Much of my current work focuses on developing quantum social science in general. I believe the outcome of this new science will be a fundamental rethinking of our relationship with nature as a whole.
The argument of my 2015 book, Quantum Mind and Social Science, is essentially that social science—all of my previous work as well—is based on a flaw. Since the birth of social science over 150 years ago, we have accepted that the mind and society obey the familiar laws of classical physics. Since we know that on the macroscopic surface, other macroscopic objects like tables and chairs obey these laws, why shouldn’t humans, who are macroscopic, also obey them?
However, there have long been doubts that the Newtonian mechanics of moving planets and pulleys can tell us much about humans, not simply because we are more complex. The problem is that we are also subjects—not only that, but also living, conscious “objects” that experience reality in the first person. And so far, despite centuries of effort, no one has found even a remotely plausible classical solution to the mind-body problem—that is, how the material world, as defined by classical physics and neuroscience, could possibly give rise to consciousness. The strongest possibility, in my opinion, is from Jerry Fodor, a leading philosopher of mind, who summarizes the state of the field as follows (on page 17):
“No one has the slightest idea how a material thing could be conscious. No one even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea how a material thing could be conscious. Too much for the philosophy of consciousness.”
Of course, this doesn’t make the standard approach to social science wrong, because it’s still possible for someone to solve the mind-body problem in classical terms. But Fodor doesn’t imply much that will happen anytime soon, and in the meantime, social scientists are stuck with a worldview that gives us weak theories and deep philosophical debates.
Quantum theory provides such an alternative. Since the early 20th century, we’ve known that classical physics has disintegrated at the subatomic level and should be replaced by the bizarre, counterintuitive findings of quantum theory. Philosophers have debated for decades what quantum “strangeness” tells us about the nature of reality. But most agree that “non-trivial” quantum phenomena—things that are distinctly different from the predictions of classical physics and therefore justify a different framework for study—are mostly confined to subatomic particles. Above this level, interesting quantum effects are thought to statistically “disappear” (a process known as “divergence”), and classical physics of tables and chairs takes over. If so, this justifies a classical social science, even if the fundamental physics is quantum. But then we return to consciousness, a macroscopic phenomenon that seems to have no classical explanation…
Quantum consciousness theory posits that the deep structure of the brain allows subatomic quantum processes to filter upward and manifest themselves as consciousness and/or as reality at the macroscopic level. According to orthodoxy, which is impossible due to inconsistency, the theory is highly controversial—and therefore, in making it the foundation of my social ontology, I am not only being straightforward but also “going off the line.” However, the hypothesis that the mind is quantum solves a number of long-standing philosophical problems in one fell swoop, and I would argue that makes it “too elegant to be true.” In the last decade, there has been a growing body of empirical evidence for this idea from two scientific fields.
One of these is quantum decision theory in psychology, which shows that using quantum theory to model human cognition can make sense of the famous “Kahneman-Tversky” anomalies of “irrational” human behavior (specifically Busemeyer and Bruza’s Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision). The other evidence comes, quite unexpectedly, from quantum biology, showing that plants, birds, and some other organisms (so far) utilize non-trivial, macroscopic quantum processes for survival. If plants and birds can do that, then wouldn’t we expect humankind to preserve such a valuable trick, and if there’s something amplifying it, wouldn’t we expect them to? While it’s too early to give a positive answer, looking at the sciences from physical to biological and human, I see an explosion of interest in everything quantum. Where do you think today’s 19th-century social sciences will be in history? 🙂
Let me give two examples of how what seems like purely philosophical differences between two perspectives can, on the ground, create very different pictures, first for the individual and then for society. Even though it’s difficult to predict our behavior and we may feel like conscious subjects, the classical approach ultimately says that each of us is a deterministic material object—a robot or a zombie. After all, predicting the weather is also difficult, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the result of a deterministic material process. As for the feeling of emotional consciousness, some leading materialists have concluded that consciousness (and freedom of will) must be an “illusion” due to inadequacies they cannot explain (acknowledging). From a quantum perspective, there is no need to abandon the “illusions” of free will and consciousness. Rather than deterministic machines, humans are “walking wave functions” with the freedom to choose who we will be at any given moment. As for feeling like a subject, in the collapse of the wave function, quantum physics provides a framework for the projection of consciousness to the quantum scale (an ontology known as panpsychism); this then elevates quantum brains to the human level. These are controversial ideas, but controversial compared to what—is this consciousness an illusion? When orthodoxy has run itself into the ditch, as some mainstream philosophers have concluded, it is time for heterodox and even radical thinking.
Returning to our picture of society, the fundamental assumption of the classical approach is that individuals, like all other macroscopic objects, are 100% separable, physically distinct things, and this is logical on the surface. Each of us seems to be entirely covered in our own skin, so that nothing about our bodies (which, according to the classical view, is only the brain), including our minds, is inherently or intrinsically connected to others. Of course, we are connected to each other in many causal ways, but (according to this view) not intrinsically or logically. Ultimately, we are all alone.
The consequence of the classical assumption of separability that I am arguing is a view of the human condition as individualistic and competitive, where conflict is the default environment (most famously as in Hobbes’s state of nature), and therefore the challenge is to cooperate in the face of the human condition. However, even when people cooperate, the classical picture of society remains reductionist because it is still composed of separate individuals.
This individualistic view of society is so deeply ingrained that you might wonder what the problem is. Firstly, there’s an intuition on the other side that, despite being supposedly entirely separable, there seem to be many ways in which who we are cannot be separated from others: teacher/student, wife/husband, citizen/foreigner, master/slave, etc. If consciousness is quantum, then this apparent inseparability has a physical basis; that is, like all other organisms, our senses intertwine with our environment quantum mechanically, and so do each other’s minds through language.
In short, the quantum mind is not entirely confined within the skull, but is connected to the world around it in a non-local way. This doesn’t guarantee that people will always cooperate; it all depends on how much chaos there is in a given situation. (War could still exist in a quantum world). But it puts our thinking about society into a much more holistic framework, so that it makes sense to think of people not as separable parts in a machine, but as pixels in a hologram. In my view, such social unity is appealing not only philosophically, because it is true, but also politically, because it is more likely to bring people together in the task of saving the planet and, with it, our descendants, a task more urgent than individualism.
This is the argument of Quantum Mind and Social Science, and I defend it in several articles responding to criticisms of the book’s publication line. However, while I hope you will read (and enjoy!) the book, the real task going forward is to begin to “quantify” the social sciences. By this, I mean the current societal structure…