On the Conceptuality Interpretation of Quantum and Relativity Theories

Abstract

How can we explain the strange behavior of quantum and relativistic entities? Why do they behave in ways that defy our intuition about how physical entities should behave, considering our ordinary experience of the world around us? In this article, we address these questions by showing that the comportment of quantum and relativistic entities is not that strange after all, if we only consider what their nature might possibly be: not an objectual one, but a conceptual one. This not in the sense that quantum and relativistic entities would be human concepts, but in the sense that they would share with the latter a same conceptual nature, similarly to how electromagnetic and sound waves, although very different entities, can share a same undulatory nature. When this hypothesis is adopted, i.e., when a conceptuality interpretation about the deep nature of physical entities is taken seriously, many of the interpretational difficulties disappear and our physical world is back making sense, though our view of it becomes radically different from what our classical prejudice made us believe in the first place.

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

“…Often we will use 'light' as an example and inspiration of how we will talk and reason about human language where 'concepts' (words), as 'states of the cogniton', are then like 'photons of different energies (frequencies, wave lengths)'. With the new findings we present here, we also make an essential and new step forward in the elaboration of our 'conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory', where quantum particles are the concepts of a proto-language, in a similar way that human concepts (words), are the quantum particles (cognitons) of human language (Aerts, 2009a(Aerts, , 2010a(Aerts, ,b, 2013(Aerts, , 2014Aerts et al, 2018dAerts et al, , 2019c.…”

“…This stimulated the direct study of the 'indistinguishability of photons from different sources', with the finding that 'for photons to behave as indistinguishable bosons neither their frequencies nor their arrival times at the beam splitter can be too different, otherwise they behave as distinguishable quantum particles' (Lettow et al, 2010). What is however most significant for what concerns our take on this, and its value as support of our conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory (Aerts, 2009a(Aerts, , 2010a(Aerts, ,b, 2013(Aerts, , 2014Aerts et al, 2018dAerts et al, , 2019c, is the result of an amazing experiment that was performed in the series of attempts of quantum opticians to create entanglement within linear optics by making use of the interference due to two photon indistinguishability. In this experiment, photons of different frequencies are used to enter the beam splitter, hence given earlier experiments (Lettow et al, 2010), these photons should not behave as indistinguishable bosons, but on the outgoing part of the beam splitter a setup is realized that 'erases' the information about the different frequencies of the incoming photons.…”

Quantum entanglement in physical and cognitive systems: A conceptual analysis and a general representation

“…But nowadays the predictions of quantum theory are no longer put into question, not only as regards entanglement, which has been shown to be preservable over distances of more than a thousand of kilometers (Yin et al, 2017), but also with respect to many other effects predicted by the theory, like the delocalization of large organic molecules (Gerlich et al, 2011), just to cite one. On the other hand, the debate about the profound meaning of the theory never stopped, and in fact has constantly renewed and expanded over the years, so much so that one can envisage this will produce in the end a Copernican-like revolution in the way we understand the nature of our physical reality (Deutsch, 1998;Stapp, 2011;Kastner, 2013;Fuchs, 2017;Aerts et al, 2018). Such debate, however, has not remained confined to physicists or philosophers of science, but also reached new fields of investigation, in particular that of psychology, due to the development of that research domain called 'quantum cognition', which saw its beginnings in the nineties of the last century (Aerts & Aerts, 1995;Aerts et al, 1999;Khrennikov, 1999;Gabora & Aerts, 2002;Atmanspacher et al, 2002;Aerts & Czachor, 2004;Aerts & Gabora, 2005a,b) and borrowed ideas from quantum physics to develop new promising models for a variety of cognitive phenomena, also providing in return interesting insights as regards our understanding of physical systems (Khrennikov, 2010;Busemeyer & Bruza, 2012;Haven & Khrennikov, 2013;Wendt, 2015).…”

“…Many additional arguments can be brought forward in support of the thesis that quantum entities should be considered to be non-spatial, like those following from a study of their temporal behaviors, by means of the notion of sojourn time (Sassoli de Bianchi, 2012), or from an analysis of spins greater than one-half, which cannot be associated with any specific spatial direction (Aerts & Sassoli de Bianchi, 2017), and of course, there are also the many no-go theorems, in particular those of Kochen & Specker (1967), which if taken seriously tell us just that: that quantum entities cannot be depicted as the factual objects connected by laws of Einstein's desiderata, being instead more like entities having an unexpected "conceptual nature," being able to manifest in states having a varying degree of abstractness or concreteness, the more concrete ones being those we usually describe as the classical spatio-temporal objects of our ordinary experience (Aerts et al, 2018).…”

Modeling Meaning Associated with Documental Entities: Introducing the Brussels Quantum Approach

“…Indeed, a strong analogy was established between the operational-realistic description of a physical entity, interacting with a measurement apparatus, and the operational-realistic description of a conceptual entity, interacting with a mind-like cognitive entity (see [2] and the references therein). In that respect, in a recent interpretation of quantum theory the strange behavior of quantum micro-entities, like electrons and photons, is precisely explained as being due to the fact that their fundamental nature is conceptual, instead of objectual (see [3] and the references therein). Considering the success of the quantum formalism in modeling and explaining data collected in cognitive experiments with human participants, it is then natural to assume that a similar approach can be proposed, mutatis mutandis, to capture the information content of large corpora of written documents, as is clear that such content is precisely what is revealed when human minds interact with said documents, in a cognitive way.…”