The text asks why quantum physics can be used to explain society, and suggests that the social sciences have not been able to account for the complexity and subjectivity of human reality. The text follows the ideas of Alex Wendt, who proposes that the problem of the agent and the structure can be better understood by using concepts from particle physics.

Written and published by Nihilitus

Date of publication: September 30, 2023

Why use quantum physics to explain society? This is a controversial question because it would be like questioning the advances made by the social sciences in their methodologies and theories. However, the problem alludes precisely to the lack of a more precise and deeper knowledge of human reality because societies are made of social groups and these are made of human beings who have a consciousness and subjectivity that is problematic (always has been) for the scientific status. We only have to see how societies currently function to realize that something is wrong.

Let us look at our modern democracies, in their obsession with impartiality, separation of powers and free speech (which are a direct derivation of the scientific-materialistic influence on our understanding of reality). These are very noble principles that aim at having a peaceful and civilized coexistence, and their desire is that the system itself reflects them in all possible institutional spheres. The problem is that institutions are not impartial, they are made up of individuals and groups with their own agencies and often go against the principle of participation, inclusion and freedom of speech. Electing them democratically opens the possibility of a fascist group taking power to restructure the whole system and turn democracy into a dictatorship, to say the least. We have seen this phenomenon with recurrence and the worst of all is that it has been encouraged by society itself.

So therein lies a fundamental problem. Either we are misunderstanding society or we are letting it pass that it does not fit with the reality we live in. There is a profound contradiction in modern human societies. This analysis postulates that the social sciences have not found answers to these problems, so it will be necessary to look for an alternative in what particle physics can offer us. We will follow the approach of Alex Wendt who develops in a chapter of his book “Quantum Mind and social Science”, the problem of the agent and the structure. His proposal is structured in four parts:

1. The prevalence of a classical worldview in social theory.

Alex Wendt (2015) makes it clear that one of the structural problems of the social sciences since their birth has been the prominence of an emergentist thinking that explains social and abstract phenomena, such as mind or consciousness, from a materialistic physical basis equating them to the macroscopic phenomena studied and explained by the physical sciences. This thinking is based on a principle of irreducibility that exalts the nature of the whole over the parts. This relationship is marked by a type of downward causation that allows the whole to affect the behavior and properties of the parts.

The problem Wendt (2015) points out is the contradiction between the emergentist nature and the social reality it studies. If in the classical worldview everything is material, why can’t we see social structures if they are real? The answer of materialism is that we can infer them by their effects. However, this affirmation is recognizing the existence of intentional states that generate these effects, but here is where materialism contradicts itself again because it would recognize that consciousness has a role in this process. Let us recall that for materialism consciousness is an illusion. The question that emerges from this contradiction is if consciousness is an illusion, why are social structures not?

Materialism cannot give us a satisfactory answer in this respect without falling into a serious contradiction that calls into question the theoretical interpretation of social reality. Wendt’s proposal is to direct attention to a social holism that is compatible with a flat ontology and has an ontological basis in quantum physics (thus, it will be incompatible with individualism). Thus an alternative version of the agent-structure relation will be proposed in which both sides will be emergent, but in a quantum sense.

2. Thinking another way to the domain of supervenience in social theory

Supervenience is a philosophical concept used to understand the relationship between different levels of social phenomena. It specifically describes that the properties of a superior level (e.g., a society or a culture) are determined by, but not reducible to, the inferior level components (e.g., individuals or groups). Thus supervenience entails an asymmetric dependency relationship between the parts (i.e., the influence between their constituents is not equal or symmetric).

One example is the asymmetrical relationship between mass media and audiences. The first generation media were characterized by being vertical, objective and had a massive reach. Some of these properties corresponded to their own technical nature, but other aspects such as objectivity were part of a discourse that the media reinforced to gain credibility. On the other hand, audiences were seen as passive, manipulable and docile. Indeed, for a long time the relationship between media and audiences was marked by verticality, manipulation and corporate interest, although culturally the opposite idea was cultivated and established. Clearly we see here an asymmetrical relationship corresponding to supervenience. We know that their properties are linked, but their linkage is not symmetrical. This means that changes in the underlying set (media) may cause changes in the dependent set (audiences), but changes in the dependent set may not necessarily cause changes in the underlying set.

