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. We exploit these results and 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, or density, 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 example we analyze. Our hypothesis naturally explains the 'non-classical nature' of some quantum logical connectives, as due to Bell-type correlations.
Abstract:We work out a quantum-theoretic model in complex Hilbert space of a recently performed test on co-occurrencies of two concepts and their combination in retrieval processes on specific corpuses of documents. The test violated the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of the Bell inequalities ('CHSH inequality'), thus indicating the presence of entanglement between the combined concepts. We make use of a recently elaborated 'entanglement scheme' and represent the collected data in the tensor product of Hilbert spaces of the individual concepts, showing that the identified violation is due to the occurrence of a strong form of entanglement, involving both states and measurements and reflecting the meaning connection between the component concepts. These results provide a significant confirmation of the presence of quantum structures in corpuses of documents, like it is the case for the entanglement identified in human cognition.
Abstract:We show that data collected from corpuses of documents violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell's inequality (CHSH inequality) and therefore indicate the presence of quantum entanglement in their structure. We obtain this result by considering two concepts and their combination and coincidence operations consisting of searches of co-occurrences of exemplars of these concepts in specific corpuses of documents. Measuring the frequencies of these co-occurrences and calculating the relative frequencies as approximate probabilities entering in the CHSH inequality, we obtain manifest violations of the latter for all considered corpuses of documents. In comparing these violations with those analogously obtained in an earlier work for the same combined concepts in psychological coincidence experiments with human participants, also violating the CHSH inequality, we identify the entanglement as being carried by the meaning connection between the two considered concepts within the combination they form. We explain the stronger violation for the corpuses of documents, as compared to the violation in the psychology experiments, as being due to the superior meaning domain of the human mind and, on the other side, to the latter reaching a broader domain of meaning and being possibly also actively influenced during the experimentation. We mention some of the issues to be analyzed in future work such as the violations of the CHSH inequality being larger than the `Cirel'son bound' for all of the considered corpuses of documents.