Book Review: Quantum Mind and Social Science

Reviewed by: Benjamin Lamb-Books

Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology by Alexander Wendt (2015), Cambridge University Press.

In his latest book, Alexander Wendt, the well-known political scientist and International Relations theorist, ventures across disciplinary borders to rethink social ontology through the counterintuitive principles of quantum physics. Wendt’s proposal is radical, with radical implications for sociology. At stake is sociology’s classically-inherited ontological commitment to Newtonianism, a commitment that manifests itself in beliefs that social causation should always be mechanical, local, and materialist.

Wendt’s quantum social ontology goes something like this: People are “walking wave-functions.” In other words, the human brain is a quantum operating system, protected by organic boundaries and highly skilled in processes of quantum computing that we more commonly call memory and feeling (Experience), information-processing (Cognition), and agency/freedom (Will). Wendt’s three quantum faculties, Experience, Cognition, and Will, are the constitutive components of his theory of “quantum mind” as highlighted in the book’s title.

Newtonianism lurks every-where in social science today. Most forms of conflict theory and political realism, whether in sociology or political science, are Newtonian, as is analytical sociology’s theory of mechanisms, processes, and networks. For Wendt, these familiar features of the discipline rest on a flawed ontological foundation, one which does not adequately measure, interrogate, and wrestle with the quantum foundations of social life, such as the sentience, sociality, and spontaneity of human beings equipped with the faculties of consciousness that Wendt calls “quantum mind.”

Wendt’s book is a bold attempt at taking the quantum revolution in physics seriously. Until the early twentieth century, physicists subscribed to the Newtonian idea that all objects possess a mutually independent existence from one another, that each object is subject to the general causal laws of the material universe; and that, therefore, objects can only influence one another through direct contact mediated by material constraints. Quantum physics overturned these classic Newtonian assumptions. Work by Planck and Einstein revealed that light is a “photon” which sometimes behaves like waves and sometimes like particles. But photons did not behave as normal particles of matter were supposed to. Instead, their behavior depended upon the state of the field of which they were “part.” Stranger still, photons in the same field could be said to be in two contradictory positions at once, a phenomenon known as “superposition.” Within a few years, the French scientist Louis de Broglie realized that Einstein’s hypothesis had implications for matter too—that matter at the subatomic level of protons and electrons also acted with a similar wave-particle duality, and thus was prone to the same weird properties of superposition, nonseparability, and spontaneity. In short, quantum physics confounded the commonsense view of the basic building blocks of the universe—that brute matter is simple and separable “all the way down.”

Another important ontological insight from quantum mechanics is the idea of entanglement. Entanglement is perhaps the keyword of quantum theory today. It refers to how particles continue to “influence” one another even after they have interacted with one another and moved apart. That non-local forms of connection exist and “travel” faster than the speed of light is one of the best-confirmed findings of modern physics. More vexing still, space and time appear not to exist inside the atom, raising the intriguing possibility of retroactive influence or correlation. For the past century, therefore, modern physics has been grappling with the profound and disconcerting fact that the ontology of matter is far less obvious or lifeless than it once appeared to be.

While most physicists have been reticent to discuss the ontological implications of quantum mechanics, the philosophers among them have offered an exotic buffet of quantum ontologies competing to describe the nature of quantum reality. Wendt helpfully navigates this daunting philosophical labyrinth, but he is not primarily interested in re-hashing classical epistemological debates. Instead, he seeks to develop a systematic replacement, going to the roots of intentional phenomena and identifying the quantum foundations of social life. The chapters of Quantum Mind review advances in quantum theory and apply them to biology, the brain, consciousness, decision-making and rationality, experience and memory, free will and agency, language, vision and perception, sociability, interaction, and macro-social structures like the state. In each area, Wendt reviews longstanding theoretical deadlocks and exposes the classical Newtonian assumptions responsible for them. He then weaves together research from multiple disciplines that demonstrates how quantum mechanics helps to make sense of observed behavior within each domain. Perhaps most ambitiously, rather than adopting a “weak” epistemological stance—that quantum formalism should be restricted to prediction—he instead advocates for a “strong” realist interpretation of the quantum systems at work. That is to say, he argues that quantum wave-functions—along with their weird, non-local, and time-symmetric effects—actually exist and operate at the level of social structures.

​Wendt’s quantum social ontology goes something like this: People are “walking wave-functions.” In other words, the human brain is a quantum operating system, protected by organic boundaries and highly skilled in processes of quantum computing that we more commonly call memory and feeling (Experience), information-processing (Cognition), and agency/freedom (Will). Wendt’s three quantum faculties, Experience, Cognition, and Will, are the constitutive components of his theory of “quantum mind” as highlighted in the book’s title.

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​Other people, institutions, and objects who “measure” subjects in many different ways interfere with this quantum state of mind, thus effecting its wave-function collapse into everyday reality.

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 These are also the properties of proto-subjectivity that go all the way down to the subatomic level in Wendt’s panpsychic universe. Human brains are capable of sustaining states of “quantum coherence,” wherein multiple contradictory possibilities exist within an irreducible wave-function whole. Quantum coherence describes the human unconscious par excellence: in the unconscious, various contradictory potential vectors of meaning and action are held in superposition. But other people, institutions, and objects who “measure” subjects in many different ways interfere with this quantum state of mind, thus effecting its wave-function collapse into everyday reality.