The mass media could direct public opinion as they pleased with direct sequences in the power relationship between governments and their citizens. But the citizenry could not exert the same influence because opinion and information were centralized. Unlike today, audiences did not have the technology to materialize their interests and expectations, but depended on their exposure in the mass media. If they were not in the media they did not exist in other words.

One of the observations Wendt (2015) makes is that supervenience has a physicalist ontology in the classical sense. They assume as natural and universal the separability and locality of the parts. In the case of media and audiences this separability is notorious. The media are not spaces of interaction with their audiences, therefore the relationship is vertical. The audiences are only limited to receive the messages, their passive role is separated from the construction of the message, therefore, they cannot influence it.

Wendt (2015) finds something problematic in this relationship. In the media example we see that there is a denial of the intentional (non-visible, hence non-material) states of audiences. By assuming that they are passive subjects the media are denying their ownership as agents. If so, the role of audiences would only be limited to replicating what the media want or camouflage in their messages. Long-term influence would result in a society of asymmetrical relations, of docile subjects and without their own agenda. For Wendt (2015), intentionality is what marks the development and evolution of societies. Without intentionality there would be no social practices, only behaviors. Social structures feed on this property because it is the basis of norms, institutions, beliefs and social institutions.

Wendt (2015) argues that intentional states are problematic for the materialist worldview because they have no place. How appropriate are our theories of social structures if we expel intentional states from social phenomena?

In order not to get entangled in the matter, materialism assumed that the intentional states were part of the cerebral dimension, therefore, its study should be limited to the nature of that dimension. Thus it separated the one from the other. But it also reinforced its physicalist sense because the study of individual behavior would be strictly limited to the brain-neural nature. Therefore, there is nothing mystical in intentions because they originate in the brain structure of people and what cannot be explained by that way is an illusion such as consciousness, which is epiphenomenal for materialism.

This reductionist tendency limits the relationship of human beings with reality to their individuality. It assumes that thought is prior to society. This type of interpretation is called internalism. Its approach is purely individualistic. By focusing on the internal processes of individuals or groups, it separates them from society as a whole, which is why its ontological basis is individualistic.

The opposite is externalism which postulates that thought depends on society. It assumes that some mental states are constituted by conditions external to the mind/body. Its ontology is relational.

Wendt (2015) clarifies that externalism does not entail denying the existence of private thoughts in people’s heads. What is being said is that the conditions that make it possible to have individual thoughts do not depend on the individual, but on social relations. One of the elements that reinforce this externalist perspective is the nature of language based on entanglement. Indeed, through language, knowledge is shared and meanings are socialized, thus creating a dimension that no longer depends on an individual but on a collective structure. In other words, the meanings that are constructed from social interaction acquire a nature of their own and are separated from individual minds. They are beyond their limits. This is the basis of societies because they build a culture based on a shared semantics that allows them to survive.

This allows Wendt (2015) to conclude that the social constitution of mental states is nonlocal and noncausal. His proposal is based on understanding mind and language as quantum systems. This being so, externalism is its logical consequence. Its basis is semantic nonlocality. By participating in a shared language the content of thoughts becomes entangled with other minds, it becomes contextual. With these arguments an alternative to the supervenience perspective is proposed having in opposition a holistic and flat ontology with a clear influence of externalism.

Wendt’s (2015) conclusion is clear: an ontologically emergentist conception of social structure is incompatible with the classical worldview. The error of supervenience ontology is that it treats individuals and their properties as constitutively exogenous to social life. These arguments allow Wendt to argue for a quantum-based externalism that allows us to think reality from another perspective.

3. Emergentist perspective of quantum influence

Wendt (2015) rethinks the agent-structure problem, but from a quantum approach (1). First one has to understand some fundamentals of the quantum field. The nature of subatomic particles is strongly influenced by entanglement, that means that there are no particularities or individualities that can be measured. Subatomic particles are processes or vibrations. There is, then, no basis for thinking of the existence of a stratified structure of levels. Instead, physicists have found that particles are naturally entangled and this allows them to acquire new properties, the relational properties of the whole.

