Beyond the Einstein-Bohr Debate: Cognitive Complementarity and the Emergence of Quantum Intuition
It reframes a foundational debate in quantum physics and extends its lessons into cognitive science, potentially impacting interdisciplinary research on uncertainty and decision-making.
This paper tackles the interpretation of quantum complementarity by proposing it as an epistemic principle rather than an ontological claim, and introduces cognitive complementarity and quantum intuition as a framework to bridge quantum measurement theory with cognition, offering empirical pathways for studying decision-making under uncertainty.
Recent high-precision experimental confirmations of quantum complementarity have revitalized foundational debates about measurement, description, and realism. This article argues that complementarity is most productively interpreted as an epistemic principle--constraining what can be simultaneously accessed and represented--rather than as an ontological claim about quantum reality. Reexamining the Einstein-Bohr debate through this lens reveals a persistent tension between descriptive completeness and contextual meaning, a tension experiments clarify but do not dissolve. Building on this analysis, we introduce cognitive complementarity as a structural principle governing reasoning under non-classical uncertainty, where mutually constraining representations cannot be jointly optimized. Within this framework, we propose quantum intuition as a testable cognitive capacity: the ability to sustain representational plurality, regulate commitment timing, and resolve perspective-incompatibilities in a context-sensitive manner. Formulated as a naturalistic construct grounded in shared informational constraints, quantum intuition offers a principled bridge between quantum measurement theory and cognition. This work reframes the historical debate, extends epistemic lessons from quantum foundations into cognitive science, and outlines empirical pathways for studying decision-making in contexts of irreducible uncertainty.