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

Abstract

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 presence of Bose–Einstein rather than Maxwell–Boltzmann as a statistical structure. In the current article, we set out to provide an explanation for this Bose–Einstein statistics in human language. We show that it is the presence of ‘meaning’ in ‘texts that tell a story’ that gives rise to the lack of independence characteristic of Bose–Einstein, and provides conclusive evidence that ‘words can be considered the quanta of human language’, structurally similar to how ‘photons are the quanta of electromagnetic radiation’. Using several studies on entanglement from our Brussels research group, we also show, by introducing the von Neumann entropy for human language, that it is also the presence of ‘meaning’ in texts that makes the entropy of a total text smaller relative to the entropy of the words composing it. We explain how the new insights in this article fit in with the research domain called ‘quantum cognition’, where quantum probability models and quantum vector spaces are used in human cognition, and are also relevant to the use of quantum structures in information retrieval and natural language processing, and how they introduce ‘quantization’ and ‘Bose–Einstein statistics’ as relevant quantum effects there. Inspired by the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics, and relying on the new insights, we put forward hypotheses about the nature of physical reality. In doing so, we note how this new type of decrease in entropy, and its explanation, may be important for the development of quantum thermodynamics. We likewise note how it can also give rise to an original explanatory picture of the nature of physical reality on the surface of planet Earth, in which human culture emerges as a reinforcing continuation of life.

A Planck Radiation and Quantization Scheme for Human Cognition and Language

“…In this sense, then, we can speak of a “decrease in entropy” and hence an “increase in order” for the entire text, as a consequence of entanglement, relative to the order grasped by individual words. These findings made us think further, and we now believe that it is possible to understand and explain the process we identified in Aerts and Beltran ( 2022 ), from a fundamental analysis about what concepts represent in relation to human experience. Since this new insight about entanglement can also contribute, as we will explain, to a better understanding of what the “meaning dynamics” represents that we introduced and studied in this Section 4, we bring here, as the concluding part of this Section 4, a description of this insight about entanglement.…”

“…We want to end this Section 4 by using a result that we elaborated in a recent publication related to the presence of entanglement in the combination of words in a text because it also sheds light on our analysis of “meaning dynamics” in this Section 4 and the difference between bosons and fermions and language and memory (Aerts and Beltran, 2022 ). We have identified entanglement in human cognition and language and studied various aspects of it in our Brussels research group over the years (Aerts and Sozzo, 2011 , 2014 ; Aerts Arguëlles, 2018 ; Aerts et al, 2018a , b , 2019a , 2021 ).…”

“…We have identified entanglement in human cognition and language and studied various aspects of it in our Brussels research group over the years (Aerts and Sozzo, 2011 , 2014 ; Aerts Arguëlles, 2018 ; Aerts et al, 2018a , b , 2019a , 2021 ). In Aerts and Beltran ( 2022 ) we reflected on all these examples of entanglement together, and showed how in a text of a story entanglement is essentially important in order to make the formulation of the story as precise as possible in terms of content and meaning. We demonstrated this by introducing the von Neumann entropy into human cognition and language, and examined how it is precisely the presence of entanglement that makes the von Neumann entropy of the entire text of the story smaller than the von Neumann entropy of separate words in the text of the story.…”

“…Primarily, it is the structures of the complex vector space of quantum states and the quantum probability model that have been used fruitfully to describe aspects of human cognition. Recently, we have shown that quantum statistics, and more specifically the Bose-Einstein statistics, is also prominently and convincingly present in human cognition, and more specifically in the structure of human language (Aerts and Beltran, 2020 , 2022 ). The presence of the Bose-Einstein statistics in quantum mechanics is associated with the “identity” and “indistinguishability” of quantum particles, and is probably one of the most still poorly understood aspects of quantum reality (French and Redhead, 1988 ; Saunders, 2003 ; Muller and Seevinck, 2009 ; Krause, 2010 ; Dieks and Lubberdink, 2020 ).…”

“…With a focus still primarily on this original motivation, work continued on the identification of a Bose-Einstein-like statistics by one of us, with a PhD student and collaborator, and more and better experimental evidence was collected for the superiority of Bose-Einstein statistics in modeling specific situations in human language as compared to Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics (Aerts et al, 2015 ). However, only by switching to a completely different approach, because the original approach of finding experimental evidence was not fully satisfying, was a layer of insight opened up, showing that the presence of the Bose-Einstein statistics in human cognition and language, makes a new unexplored structure of quantum mechanics important, and perhaps even crucial, to the research field of quantum cognition (Aerts and Beltran, 2020 , 2022 ). The reason we dare to assert this, while being aware of the many aspects that remain to be explored, is because the “radiation and quantization scheme that we were able to identify as uniquely structurally underlying this presence of the Bose-Einstein statistics in human cognition and language” also appears to be the underlying structure of Zipf's law, and its continuous version, Pareto's law (Pareto, 1897 ; Zipf, 1935 , 1949 ).…”