it is valid in human culture. We exploit these results and make a 'new hypothesis' on the nature of entanglement, namely, the production of entanglement in the preparation of a composite entity can be seen as a 'dynamical process of collaboration between its sub-entities to reduce uncertainty', because the composite entity is in a pure state while its sub-entities are in a non-pure, or density, state, as a result of the preparation. We identify within the nature of this entanglement a mechanism of contextual updating and illustrate the mechanism in the example we analyze. Our hypothesis naturally explains the 'non-classical nature' of some quantum logical connectives, as due to Bell-type correlations.

Development of a Thermodynamics of Human Cognition and Human Culture

Inspired by foundational studies in classical and quantum physics, and by information retrieval studies in quantum information theory, we have recently proved that the notions of 'energy' and 'entropy' can be consistently introduced in human language and, more generally, in human culture. More explicitly, if energy is attributed to words according to their frequency of appearance in a text, then the ensuing energy levels are distributed non-classically, namely, they obey Bose-Einstein, rather than Maxwell-Boltzmann, statistics, as a consequence of the genuinely 'quantum indistinguishability' of the words that appear in the text. Secondly, the 'quantum entanglement' due to the way meaning is carried by a text reduces the (von Neumann) entropy of the words that appear in the text, a behaviour which cannot be explained within classical (thermodynamic or information) entropy. We claim here that this 'quantum-type behaviour is valid in general in human cognition', namely, any text is conceptually more concrete than the words composing it, which entails that the entropy of the overall text decreases. This result can be prolonged to human culture and its collaborative entities having lower entropy than their constituent elements. We use these findings to propose the development of a new 'non-classical thermodynamic theory for human cognition and human culture', which bridges concepts and quantum entities and agrees with some recent findings on the conceptual, not physical, nature of quantum entities.

A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language

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 potentially important to human cognition. In the present work, we build on this result, and introduce a powerful radiation quantization scheme for human cognition. We show that the lack of independence of the Bose-Einstein statistics compared to the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics can be explained by the presence of a 'meaning dynamics', which causes words to be attracted to the same words. And so words clump together in the same states, a phenomenon well known for photons in the early years of quantum mechanics, leading to fierce disagreements between Planck and Einstein. Using a simple example, we introduce all the elements to get a better and detailed view of this 'meaning dynamics', such as micro and macro states, and Maxwell-Boltzmann, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac numbers and weights, and compare this example and its graphs, with the radiation quantization scheme of a Winnie the Pooh story, also with its graphs. By connecting a concept directly to human experience, we show that entanglement is a necessity for preserving the 'meaning dynamics' we identified, and it becomes clear in what way Fermi-Dirac addresses human memory. There, in spaces with internal parameters identical words can nevertheless be assigned different states.

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

Quantum structures were identified as relevant for describing situations occurring in human cognition in the domain of quantum cognition and were also fruitfully used in information retrieval and natural language processing in the domain of quantum information theory. In the present article, we build on recent prior work and show that additionally to the already identified quantum structures also quantization is present in human cognition. It appears in the form of the words behaving as quanta of human language, very analogous to how photons behave as quanta of electromagnetic radiation. We illustrate this by showing on an example text that Bose-Einstein statistics provides a perfect model while Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics is totally inadequate. Like the indistinguishability of quantum particles introduces a specific form of entanglement this also happens with words. We investigate this entanglement, compute the von Neumann entropy and the amount of non purity of the density matrices of the words and note that non-locality occurs spontaneously. We interpret these results in terms of the prospect of developing a quantum-inspired thermodynamics for the cultural layer of human society, based on a statistical analysis similar to what we propose in this article.

Quantum Bose-Einstein Statistics for Indistinguishable Concepts in Human Language

We investigate the hypothesis that within a combination of a 'number concept' plus a 'substantive concept', such as 'eleven animals,' the identity and indistinguishability present on the level of the concepts, i.e., all eleven animals are identical and indistinguishable, gives rise to a statistical structure of the Bose-Einstein type similar to how Bose-Einstein statistics is present for identical and indistinguishable quantum particles. We proceed by identifying evidence for this hypothesis by extracting the statistical data from the World-Wide-Web utilizing the Google Search tool. By using the Kullback-Leibler divergence method, we then compare the obtained distribution with the Maxwell-Boltzmann as well as with the Bose-Einstein distributions and show that the Bose-Einstein's provides a better fit as compared to the Maxwell-Boltzmanns.

