Quantum Structure in Cognition: Human Language as a Boson Gas of Entangled Words
This work proposes a novel quantum-inspired model for cognitive linguistics, potentially offering new insights into language structure and quantum theory interpretation, though it appears incremental in applying known physics to a new domain.
The authors modeled human language texts as a Bose gas near a Bose-Einstein condensate, introducing 'cognitons' as quanta of thought, and showed that Bose-Einstein statistics effectively describes story structures, linking to Zipf's law with graphs coinciding.
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.