arXiv subjects

Jonito Aerts Arguëlles

Publications and source records attributed to Jonito Aerts Arguëlles.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Identifying Quantum Structure in AI Language: Evidence for Evolutionary Convergence of Human and Artificial Cognition

We present the results of cognitive tests on conceptual combinations, performed using specific Large Language Models (LLMs) as test subjects. In the first test, performed with ChatGPT and Gemini, we show that Bell's inequalities are significantly violated, which indicates the presence of a 'non-classical probability model' with probabilities that do not satisfy Kolmogorov's axioms. In the second test, also performed using ChatGPT and Gemini, we identify the presence of 'Bose-Einstein statistics', rather than the intuitively expected 'Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics', in the distribution of the words contained in large-size texts. Interestingly, these findings mirror the results previously obtained in both cognitive tests with human participants and information retrieval tests on large corpora. Taken together, they point to the 'systematic emergence of non-classical quantum-like structures in conceptual-linguistic domains', regardless of whether the cognitive agent is human or artificial. Although LLMs are classified as neural networks for historical reasons, we believe that a more essential form of knowledge organization takes place in the distributive semantic structure of vector spaces built on top of the neural network. It is this meaning-bearing structure that lends itself to a phenomenon of evolutionary convergence between human cognition and language, slowly established through biological evolution, and LLM cognition and language, emerging much more rapidly as a result of self-learning and training. We analyze various aspects and examples that contain evidence supporting the above hypothesis. We also advance a unifying framework that explains the pervasive quantum organization of meaning that we identify.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Are Colors Quanta of Light for Human Vision? A Quantum Cognition Study of Visual Perception

We show that colors are light quanta for human visual perception in a similar way as photons are light quanta for physical measurements of light waves. Our result relies on the identification in the quantum measurement process itself of the warping mechanism which is characteristic of human perception. This warping mechanism makes stimuli classified into the same category perceived as more similar, while stimuli classified into different m categories are perceived as more different. In the quantum measurement process, the warping takes place between the pure states, which play the role played for human perception by the stimuli, and the density states after decoherence, which play the role played for human perception by the percepts. We use the natural metric for pure states, namely the normalized Fubini Study metric to measure distances between pure states, and the natural metric for density states, namely the normalized trace-class metric, to measure distances between density states. We then show that when pure states lie within a well-defined region surrounding an eigenstate, the quantum measurement, namely the process of decoherence, contracts the distance between these pure states, while the reverse happens for pure states lying in a well-defined region between two eigenstates, for which the quantum measurement causes a dilation. We elaborate as an example the situation of a two-dimensional quantum measurement described by the Bloch model and apply it to the situation of two colors 'Light' and 'Dark'. We argue that this analogy of warping, on the one hand in human perception and on the other hand in the quantum measurement process, makes colors to be quanta of light for human vision.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2025

Quantum Measurement, Entanglement and the Warping Mechanism of Human Perception

We prove that the quantum measurement process contains the same warping mechanism that occurs in categorical perception, a phenomenon ubiquitous in human perception. This warping causes stimuli belonging to the same category to be perceived as more similar, while stimuli belonging to different categories are perceived as more different. As a result of a detailed study of the quantum measurement using the Bloch representation, we identify the natural metric for pure states, namely the Fubini Study metric, and the natural metric for density states, namely the trace class metric. The warping mechanism of categorical perception is then manifested, when the distances between pure states, playing the role of stimuli for the quantum measurement, are warped into the distances between density states, playing the role of percepts for quantum measurement. We work out the example of a two-dimensional quantum model, a qubit, with 'light' and 'dark' as the two eigenstates, and show how the typical contraction and dilation warping of human perception manifest themselves in this example of the quantum measurement model of light and dark.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2025

Identifying Quantum Mechanical Statistics in Italian Corpora

We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific literary corpus. We firstly generalise a theoretical framework elaborated by ourselves to identify 'quantum mechanical statistics' in large-size texts. Then, we show that, in all analysed texts, words distribute according to 'Bose--Einstein statistics' and show significant deviations from 'Maxwell--Boltzmann statistics'. Next, we introduce an effect of 'word randomization' which instead indicates that the difference between the two statistical models is not as pronounced as in the original cases. These results confirm the empirical patterns obtained in texts of English language and strongly indicate that identical words tend to 'clump together' as a consequence of their meaning, which can be explained as an effect of 'quantum entanglement' produced through a phenomenon of 'contextual updating'. More, word randomization can be seen as the linguistic-conceptual equivalent of an increase of temperature which destroys 'coherence' and makes classical statistics prevail over quantum statistics. Some insights into the origin of quantum statistics in physics are finally provided.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

