The Heart of an Image: Quantum Superposition and Entanglement in Visual Perception

Arguëlles, Jonito Aerts

doi:10.1007/s10699-018-9547-1

Cited by 18 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This means that the interactions between 'words', which are the boson particles of language in our description, is mainly one of 'quantum superposition' and 'quantum entanglement', or more precisely one of 'overlapping de Broglie wave functions'. This corresponds well with some of our earlier findings, when studying the combinations of concepts in human language, namely that superposition and entanglement are abundant, and the type of entanglement is deep, namely it also violates additionally to Bell's inequality the marginal laws (Aerts, 2009b;Aerts, Broekaert & Gabora, 2011;Aerts & Sozzo, 2011Aerts, Sozzo & Veloz, 2015aAerts et al, 2012Aerts et al, , 2018aAerts et al, ,b,c, 2019aAerts Arguëlles, 2018;Beltran & Geriente, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

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

Aerts¹,

Beltran²

2019

Found Sci

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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.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

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

Aerts¹,

Beltran²

2019

Found Sci

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“…Quantum entanglement in human language was studied within the Brussels approach [1] to quantum cognition [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] by means of psychological experiments on human participants about the way language is used by them, and several aspects of it were researched [15,16,17,18,19]. In the present article we will investigate how quantum entanglement appears in corpuses of documents.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum Entanglement in Corpuses of Documents

Beltran¹,

Geriente²

2018

Found Sci

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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.

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“…Several examples of entanglement in human cognition have been studied in our group in the past [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 ], and we want to bring forward an analysis here that will bring us to the second new insight of this article. Let us briefly review how we showed that the combination of two concepts spontaneously makes ‘entanglement’ emerge, such that it can be illustrated in a simple way that it is a quantum entanglement where Bell’s inequalities are violated.…”

Section: Entropy and Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have named these studies ‘The Google Books Natural Language Processing Study’ and ‘The COCA Natural Language Processing Study’ in Table 2 . In the fifth study in Table 2 , images from ‘Google Images’ were examined for the occurrence of the various images of The Horse Growls , The Horse Whinnies , The Bear Growls , or The Bear Whinnies , respectively, and the statistics generated by this were used to calculate the probabilities needed to fill the terms of the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequalities [ 30 ].…”

Section: Entropy and Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Section 4 we introduce the ‘von Neumann entropy’ in human human language and show how it is greater than zero for single words while the entropy of the total text is zero, thus demonstrating the subadditivity of entropy in human language, very analogous to what takes place for quantum entities. To this end, we use the data from five studies of combinations of words that violate Bell’s inequalities [ 27 ] from previous works by our Brussels research group over the last decade [ 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. This illustrates the second of our new insights, namely that in human language, a text telling a story possesses a lower entropy than each of its words.…”

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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The Heart of an Image: Quantum Superposition and Entanglement in Visual Perception

Cited by 18 publications

References 42 publications

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

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

Quantum Entanglement in Corpuses of Documents

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

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