Quantum Cognition?

A lot of researchers and experts in other fields have tried to use various principles in physics in their own field. Economics have tried to invent something called Econophysics, to varying degree of success. And certainly many aspects of biology are starting to incorporate quantum effects.

Quantum mechanics has been used notoriously in many areas, including crackpottish application by the likes of Deepak Chopra etc. without really understanding the underlying physics. I don't know if this falls under the same category, but the news report out of The Atlantic doesn't do it any favor. I'm reading this article on quantum cognition, in which human behavior, and certain unpredictability and irrationality of human behavior, may be attributed to quantum effects!

Now, the reason why I don't think this article is that good is because it makes a number of either misleading, or strange errors.

Take, for example, the classic prisoner’s dilemma. Two criminals are offered the opportunity to rat each other out. If one rats, and the other doesn’t, the snitch goes free while the other serves a three-year sentence. If they both rat, they each get two years. If neither rats, they each get one year. If players always behaved in their own self-interest, they’d always rat. But research has shown that people often choose to cooperate.

Classical probability can’t explain this. If the first player knew for sure that the second was cooperating, it would make most sense to defect. If the first knew for sure that the second was defecting, it would also make most sense to defect. Since no matter what the other player is doing, it’s best to defect, then the first player should logically defect no matter what.

A quantum explanation for why player one might cooperate anyway would be that when one player is uncertain about what the other is doing, it’s like a Schrödinger’s cat situation. The other player has the potential to be cooperating and the potential to be defecting, at the same time, in the first player’s mind. Each of these possibilities is like a thought wave, Wang says. And as waves of all kinds (light, sound, water) are wont to do, they can interfere with each other. Depending on how they line up, the can cancel each other out to make a smaller wave, or build on each other to make a bigger one. If “the other guy’s going to cooperate” thought wave gets strengthened in a player’s mind, he might choose to cooperate too.

So you tell me if that made any sense or if this person has actually understood QM beyond what he read in a pop-science book. First of all, when wave cancellation occurs, it doesn't "make a smaller wave". It makes NO wave at that instant and time. Secondly, this person is espousing the existence of some kind of a "thought wave" that hasn't been verified, and somehow, the thought waves from the two different prisoners overlap each other (this, BTW, can be described via classical wave pictures, so why quantum picture in invoked here?).

But the fallacy comes in the claim that there is no other way to explain why different people act differently here without invoking quantum effects. Unlike physics systems where we can prepare two systems identically, we can find no such thing in human beings (even  with twins!). Two different people have different backgrounds and "baggage". We have different ethics, moral standards, etc. You'll never find two identical systems to test this out. That's why we have 9 judges on the US Supreme Court, and they can have wildly differing opinions on the identical issue! So why can't they use this to explain why people react differently under this same situation? Why can't they find the answer via the human psychology rather than invoking QM?

But it gets worse...

The act of answering a question can move people from wave to particle, from uncertainty to certainty. In quantum physics, the “observer effect” refers to how measuring the state of a particle can change the very state you’re trying to measure. In a similar way, asking someone a question about the state of her mind could very well change it. For example, if I’m telling a friend about a performance review I have coming up, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, if she asks me “Are you nervous?” that might get me thinking about all the reasons I should be nervous. I might not have been nervous before she asked me, but after the question, my answer might become, “Well, I am now!”

Of course, this smacks of the crackpottery done in "The Secret". Let's get this straight first of all, especially those who do not have a formal education in QM. There is no such thing as "wave-particle duality" in QM! QM/QFT etc. describe the system via a single, consistent formulation. We don't switch gears going from "wave" to "particle" and back to "wave" to describe things things. So the system doesn't move "from wave to particle", etc. It is the nature of the outcome that most people consider to be "wave-like" or "particle-like", but these are ALL produced by the same, single, consistent description!

The problem I have with this, and many other areas that tried to incorporate QM, is that they often start with the effects, and then say something like "Oh, it looks very much like a quantum effect". This is fine if there is an underlying, rigorous mathematical description, but often, there isn't! You cannot says that an idea is "complimentary" to another idea the same way position and momentum observables are non-commuting. The latter has a very set of rigorous mathematical rules and description. To argue that "... quantum models were able to predict order effects shown in 70 different national surveys... " is not very convincing because in physics, this would be quite unconvincing. It means that there are other factors that come in that are not predictable and can't be accounted for. What is there to argue that these other factors are also responsible for the outcome?

Again, the inability to test this out using identical systems makes it very difficult to be convincing. Human behavior can be irrational and unpredictable. That is know. Rather than considering this to be the result of quantum effects, why not consider this to be the result of a chaotic behavior over time, i.e. all of the various life experiences that an individual had all conspire to trigger the decision that he/she makes at a particular time. The "butterfly effect" in an individual's time line can easily cause a particular behavior at another time. To me, this is as valid of an explanation as any.

