Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Preface to a quantum social science
- Part I Quantum theory and its interpretation
- Part II Quantum consciousness and life
- Part III A quantum model of man
- 8 Quantum cognition and rational choice
- 9 Agency and quantum will
- 10 Non-local experience in time
- Part IV Language, light, and other minds
- Part V The agent-structure problem redux
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Quantum cognition and rational choice
from Part III - A quantum model of man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Preface to a quantum social science
- Part I Quantum theory and its interpretation
- Part II Quantum consciousness and life
- Part III A quantum model of man
- 8 Quantum cognition and rational choice
- 9 Agency and quantum will
- 10 Non-local experience in time
- Part IV Language, light, and other minds
- Part V The agent-structure problem redux
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Of the three faculties of subjectivity, the empirical case for quantum cognition is the strongest. In the past decade a rapidly growing body of scholarship has emerged at the intersection of mathematical psychology and physics that not only models cognition in explicitly quantum terms, but has rigorously tested these models as well. While it remains to be seen how mainstream psychologists will respond, “quantum decision theory” has clearly come of age. Moreover, at the same time an almost completely independent literature has emerged on quantum game theory as well. This work is more in a purely formal vein and thus less well tested against real data, although its predictions about how people should behave in quantum games appear to conform to what experimental game theorists have found. I briefly take up quantum game theory at the end of this chapter, but my main focus will be on its decision-theoretic cousin.
Quantum consciousness theory suggests that human beings are literally walking wave functions. Most quantum decision theorists would not go that far, and indeed – perhaps wary of controversy – they generally barely mention quantum consciousness, and then only to emphasize that they are making no claims about what is going on deep inside the brain (much less about consciousness), but are only interested in behavior. Instead, they have motivated their work in two other ways. First, they have highlighted the intuitive fit between quantum theory's indeterminism and the probabilistic character of human behavior. If we were founding the social sciences today and started – without metaphysical prejudice – by looking for useful models in physics, then quantum models would be a much more obvious import than classical ones. Second, quantum decision theorists have argued that their model can explain long-standing anomalies in human behavior under uncertainty. Beyond that they have remained agnostic about quantum consciousness, which makes quantum decision theory a form of what is called “weak” or “generalized” quantum theory, in which the formalism is detached from its physical basis and used simply as a tool to describe phenomena.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Quantum Mind and Social ScienceUnifying Physical and Social Ontology, pp. 154 - 173Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015