As crisscrossing wave-functions, individuals are not fully separable with respect to meanings, feelings, and identities. Interlocutors may be entangled through language at the level of semantic contexts, which also display several quantum properties. We take turns reading each other’s minds, gauging behavior, sizing each other up, thus continuously collapsing the shared wavy superposition of intentions into actual actions. We may also immediately impact one another thanks to the non-locality of light, direct perception, and our quantum-computational brain. Because con-sciousness and language operate in quantum fashion, social reality is essentially holographic: together we create mutual patterns of inter-ference that are processed by our quantum brains to give meaning and matter to the situation, materializing social structures into everyday practices. We are all shaped teleologically by social structures that are invisible, which we participate in making actual via their own wave-function collapse into concretely observable practices.

Quantum social ontology, outlined above, only works if you are willing to follow Wendt’s controversial claim that quantum systems exist on the macroscopic plane in brains, language, and in social structures—that individual organisms, discourse, and social structures can all sustain states of quantum coherence. In Wendt’s appropriation of the emerging field of quantum biology, to be quantum coherent is tantamount to being alive. Quantum coherence makes sense of both the existence of an internal perspective on the world and why that perspective-holding is inherently unobservable to outsiders. Wherever there is quantum coher-ence, there is therefore a corresponding place for phenomenology. Indeed, the most remark-able accomplishment of this book may be Wendt’s tight reconciliation of naturalistic and interpretive approaches in social science. The wave-particle duality of quantum systems gives rise to a similar methodological duality in Wendt’s vitalist sociology, a complementarity between both first-person phenomenology and third-person external observation. What enables this synthesis has something to do with the quantum nature of life itself. Wendt writes that his

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…argument amounts to an epistemological double movement, taking what is known at each level—the third-person knowledge of quantum theory and the first-person knowledge of conscious-ness—and projecting it toward the other, scaling all the way up and all the way down respectively. The goal of this maneuver is not to reduce one kind of knowledge to the other but quite the op-posite, to keep them separate until they are face to face across the micro­macro spectrum. There they can then be joined in the phenomenon of life... (2015:93)

A major concern for sociologists will be how to do quantum social science empirically. Wendt does not expect social scientists to learn the strange mathematics of quantum mechanics. There are no equations even in the book, thankfully. Nevertheless, it is not pleasant to imagine submitting quantum-theory inflected ideas through peer-review precisely on this point (“…the author does not specify the probability of his or her wave-function…”). Another practical difficulty would be in utilizing Wendt’s sophisticated terminology: are more theory articles going to appear that now represent some social practice as a “wave-function collapse” that initiates “temporal symmetry breaking” as experienced in “entanglement” with others? Redescriptions could quickly multiply as to which components of a social sequence are “classical” versus “quantum,” “local” versus “non-local,” “deterministic” versus “emergent,” and so on. Some will surely cringe to imagine others appealing to the same quantum-theoretical framework as he for data analysis.

For others, the concern will be that quantum social ontology may just offer more fancy jargon and a mere re-labeling of common sociological objects of inquiry. As Wendt would be the first to acknowledge, there are some substantive similarities between his proposal and, for instance, actor-network theory and the new materialism, the feminist performative theory of Butler and others, as well as Bourdieusian theories of field and practice. Would Wendt’s vitalist sociology have us theorize differently from these? Not necessarily. Quantum mind may simply grant such (heterodoxic) social-theorizing a surer footing in reality—that is, another set of standards to check for naturalistic consistency. In fact, this critique probably misses the point by not taking Wendt’s scientific realism seriously enough. His main intervention, at least in this book, is at the level of social ontology wherein he focuses on neglected but foundational issues regarding the nature of life and consciousness as enablers of whatever social behavior is under inquiry. Quantum mind is more than mere re-description, he hopes, and rather a closer approximation of the basic ingredients of sentient social life, from which interactions, cultures, and social structures pour forth. While Wendt is clearly interested in developing a quantum theory of the nation-state as a sort of holographic social structure, there is additional empirical potential in the areas of cultural sociology, civil-society discourse, rhetoric, and collective emotions. Here, Wendt’s holistic social ontology may support new ways of understanding, for example, cultural autonomy, transformative events, the persistence of status structures, different modalities of commun-ication, and perhaps even emotional contagion. Cultural sociology, in particular, could have much to gain from a quantum theory of consciousness.      

More generally, the big cliffhanger here is whether under the default influence of Newtonianism and classical materialism, we have in fact ended up with a sociology sans subjectivity, a life science without the life force of quantum mind, and without the weird properties of consciousness and feelings that animate, enliven, and entangle the real subjects of social science. It may be the case that we have all been too unconcerned with the nature of consciousness and that, overall, the social sciences have done quite admirably in removing humans of will and experience from the equation—an equation worse in explanatory power because of this vital omission, the omission of the vital.
 
Benjamin Lamb-Books is author of Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).