Extracting Spooky-activation-at-a-distance from Considerations of Entanglement

Following an early claim by Nelson & McEvoy \cite{Nelson:McEvoy:2007} suggesting that word associations can display `spooky action at a distance behaviour', a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. This paper presents a simple quantum model of a word association system. It is shown that a quantum model of word entanglement can recover aspects of both the Spreading Activation equation and the Spooky-activation-at-a-distance equation, both of which are used to model the activation level of words in human memory.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures; To appear in Proceedings of the Third Quantum Interaction Symposium, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol 5494, Springer, 200

Quantum Interaction Approach in Cognition, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

The mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully employed in the last years to model situations in which the use of classical structures gives rise to problematical situations, and where typically quantum effects, such as 'contextuality' and 'entanglement', have been recognized. This 'Quantum Interaction Approach' is briefly reviewed in this paper focusing, in particular, on the quantum models that have been elaborated to describe how concepts combine in cognitive science, and on the ensuing identification of a quantum structure in human thought. We point out that these results provide interesting insights toward the development of a unified theory for meaning and knowledge formalization and representation. Then, we analyze the technological aspects and implications of our approach, and a particular attention is devoted to the connections with symbolic artificial intelligence, quantum computation and robotics.Comment: 10 page

Quantum Structure in Cognition: Why and How Concepts are Entangled

One of us has recently elaborated a theory for modelling concepts that uses the state context property (SCoP) formalism, i.e. a generalization of the quantum formalism. This formalism incorporates context into the mathematical structure used to represent a concept, and thereby models how context influences the typicality of a single exemplar and the applicability of a single property of a concept, which provides a solution of the 'Pet-Fish problem' and other difficulties occurring in concept theory. Then, a quantum model has been worked out which reproduces the membership weights of several exemplars of concepts and their combinations. We show in this paper that a further relevant effect appears in a natural way whenever two or more concepts combine, namely, 'entanglement'. The presence of entanglement is explicitly revealed by considering a specific example with two concepts, constructing some Bell's inequalities for this example, testing them in a real experiment with test subjects, and finally proving that Bell's inequalities are violated in this case. We show that the intrinsic and unavoidable character of entanglement can be explained in terms of the weights of the exemplars of the combined concept with respect to the weights of the exemplars of the component concepts.Comment: 10 page

Quantum Theory and Conceptuality: Matter, Stories, Semantics and Space-Time

We elaborate the new interpretation of quantum theory that we recently proposed, according to which quantum particles are considered conceptual entities mediating between pieces of ordinary matter which are considered to act as memory structures for them. Our aim is to identify what is the equivalent for the human cognitive realm of what physical space-time is for the realm of quantum particles and ordinary matter. For this purpose, we identify the notion of 'story' as the equivalent within the human cognitive realm of what ordinary matter is in the physical quantum realm, and analyze the role played by the logical connectives of disjunction and conjunction with respect to the notion of locality. Similarly to what we have done in earlier investigations on this new quantum interpretation, we use the specific cognitive environment of the World-Wide Web to elucidate the comparisons we make between the human cognitive realm and the physical quantum realm.Comment: 14 page

Quantum Structure in Competing Lizard Communities

Almost two decades of research on applications of the mathematical formalism of quantum theory as a modeling tool in domains different from the micro-world has given rise to many successful applications in situations related to human behavior and thought, more specifically in cognitive processes of decision-making and the ways concepts are combined into sentences. In this article, we extend this approach to animal behavior, showing that an analysis of an interactive situation involving a mating competition between certain lizard morphs allows to identify a quantum theoretic structure. More in particular, we show that when this lizard competition is analyzed structurally in the light of a compound entity consisting of subentities, the contextuality provided by the presence of an underlying rock-paper-scissors cyclic dynamics leads to a violation of Bell's inequality, which means it is of a non-classical type. We work out an explicit quantum-mechanical representation in Hilbert space for the lizard situation and show that it faithfully models a set of experimental data collected on three throat-colored morphs of a specific lizard species. Furthermore, we investigate the Hilbert space modeling, and show that the states describing the lizard competitions contain entanglement for each one of the considered confrontations of lizards with different competing strategies, which renders it no longer possible to interpret these states of the competing lizards as compositions of states of the individual lizards.Comment: 28 page

Quantum computation, quantum theory and AI

The main purpose of this paper is to examine some (potential) applications of quantum computation in AI and to review the interplay between quantum theory and AI. For the readers who are not familiar with quantum computation, a brief introduction to it is provided, and a famous but simple quantum algorithm is introduced so that they can appreciate the power of quantum computation. Also, a (quite personal) survey of quantum computation is presented in order to give the readers a (unbalanced) panorama of the field. The author hopes that this paper will be a useful map for AI researchers who are going to explore further and deeper connections between AI and quantum computation as well as quantum theory although some parts of the map are very rough and other parts are empty, and waiting for the readers to fill in. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

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

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.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure