Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology

- This book asks “What are the implications for philosophy if quantum coherence is the physical origin of all life, even of the collective consciousness of a nation?” Wendt says that most philosophy has assumed classical physics, not quantum physics, and that this assumption has always made the nature life and consciousness very mysterious and contentious. He is clear that the physics underlying his hypothesis, though very suggestive, is still quite thin. Yet, he says, even if “quantum mind” turns out to be more metaphorical than physical, it still provides a far better way to resolve the apparent philosophical paradoxes of life and society than today’s dominant theories. And Wendt, a political scientist who took on philosophy from the outside, is very good at elucidating those paradoxes. I only wish he had been better at elucidating the physical evidence for quantum coherence in biological systems.-- But if, like me, you’re not an academically trained philosopher, plan to do a lot of googling of words like ontology, epistemology, epiphenomenalism, supervenience, vitalism, reification, panpsychism, and the like, When I combined Wikipedia with the usage and partial explanations in the text, then it all made sense, at least to someone who has a strong academic and scientific bent. I also googled some of the physics experiments, discovering, as I expected, that sometimes the interpretations were contentious. But with the backing of luminaries like Roger Penrose, this is serious stuff. The other good thing is that when philosophers and physicists do battle on the frontiers of knowledge, they know that they could be wrong and tend to be more respectful of one another than do politicians. In fact, they understand that “proposal and criticism” is a key part of the game.-- With these caveats this book is an excellent introduction to modern philosophy, as well as the basic concepts of quantum mechanics (without any math). As to Wendt’s field of professional expertise (international relations), very little is said, but his ultimate goal is to meet the philosophical needs of social scientists. For example, social scientists customarily use the “intention” of individuals or groups as an explanatory tool, assuming some version of “free will” and “folk psychology”. So is this “intention” really just an illusion, being ultimately explainable by the forces of classical physics acting on molecules, or is it irreducible but emergent from the complexity of a large scale system, or does it have a reality based in quantum physics (the entanglement of myriads of quantum waves which have somehow been combined in a coherent way to reach a human scale)?-- Backing up, what distinguishes life from inorganic matter? Even biologists have great difficulty with this question because somebody can always point out an exception to every proposed rule. But Penrose and Hameroff propose that the microtubules that provide the core structure of every cell are also the locus of the quantum coherence that literally animates the cell. And social experiments demonstrate that quantum decision rules, using superposition of states, often describe actual human choices better than classical logic and probability.-- Thus Wendt’s critique of conventional philosophy provides a powerful impetus toward the development of a new, more open-minded paradigm of how to think about human society. For example, it constitutes a direct assault on “rational economic man” and the “micro-economic” foundations espoused by economists, giving strong backing to behavioral economics and emergent phenomena. This kind of new thinking is especially needed in fields, like economics, which are influenced by powerful societal forces like politics, religion, or ideology.Later addition: The book “Life on the Edge” by scientists McFadden and Al-Khalili throws cold water on the “quantum consciousness” proposed by Penrose. They suggest that brain waves are the medium of consciousness but that this is a macroscopic phenomenon. According to these researchers, the latest studies in quantum biology only show quantum coherence at the microscopic level in very special situations, though still of great significance (making photosynthesis in plants and respiration in animals much more efficient, enabling an exquisite sense of smell, the detection of the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field by some animals, etc.). Yet, as I pointed out above, “quantum mind” still has significant metaphorical value.

Alexnder Wendt has written a book that is informative, insightful and expertly researched. While the title references social science, you might well consider this book an overview of the recent research into the quantum basis of consciousness. If you are interested in the implications of the Hammeroff/Penrose Orch-OR theory, this is a great place to start. The author takes care to present various interpretations of consciousness theory (both quantum and classical), and provides excellent historical context for these interpretations. This book will allow you to become more comfortable with the expanded world view that accompanies an understanding of the physical basis for consciousness without imposing unsupported speculation that often tries to drift into this picture.Bottom line, worth every penny of your money and every minute of your time. Thank you, Mr. Wendt for writing this book. It's a gem.

OMG, thank you Wendt for this awesome mind-blowing kickass book! This book hopefully will challenge and change how people think about social science. I am not saying that Quantum theory has to be the only theory that is correct, but let's embrace the possibility that not everything and every model has to obey the classical laws of physics, and let's not marginalize those social scientists who already have been challenging those laws.

This book is very thorough and excellently presented. The organization of the information couldn't be better. You will understand the subject perfectly after reading this. It is also a very forward-thinking subject that is unique and exciting.

Amazing perspectives validating my views. But difficult to read and comprehend.

This book is a fascinating piece of cross discipline scholarship that enhances the field of social science as a whole. While I bought this book hoping that the lessons would apply to international relations in particular, the book is more about broad means of conceptualizing social science ontologies. Once again, Wendt, who is best know for revolutionizing the world of theoretical international relations as the father of constructivism, turns existing thinking on its head with this riveting work.

Blazing trails for quantum theory in the social sciences.