There is a symmetry of the quantum nature of particles with the relationship between individuals and society, but first you have to understand something. In social life individuals are like particles, but they cannot merge because of their biological bodies. However, shared language gives rise to intertwined minds. Thanks to this property the knowledge of social experience separates from the individual and in its amplification society matures as a structure. Entanglement is an emergent and inescapable phenomenon and is part of human nature and that of subatomic particles.

As there is no essential difference between the basic level and the higher level, the parts and the whole are co-emergent. In Wendt’s (2015) argument this is a process of emergent state symmetry.

An example to understand this conceptualization would be the construction of power in societies. The standard knowledge held by political power elites is that the people are passive, manipulable and disorganized. Here we see a marked influence of supervenience in the conception of power. However, history tells us that the people can exert a direct influence when a situation pushes them to the limit of survival. There are plenty of examples. The Soviet Union, for example, collapsed not only because of the corruption of the political elites that ruled the red empire, but also because of the intolerance of its population to follow the path of generalized poverty in every sense. The Venezuelan case is also interesting because its system collapsed despite having abundant wealth, but its distribution was so inequitable and evident that the population felt outraged and betrayed by their own elites, thus opening the way for the rise of Chavist populism that has led the country to extreme poverty, concentration of power and absolute hermeticism because they do not want to leave power denying their own people their own yearning for change.

A responsible elite understands that power in society is co-emergent; it is a process of symmetry in which politics is built as a participatory and inclusive process between elites and their population. This is the only way in which power can be managed in a sustainable and enduring manner. Following the influence of supervenience will lead us to the inevitable conflict of political elites creating laws that are totally unnatural to the dynamics of their society and a population agitated on the brink of social explosion, which can lead to dangerous conjunctural combinations that give rise to extremist governments. It would not be unusual to see a resurgence of Nazism (as predicted by some political philosophers such as Jason Reza Jorjani) in a Western nation overwhelmed by the problems of criminality, immigration, intolerance and the inability of its elites to solve them properly.

With this clarification, social structure can be understood from two dimensions: on the one hand, the demographic structure that alludes to the physical-objective patterns of society (such as our bodies or the physical structures that shape society); on the other hand, there is the cultural structure that includes phenomena such as norms, institutions and culture itself that carry with them a discourse that people reproduce in order to act and shape their agendas. Social structures depend on this dimension in which mental states, collective intentions and shared language are linked.

It is this dimension that Wendt (2015) explores in depth and proposes that its physical basis is the quantum field. That entails understanding that social structures are physically superpositions of shared mental states. In other words, they are social wave functions. This proposal has some implications:

1. Social structures are not classical constructions, they are not real things or objects. We must think of them as pure potentialities, i.e. states of superposition. This would explain why social structures are unobservable (wave functions cannot be observed, but only the result of their collapse into a particle).
2. The stratification of levels is broken. Social structures are neither above nor below individual agents. In the real world there are only people and their practices, which implies a flat ontology.
3. Conceiving social structures as superpositions of shared mental states means that they are ontologically emergent, in the quantum sense of the entanglement between the agents that constitute them.
4. The superposition approach implies a holistic social ontology. In this structure the agents that are part of it are non-locally connected to each other.

Thinking of the social structure as a superposition implies accepting that it will be in permanent movement. The interior of society is naturally conflictive because meanings of life are temporarily disputed and imposed. For example, there was a historical time when animals had no recognition in the laws of human communities, they were things. If we follow the supervenience approach we would never have believed that one day human laws would grant them rights because animals are not human and could not impose their own agenda. However, the laws changed because human communities themselves understood that animals are sentient subjects. As a wave function the reality of society is a potentiality. How much more co-emergent and quantum can this phenomenon be because there is an experiential transcendence of emotions and senses between species that handle languages totally opposed to each other. Only entanglement can allow such a phenomenon to occur, furthermore it demonstrates the contest of senses that is at play and that define the field of the real. Just as there is a tendency to self-destruction promoted by excessive ambition, there is also a tendency to repair, to reconstruct life for its permanence. This is one of the ontological fields of dispute of human communities. It is the fuel of political struggles that change the meanings of life that end up configuring the patterns of coexistence.