Quantum Structure in Cognition: Human Language as a Boson Gas of Entangled Words

We model a piece of text of human language telling a story by means of the quantum structure describing a Bose gas in a state close to a Bose-Einstein condensate near absolute zero temperature. For this we introduce energy levels for the words (concepts) used in the story and we also introduce the new notion of 'cogniton' as the quantum of human thought. Words (concepts) are then cognitons in different energy states as it is the case for photons in different energy states, or states of different radiative frequency, when the considered boson gas is that of the quanta of the electromagnetic field. We show that Bose-Einstein statistics delivers a very good model for these pieces of texts telling stories, both for short stories and for long stories of the size of novels. We analyze an unexpected connection with Zipf's law in human language, the Zipf ranking relating to the energy levels of the words, and the Bose-Einstein graph coinciding with the Zipf graph. We investigate the issue of 'identity and indistinguishability' from this new perspective and conjecture that the way one can easily understand how two of 'the same concepts' are 'absolutely identical and indistinguishable' in human language is also the way in which quantum particles are absolutely identical and indistinguishable in physical reality, providing in this way new evidence for our conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory.

Quantum-theoretic Modeling in Computer Science A complex Hilbert space model for entangled concepts in corpuses of documents

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 the Bell inequalities ('CHSH inequality'), thus indicating the presence of entanglement between the combined concepts. We make use of a recently elaborated 'entanglement scheme' and represent the collected data in the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of the individual concepts, showing that the identified violation is due to the occurrence of a strong form of entanglement, involving both states and measurements and reflecting the meaning connection between the component concepts. These results provide a significant confirmation of the presence of quantum structures in corpuses of documents, like it is the case for the entanglement identified in human cognition.

Quantum Entanglement in 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.

Towards a Quantum World Wide Web

We elaborate a quantum model for the meaning associated with corpora of written documents, like the pages forming the World Wide Web. To that end, we are guided by how physicists constructed quantum theory for microscopic entities, which unlike classical objects cannot be fully represented in our spatial theater. We suggest that a similar construction needs to be carried out by linguists and computational scientists, to capture the full meaning carried by collections of documental entities. More precisely, we show how to associate a quantum-like 'entity of meaning' to a 'language entity formed by printed documents', considering the latter as the collection of traces that are left by the former, in specific results of search actions that we describe as measurements. In other words, we offer a perspective where a collection of documents, like the Web, is described as the space of manifestation of a more complex entity - the QWeb - which is the object of our modeling, drawing its inspiration from previous studies on operational-realistic approaches to quantum physics and quantum modeling of human cognition and decision-making. We emphasize that a consistent QWeb model needs to account for the observed correlations between words appearing in printed documents, e.g., co-occurrences, as the latter would depend on the 'meaning connections' existing between the concepts that are associated with these words. In that respect, we show that both 'context and interference (quantum) effects' are required to explain the probabilities calculated by counting the relative number of documents containing certain words and co-ocurrrences of words.

Testing Quantum Models of Conjunction Fallacy on the World Wide Web

The 'conjunction fallacy' has been extensively debated by scholars in cognitive science and, in recent times, the discussion has been enriched by the proposal of modeling the fallacy using the quantum formalism. Two major quantum approaches have been put forward: the first assumes that respondents use a two-step sequential reasoning and that the fallacy results from the presence of 'question order effects'; the second assumes that respondents evaluate the cognitive situation as a whole and that the fallacy results from the 'emergence of new meanings', as an 'effect of overextension' in the conceptual conjunction. Thus, the question arises as to determine whether and to what extent conjunction fallacies would result from 'order effects' or, instead, from 'emergence effects'. To help clarify this situation, we propose to use the World Wide Web as an 'information space' that can be interrogated both in a sequential and non-sequential way, to test these two quantum approaches. We find that 'emergence effects', and not 'order effects', should be considered the main cognitive mechanism producing the observed conjunction fallacies.