And that explanation is purely classical!

Zz.

Postmodernism, The Physicist, and The Porn Star

{Don't miss our nomination period to nominate your most attractive physicists}

When was the last time you read an article that has, in one shot, something about creative writing, postmodernism, a physicist, and a porn start trying to change career? Well now you have!

This article is lamenting the state of creative writing classes, and that they no longer teach you how to write, but now teach you how to think. But worse still, they inflict on postmodernism ideas onto students.

The trouble with creative writing classes in the modern university is they do not teach writing. As anyone who has suffered through one of these classes knows, they are nebulous attempts at inculcating students with the values of today's postmodernists -- most importantly, pretension. Pop-cultural analysis, pop-psychology, and pop-philosophy are discussed, while how to write a compelling sentence is not. Rules of capitalization and punctuation are ignored probably because they are vestiges of neocolonial homophobic sexism.

Now, as someone who didn't take creative writing in college, I have no idea if this is true, or if this is universally practiced in all schools. So I'd like to hear from someone who knows more about this than I do. Still, the mention of the word "postmodernism" cannot evade the infamous Alan Sokal that managed to throw a pie in the face at that discipline.

Social Text's editors published the article in 1996 and soon after Sokal revealed it was a hoax, proving that certain branches of academia today are unable to distinguish nonsense from fashionable nonsense. This stems from the fact that relativism forms the intellectual bedrock of the humanities today. Because attempts at discovering truths are derided as antediluvian, substance and argumentation are relegated, while servility to the gatekeepers takes on supreme value. This is why we get such fashionable nonsense, and, unfortunately, this is exactly what Lorelei Lee will both teach and be taught.

Ah, such fun!

Zz.

What Is Worse Than A "Lost Soul"? An Ignorant Lost Soul!

Here's a hint to a freshman English/Journalism major: when you are trying to shore up support for your cause, it is always not a good idea to make a side-swipe at something else that is irrelevant to your point. Not only will you alienate those who could potentially support what you are trying to do, but it makes your case looks WEAK since you are trying to strengthen your case by putting down others, more so when it is done based on utter ignorance of what the others actually do!

This "writer" of an "independent" college newspaper (at least it was independent when I was a student at UW-Madison many years ago) is trying to argue why the study of humanities should be supported. I have zero issues with that. But his argument on why it should be supported took a nasty and condescending attitude towards the sciences, which of course, got my goat!

Today it seems like the emphasis put on math and science in our country has made students satisfied with learning by sitting in lecture and simply regurgitating facts on multiple-choice Scantrons in a mindless Dark Age of their own. Either that or the encouragement math and science students get has warranted their claims that students like myself studying the humanities are “lost souls” or that their degrees are “worthless.”

With math and science majors, their degrees make them highly qualified to many employers because those fields are directly related to the profitable technology industry. These types of students get through college studying the Krebs cycle and the calculus of motion only to reiterate it for their professors on their exams before forgetting it weeks later when a couple thirsty Thursdays wipe their memories clear, leaving them space for new information. Sure, they can dazzle with Darwin’s theory and calculate quantum physics, but in the area of critical thinking, they seem to be lacking.

Holy bunch of crap, Batman!

I won't tackle that issue with students and scientists only regurgitating what they have been taught, because I've already addressed this issue in one of my entries on "Imagination without knowledge is ignorance waiting to happen", and this guy certainly has a LOT of ignorant imagination, for a freshman! Now, the issue of "critical thinking" is something that I've mentioned many times on here, because it is the MAIN reason why I believe that more people should be studying physics/sciences because it emphasize critical and systematic approach to thinking and solving problems, and not just related to science problems. It is the impetus for my series on revamping the introductory undergraduate physics laboratories. I've even given specific examples on how the skill of thinking systematically can be acquired via studying physics and trying to work through a physics problem.

The author here is confusing between rote skills that one also need to be able to work through a problem in math and physics, and the analytical thinking skills that one can acquire when doing such problems. He seems to only see the former. The domain of "critical thinking" isn't a monopoly of the humanities. In fact, I would say that a large part of the sciences does nothing but critical thinking. How else can one explain how major shift in our understanding of the world we live in has occurred? To be able to understand some of the most complex and complicated phenomena in the world require such critical thinking, and not simply regurgitating what has been taught or known! It is why the boundary of our knowledge continues to expand!

In addition to that, even the humanities are coat-tailing on the sciences, especially physics. One only needs to look at various principles of physics that have been adapted into various fields of humanities, highlighted by the bastardization of physics by post-modernism.

Make your argument on why the study of humanities is important today, why it is a necessary component of a civilized society. Don't try to show your importance by taking a swipe at others. It only makes you look like a bitter and angry politician!

Zz.