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

Aerts, Diederik; Beltran, Lester

doi:10.1007/s10699-019-09633-4

Cited by 17 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 107 publications

(141 reference statements)

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“…We consider as an example again the first text we examined in [ 1 ], namely the Winnie the Pooh story entitled ‘In Which Piglet Meets a Haffalump’ [ 32 ].…”

Section: Words As the Quanta Of Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…We tested the two statistics, Bose–Einstein and Maxwell–Boltzmann, on many different texts representing stories, short stories, and long stories of the size of novels. We observed that time and again a Bose–Einstein distribution yielded a perfect fit, whereas the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution never came even close to a fitting distribution [ 1 ]. The reader may have noticed that in the ‘Example Text’ we have also underlined the words Sound and Food .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We wish in this article to continue working on our finding in [ 1 ], which was preceded by an initial examination in [ 4 ], and which consists in considering ‘words as the quanta of human language’. Hence, the ground of our motivation is the perspective that ‘human language and its words’ are similar to ‘ideal gases and their atoms or molecules’ and also to ‘electromagnetic radiation and its photons’.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hence, the ground of our motivation is the perspective that ‘human language and its words’ are similar to ‘ideal gases and their atoms or molecules’ and also to ‘electromagnetic radiation and its photons’. With respect to the first comparison, that of human language with an ideal gas consisting of bosonic atoms or molecules, we already investigated aspects of this similarity in [ 1 ]. More concretely, we compared the bosonic statistical structure we discovered in human language with the situation of a gas of bosonic atoms close to the Bose–Einstein condensate of this gas [ 5 , 6 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Section 2 , we give one of the examples of a text for which we determined the Bose–Einstein distribution in [ 1 ]. With respect to the second comparison, that of human language and its words with electromagnetic radiation and its photons, we will examine it in Section 3 , using in part a historical account in which Max Planck and Albert Einstein in particular played a prominent role.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Aerts¹,

Beltran²

2021

Entropy

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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.

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“…We consider as an example again the first text we examined in [ 1 ], namely the Winnie the Pooh story entitled ‘In Which Piglet Meets a Haffalump’ [ 32 ].…”

Section: Words As the Quanta Of Human Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%