"The central claim of this book is that all intentional phenomena are quantum mechanical." (p.149) As such, quantum modeling (i.e. superposition, entanglement, etc.) is far more appropriate for the "hard problem" (consciousness) than atomistic classical models. In addition, the quantum assumption works nicely with other assumptions about social interaction.Why not 5 stars? A few of the claims (e.g. "quantum all the way down") are extremely speculative at this point.

Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology by Alexander Wendt is an excellent review of the current state of the art in our understanding of the alleged quantum nature of the mind and a proposal for the implications of this idea for the social sciences, construed as the study of the system of interacting quantum minds. This approach to understanding social science is brand new and quite daring – very few people at present share such understanding and are willing to make the effort to combine seemingly disparate domains of knowledge, such as quantum physics and social sciences; however, assuming that reality is one whole and the different scientific disciplines are simply traditionally disparate ways of observing and understanding this one whole, such an attempt at a highly interdisciplinary scholarship makes very good sense. It may seem far-fetched to try to combine disciplines at the two extremes of the hierarchy of scientific knowledge – the most fundamental, quantum physics, studying the behaviour of matter at the lowest spatial scales in the simplest material objects, the elementary particles, and the most abstract, social science, studying the behaviour of the most complex systems, those made up of the interactions between the most complex objects in the universe, the human brains, but for the handful of scholars interested in bridging this gap and the more curious amateur scientists this book is a very timely and welcome appearance.The narrative recaps the most publicised ideas on the relation between mind and matter, blending philosophical and physics discourse in an easy to understand popular science exposition. In the later chapters of the book this innovative conception of the quantum nature of the human mental processes is used to inform traditionally hard to crack problems in the social sciences, such as agency, free will, causation, and the ontic status of social phenomena. The overarching proposal made by Wendt with respect to the understanding of social sciences is, quote: “If the physical basis of mind and language is quantum mechanical, then, given this definition, that is true of social structures as well. Which is to say, what social structures actually are, physically, are superpositions of shared mental states – social wave functions.” In other words, once one makes the move from the classical conception of matter as made up of tiny hard balls flying and colliding in empty space to the quantum conception of matter, involving superposition, entanglement, probabilistic definition of existence, ontologically fundamental status of a mathematical construct – the wave function, etc., the hypothesis of a quantum nature of the mind entails also a quantum nature of social reality. Therefore, the proposal is that social sciences need to speak the language of quantum physics and their theories need to ultimately be reducible to interacting systems of quantum-behaving particles – the alleged physical instantiation of the mental processes in the human brain, and Wendt goes to some detail in showing how this could be done. This line of reasoning leads Wendt to envision human society as a “superorganism” with a collective conscious state. This proposition seems odd from the point of view of the classical picture of matter and the human brain, but it makes sense when the brain is imagined not as made up of tiny balls (particles) sticking together in clusters (molecules) under the action of the electromagnetic force, but as a structure of matter with concentrated “nebulousness”, namely, the quantum indeterminacy of the states and the positions of the material constituents (particles) of the particle structures in the brain realising the mental state. In this picture, the “nebulous” structures interact with each other via classical channels (the senses), forming a network of shared “nebulousness”, what Wendt calls the “social wave function”.I am personally very sympathetic to these ideas, although I wouldn’t go as far as giving a physical ontic status to a “collective conscious state” – to me this is going too far, and I envision only locally realised entanglement within individual brains as real, physical phenomenon, and collective mental states only as an abstraction which does not have a physical basis (not yet, but I believe it will become physically real in the more distant future when human brains and technology become more integrated, enabling direct communication between the mental states of individual brains). There is a quirky little idea contained in the book, though, to which I subscribe, namely, that language may have something to do with light, which is the subject of Part IV. Again, from a classical perspective this sounds really weird – how could language possibly be related to the physical phenomenon of light?! However, it is a quite natural outcome of the postulate of the quantum nature of mind – just like light is the phenomenon of exchange of electromagnetic quanta between the main types of particles making up ordinary matter (electrons, protons and neutrons), so is language the phenomenon of exchange of linguistic “quanta” (words) between mental states. I came up with this idea myself too a few years ago, and it is described in more detail in my book What is the World (Xlibris, 2013).Generally speaking, I really enjoyed reading Quantum Mind and Social Science; it is a book which differs from other publications in that broader area and is more innovative than usual. Still, it is far from the level of innovation that I offer in my book, and therefore sounds quite traditional and repetitive compared with my own way of thinking. The field of the understanding of the quantum nature of mind and matter and the relation between them seems to be moving in the right direction, albeit slowly by my standards, and this book constitutes a substantial step forward in this progression. To those who are impatient with the glacial pace of evolution of the received view of our collective understanding of reality I would suggest to read my book! :-)

This books merges philosophy of mind and philosophy of physics with a quantum viewpoint. And the approach is satisfyingly one of a rational “ anthropologist “ looking into each field. It is quite simply probably the most fulfilling non fiction book I’ve ever read. Thankyou Alexander.

Good read.Just wouldn't purchase anything from PBC Distributors. Had a terrible experience.