The Separability Problem in Quantum Mechanics: Insights from Research on Axiomatics and Human Language

Einstein's article on the EPR paradox is the most cited of his works, but not many know that it was not fully representative of the way he thought about the incompleteness of the quantum formalism. Indeed, his main worry was not Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which he accepted, but the experimental non-separability of spatially separate systems. The same problem was also recognized, years later, by one of us, as part of an axiomatic analysis of the quantum formalism, which revealed an unexpected structural limitation of the quantum formalism in Hilbert space, preventing the description of separate systems. As we will explain, this limitation does not manifest at the level of the states, but of the projectors describing the properties, in the sense that there are not enough properties in the formalism to describe separate systems. The question remains whether separability is a possibility at the fundamental level and if a formalism should integrate it into its mathematical structure, as a possibility. To aid our intuition, we offer a reflection based on a powerful analogy between physical systems and human conceptual entities, as the question of separability also arises for the latter.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Development of a Thermodynamics of Human Cognition and Human Culture

Inspired by foundational studies in classical and quantum physics, and by information retrieval studies in quantum information theory, we prove that the notions of 'energy' and 'entropy' can be consistently introduced in human language and, more generally, in human culture. More explicitly, if energy is attributed to words according to their frequency of appearance in a text, then the ensuing energy levels are distributed non-classically, namely, they obey Bose-Einstein, rather than Maxwell-Boltzmann, statistics, as a consequence of the genuinely 'quantum indistinguishability' of the words that appear in the text. Secondly, the 'quantum entanglement' due to the way meaning is carried by a text reduces the (von Neumann) entropy of the words that appear in the text, a behaviour which cannot be explained within classical (thermodynamic or information) entropy. We claim here that this 'quantum-type behaviour is valid in general in human language', namely, any text is conceptually more concrete than the words composing it, which entails that the entropy of the overall text decreases. In addition, we provide examples taken from cognition, where quantization of energy appears in categorical perception, and from culture, where entities collaborate, thus 'entangle', to decrease overall entropy. We use these findings to propose the development of a new 'non-classical thermodynamic theory' for human cognition, which also covers broad parts of human culture and its artefacts and bridges concepts with quantum physics entities.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2022

Human Perception as a Phenomenon of Quantization

For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the reconciliation of a bottom up stimulus with a top down cognitive expectation pattern, there arises the typical warping of categorical perception, where groups of stimuli clump together to form quanta, which move away from each other and lead to a discretization of a dimension. The individual concepts, which are these quanta, can be modeled by a quantum prototype theory with the square of the absolute value of a corresponding Schrödinger wave function as the fuzzy prototype structure, and the superposition of two such wave functions accounts for the interference pattern that occurs when these concepts are combined. Using a simple quantum measurement model, we analyze this archetype of human perception, provide an overview of the experimental evidence base for categorical perception with the phenomenon of warping leading to quantization, and illustrate our analyses with two examples worked out in detail.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2021

Entanglement in Cognition violating Bell Inequalities Beyond Cirel'son's Bound

We present the results of two tests where a sample of human participants were asked to make judgements about the conceptual combinations {\it The Animal Acts} and {\it The Animal eats the Food}. Both tests significantly violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt version of Bell inequalities (`CHSH inequality'), thus exhibiting manifestly non-classical behaviour due to the meaning connection between the individual concepts that are combined. We then apply a quantum-theoretic framework which we developed for any Bell-type situation and represent empirical data in complex Hilbert space. We show that the observed violations of the CHSH inequality can be explained as a consequence of a strong form of `quantum entanglement' between the component conceptual entities in which both the state and measurements are entangled. We finally observe that a quantum model in Hilbert space can be elaborated in these Bell-type situations even when the CHSH violation exceeds the known `Cirel'son bound', in contrast to a widespread belief. These findings confirm and strengthen the results we recently obtained in a variety of cognitive tests and document and image retrieval operations on the same conceptual combinations.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2019

Quantum entanglement in physical and cognitive systems: a conceptual analysis and a general representation

