The Quantum Nature of Identity in Human Thought: Bose-Einstein Statistics for Conceptual Indistinguishability
This addresses the problem of understanding human thought processes for cognitive scientists and psychologists, offering a novel perspective but is incremental in applying quantum models to concept combination.
The study tackled how humans combine concepts like 'Eleven Animals', finding that their behavior deviates from classical statistical theories, specifically showing evidence of Bose-Einstein statistics with significant experimental results.
Increasing experimental evidence shows that humans combine concepts in a way that violates the rules of classical logic and probability theory. On the other hand, mathematical models inspired by the formalism of quantum theory are in accordance with data on concepts and their combinations. In this paper, we investigate a novel type of concept combination were a number is combined with a noun, e.g., `Eleven Animals. Our aim is to study 'conceptual identity' and the effects of 'indistinguishability' - in the combination 'Eleven Animals', the 'animals' are identical and indistinguishable - on the mechanisms of conceptual combination. We perform experiments on human subjects and find significant evidence of deviation from the predictions of classical statistical theories, more specifically deviations with respect to Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics. This deviation is of the 'same type' of the deviation of quantum mechanical from classical mechanical statistics, due to indistinguishability of microscopic quantum particles, i.e we find convincing evidence of the presence of Bose-Einstein statistics. We also present preliminary promising evidence of this phenomenon in a web-based study.