4. In the construction of a quantum vitalist sociology

As described above, the problem of contemporary social sciences is the strong influence of classical materialism. With a deterministic/mechanistic ontology at their base, the social sciences constructed a limited conceptualization of the human being. Expelling the subjective state and the intentionalities of social subjects entailed putting the study of societies and the individual on the same level as the physical sciences. In contemporary sociology materialism is unquestionable, error terms are related to the complexity of poor data instead of free will, causal mechanisms are the fundamental pattern of explanation, hence social systems are understood as matter in motion.

Given this scenario, Wendt’s (2015) proposal is to renew the perspective of sociology based on three novel parameters in the understanding of human nature: consciousness, intentionality and freedom. In that way ontology shifts from a deterministic materialism to a phenomenological vitalism. Thus it is recognized that subjectivity is an inescapable component of social reality and is constituted by a physical, but non-material and unobservable vital force (the elen vital). When this explanation is applied to social systems we are reconstructing the scientific discipline of the social, we are shaping the vitalist sociology that studies society as an organism with subjectivity and consciousness. From this approach many concepts and theories will have to be re-evaluated, such as our understanding of the State as the organized structure of society.

Wendt (2015) makes some important observations. First, he recognizes that the State is a social system constituted by two parts: first, a social structure organized around certain forms of language (such as citizenship, territoriality or sovereignty); and second the heterogeneity of practices of the social units that participate in the discursive formation of the State (such as citizens and foreign persons).

Taking into account the practices, language and nature of social units, Wendt (2015) applies a quantum approach to the understanding of the State: he attributes to it a wave function recognition shared non-locally across time and space by millions of people; therefore, it is only a potential reality; as a practice it is a real phenomenon that materializes momentarily as people collapse their wave function in everyday matters such as voting, paying taxes or going to war (2).

A clear example is the legal framework that establishes individual and collective behavior in the States. Laws reflect the meanings of life that society builds over time and are not eternal; they depend on coexistence, on the irruption of new generations, on new conditions of life that emerge and in conjunction change the legal framework. Laws reflect our experience shared by generations and what at one time was a social practice accepted and assimilated by all (such as the exploitation of non-renewable resources) at another time can become a limitation to coexistence and survival (such as climate change, which is a threat to life as a whole). Wendt is therefore right when he recognizes that the State is only a potential reality, another feature of its nature as a wave function. Political struggles (and also the everyday events of our coexistence with others and institutions) are the actions that provoke collapse and alter reality.

What about the people who make up the State? From a classical approach States are nothing more than individuals and their interactions. However, when we apply the quantum approach we are assuming that people have overlapping minds that are entangled through language. The State is a concept that has matured over millennia. Its word not only describes a condition of coexistence, but a type of experience that is assimilated and shared by all citizens, and in its individual and collective recurrence the concept is reinforced so that it can continue to be transmitted to new generations.

It is for that reason that Wendt (2015) concludes that citizens co-participate in the discourse of the State, so that the entanglement (which is mental) helps to create the structures that allow coexistence. But to reach this point there is no single sense that organizes society because freedom being a component of the relationship between individuals there will always be a dispute of semantics. Coexistence is only achieved at the expense of the defeat of one of the senses that feeds the structure.

For that reason, it is important to take into account the complex power relationship between members of society for their ability to direct processes, question them or be swayed by the prevailing current. Wendt (2015) recognizes that any State (democratic or not) has individuals who are provided with the authority to speak for a State as a whole. They are the dominant units that contain within themselves the reasons for the collective actions of their members. There are other individuals who act as units that surrender to the dominant ones. They provide them with the strength to collapse the wave function of the state by giving up their own right to act against the chosen path.

An important factor in this relationship is the recognition by individuals of their nature as a social wave function and the implications it carries for the transformation of reality. Wendt (2015) identifies that there may be social units that do not have an image of themselves in the social whole, which would leave them in a position of vulnerability because, not being aware of their status as agents, they can be used as manipulable objects.