We provide a general description of the phenomenon of entanglement in bipartite systems, as it manifests in micro and macro physical systems, as well as in human cognitive processes. We do so by observing that when genuine coincidence measurements are considered, the violation of the 'marginal laws', in addition to the Bell-CHSH inequality, is also to be expected. The situation can be described in the quantum formalism by considering the presence of entanglement not only at the level of the states, but also at the level of the measurements. However, at the "local'" level of a specific joint measurement, a description where entanglement is only incorporated in the state remains always possible, by adopting a fine-tuned tensor product representation. But contextual tensor product representations should only be considered when there are good reasons to describe the outcome-states as (non-entangled) product states. This will not in general be true, hence, the entangement resource will have to generally be allocated both in the states and in the measurements. In view of the numerous violations of the marginal laws observed in physics' laboratories, it remains unclear to date if entanglement in micro-physical systems is to be understood only as an 'entanglement of the states', or also as an 'entanglement of the measurements'. But even if measurements would also be entangled, the corresponding violation of the marginal laws (no-signaling conditions) would not for this imply that a superluminal communication would be possible.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2017

Spin and Wind Directions I: Identifying Entanglement in Nature and Cognition

We present a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of spatial directions that they considered to be the best example of 'Two Different Wind Directions'. Data are shown to violate the CHSH version of Bell's inequality with the same magnitude as in typical Bell-test experiments with entangled spins. Wind directions thus appear to be conceptual entities connected through meaning, in human cognition, in a similar way as spins appear to be entangled in experiments conducted in physics laboratories. This is the first part of a two-part article. In the second part we present a symmetrized version of the same experiment for which we provide a quantum modeling of the collected data in Hilbert space.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2017

Spin and Wind Directions II: A Bell State Quantum Model

In the first half of this two-part article, we analyzed a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of directions that they considered to be the best example of 'Two Different Wind Directions', and showed that the data violate the CHSH version of Bell's inequality, with same magnitude as in typical Bell-test experiments in physics. In this second part, we complete our analysis by presenting a symmetrized version of the experiment, still violating the CHSH inequality but now also obeying the marginal law, for which we provide a full quantum modeling in Hilbert space, using a singlet state and suitably chosen product measurements. We also address some of the criticisms that have been recently directed at experiments of this kind, according to which they would not highlight the presence of genuine forms of entanglement. We explain that these criticisms are based on a view of entanglement that is too restrictive, thus unable to capture all possible ways physical and conceptual entities can connect and form systems behaving as a whole. We also provide an example of a mechanical model showing that the violations of the marginal law and Bell inequalities are generally to be associated with different mechanisms.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2017

Testing Quantum Models of Conjunction Fallacy on the World Wide Web

The 'conjunction fallacy' has been extensively debated by scholars in cognitive science and, in recent times, the discussion has been enriched by the proposal of modeling the fallacy using the quantum formalism. Two major quantum approaches have been put forward: the first assumes that respondents use a two-step sequential reasoning and that the fallacy results from the presence of 'question order effects'; the second assumes that respondents evaluate the cognitive situation as a whole and that the fallacy results from the 'emergence of new meanings', as an 'effect of overextension' in the conceptual conjunction. Thus, the question arises as to determine whether and to what extent conjunction fallacies would result from 'order effects' or, instead, from 'emergence effects'. To help clarify this situation, we propose to use the World Wide Web as an 'information space' that can be interrogated both in a sequential and non-sequential way, to test these two quantum approaches. We find that 'emergence effects', and not 'order effects', should be considered the main cognitive mechanism producing the observed conjunction fallacies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Context and Interference Effects in the Combinations of Natural Concepts

The mathematical formalism of quantum theory exhibits significant effectiveness when applied to cognitive phenomena that have resisted traditional (set theoretical) modeling. Relying on a decade of research on the operational foundations of micro-physical and conceptual entities, we present a theoretical framework for the representation of concepts and their conjunctions and disjunctions that uses the quantum formalism. This framework provides a unified solution to the 'conceptual combinations problem' of cognitive psychology, explaining the observed deviations from classical (Boolean, fuzzy set and Kolmogorovian) structures in terms of genuine quantum effects. In particular, natural concepts 'interfere' when they combine to form more complex conceptual entities, and they also exhibit a 'quantum-type context-dependence', which are responsible of the 'over- and under-extension' that are systematically observed in experiments on membership judgments.

cs.AI↗