Entanglement as a Method to Reduce Uncertainty

Abstract

In physics, entanglement ‘reduces’ the entropy of an entity, because the (von Neumann) entropy of, e.g., a composite bipartite entity in a pure entangled state is systematically lower than the entropy of the component sub-entities. We show here that this ‘genuinely non-classical reduction of entropy as a result of composition’ also holds whenever two concepts combine in human cognition and, more generally, it is valid in human culture. On the basis of these results, we make a ‘new hypothesis’ on the nature of entanglement, namely, the production of entanglement in the preparation of a composite entity can be seen as a ‘dynamical process of collaboration between its sub-entities to reduce uncertainty’, because the composite entity is in a pure state while its sub-entities are in a non-pure state as a result of the preparation. We identify within the nature of this entanglement a mechanism of contextual updating and illustrate the mechanism in the examples we analyse. Our hypothesis naturally explains the non-classical nature of some quantum logical connectives, as due to Bell-type correlations.