Concepts and Their Dynamics: A Quantum-Theoretic Modeling of Human Thought

TL;DR

This paper presents a quantum-theoretic framework for modeling human concepts, emphasizing quantum effects like contextuality, interference, and entanglement, and explaining their advantages over classical theories in capturing concept dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-inspired model of human concepts that incorporates complex amplitudes and entanglement, offering new insights into concept combination and emergence.

Findings

Quantum effects are integral to human concept dynamics.

Complex amplitudes enable interference effects in concept measurement outcomes.

Quantum modeling explains contextual emergence better than classical theories.

Abstract

We analyze different aspects of our quantum modeling approach of human concepts, and more specifically focus on the quantum effects of contextuality, interference, entanglement and emergence, illustrating how each of them makes its appearance in specific situations of the dynamics of human concepts and their combinations. We point out the relation of our approach, which is based on an ontology of a concept as an entity in a state changing under influence of a context, with the main traditional concept theories, i.e. prototype theory, exemplar theory and theory theory. We ponder about the question why quantum theory performs so well in its modeling of human concepts, and shed light on this question by analyzing the role of complex amplitudes, showing how they allow to describe interference in the statistics of measurement outcomes, while in the traditional theories statistics of outcomes originates in classical probability weights, without the possibility of interference. The relevance of complex numbers, the appearance of entanglement, and the role of Fock space in explaining contextual emergence, all as unique features of the quantum modeling, are explicitly revealed in this paper by analyzing human concepts and their dynamics.