Quantum Structure in Cognition: Human Language as a Boson Gas of Entangled Words

Diederik Aerts,Lester Beltran

doi:10.1007/s10699-019-09633-4

Abstract

We model a piece of text of human language telling a story by means of the quantum structure describing a Bose gas in a state close to a Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero temperature. For this we introduce energy levels for the words (concepts) used in the story and we also introduce the new notion of ‘cogniton’ as the quantum of human thought. Words (concepts) are then cognitons in different energy states as it is the case for photons in different energy states, or states of different radiative frequency, when the considered boson gas is that of the quanta of the electromagnetic field. We show that Bose–Einstein statistics delivers a very good model for these pieces of texts telling stories, both for short stories and for long stories of the size of novels. We analyze an unexpected connection with Zipf’s law in human language, the Zipf ranking relating to the energy levels of the words, and the Bose–Einstein graph coinciding with the Zipf graph. We investigate the issue of ‘identity and indistinguishability’ from this new perspective and conjecture that the way one can easily understand how two of ‘the same concepts’ are ‘absolutely identical and indistinguishable’ in human language is also the way in which quantum particles are absolutely identical and indistinguishable in physical reality, providing in this way new evidence for our conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory.

Highlights

Human language is a substance consisting of combinations of concepts giving rise to meaning
We will show that a good model for this substance is the one of a gas of entangled bosonic quantum particles such as they appear in physics in the situation close to a Bose–Einstein condensate
With the new findings we present here, we make an essential and new step forward in the elaboration of our ‘conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory’, where quantum particles are the concepts of a proto-language, in a similar way that human concepts, are the quantum particles of human language (Aerts 2009a, 2010a, b, 2013, 2014; Aerts et al 2018d, 2019c)

Summary

Introduction

Human language is a substance consisting of combinations of concepts giving rise to meaning. 4, Fig. 7b), and each time it showed that a modeling by means of a Bose–Einstein statistical energy distribution, like explained above, gives rise to an almost complete fit with the data We started this investigation with the idea that ‘concepts within human language behave like bosonic entities’, an idea we expressed earlier as one of the basic pieces of evidence for the ‘conceptuality interpretation’ (Aerts 2009a). A recent experiment shows that if this experimentally accepted possibility to distinguish them is erased by means of a quantum eraser, these different frequency photons behave as indistinguishable (Zhao et al 2014) This makes us put forward the proposal that ‘the way in which we clearly see and understand the identity and indistinguishability of concepts (words, cognitons) in human language’ is ‘the way in which identity and indistinguishability for quantum particles can be understood’. We elaborate with examples this new way of interpreting ‘identity and indistinguishability’ and show how it is a strong confirmation of our conceptuality interpretation of quantum theory

Human Language as a Bose Gas

The Bose–Einstein Condensate in Physics

Zipf’s Law and the Bose Gas of Human Language

Identity and Indistinguishability