Contemporary political reality continues to repeat this same scheme in any model, be it democratic or authoritarian. The importance of leaders continues to play a determining role in the constitution of States. In recent decades, the emergence of populism has been in vogue in political theory. From a more realistic perspective, all political processes depend on a populist base because not all citizens are aware of their role as power brokers who can influence the direction of the State. So in any society this manipulation/control relationship continues to exist. 

An interesting observation Wendt (2015) makes about the nature of leaders is that they have to act on behalf of all citizens. This would make us all without exception potential objects of manipulation, however, the role of information (deriving in a power-conscious state) in avoiding manipulation is important. Only those who are aware of what is happening can be subjects of the State because they can deliberately act on their potential.

In quantum terms this can be understood as a system of entangled particles according to Wendt’s (2015) argument. Particles cannot collapse by themselves in a controlled measurement system in an environment. The observer causes the collapse with the measurement. That is why his role is important. In the power relationship between social units he would assume the role of leader because he is aware that his decision will collapse the undetermination thus creating an expectant reality.

Because the wave function of the State has many potential outcomes (because of the confluence of multiple semantics that fight each other to impose themselves) the intentions and character of the leaders are crucial in determining what policies are realized. When a dominant unit collapses the potentialities of a State in a real election, non-local consequences follow for all other social units. This type of causality can be seen as the basis for a quantum conceptualization of structural power. Dominant units by virtue of their position within a social wave function can affect others through action at a distance.

Another fundamental question Wendt (2015) asks is about the ontological status of the State. Entanglement and non-local effects evidently reinforce a quantum explanation, so his proposal is to recognize the State as a kind of hologram (3). First it is necessary to explain some basic principles. A particularity of the hologram is that the information that generates the whole is encoded in each pixel of the image (4). If we transfer this explanation to the nature of the State and the social units that make it up, we would say that the whole (i.e. the State) is present in the parts (the citizens that make it up). Thus, for example, the State could lose most of its population in a natural catastrophe, and yet it may be able to rebuild its central institutions with the surviving people.

Proposing a vitalist sociology implies understanding society as a conscious superorganism (2015). This may be problematic because it implies assuming that there are universal patterns in the organizational nature of human and non-human beings. Wendt (2015) alludes to quantum coherence as a constitutive principle of life. Recall that coherence protects the quantum structures of the brain from collapsing upon contact with the external environment. This protection would be the key here because it would act as an immunological instrument that is replicated in other living systems and would fulfill the same protective function. The State also replicates this structure and in general can be applied to any social organism.

The other problem is to understand society as a superorganism that is conscious. For Wendt (2015) human groups possess intentional states, they have their own agenda, hence it is evident to recognize conceptually the existence of a collective intentionality. The problem of attributing consciousness to groups lies in the fact that it is naturally a private and reserved phenomenon, so if it is applied to a structure as complex as the State it would only be the dispersed accumulation of conscious individuals. This poses a challenge to the proposal of a vitalist sociology because the approach needs a physical basis. One can appeal to the quantum argument to solve this drawback. Three questions are proposed:

First. Assume that consciousness is a universal phenomenon that exceeds the limits of individual brain structures (2015). Being an extended phenomenon its nature contains all recognizable matter in reality. This allows Wendt (2015) to argue that consciousness is a transaction between the mind and its environment. This also allows us to suppose the existence of a collective consciousness.

Second. The challenges involved in the conceptualization of collective consciousness. One of the limitations of the concept is that its study and scientific relevance is limited to individual brains. Wendt (2015) agrees that it is difficult to find a physical basis for the ontology of the social that explains collective consciousness. Therefore, he refers to Hans Schmid’s (2014) proposal on the “sense of us” that presupposes collective intentions.

The “sense of us” in Schmid (2014) is predetermined in social interactions which in turn are subject to cultural semantics in which there is a pre-existing plural subject. For Schmid (2014) there is a process of infinite regression immersed because the formation of the plural subject is an activity of doing together. Schmid (2014) will define the sense of the us as a plural self-consciousness because it is the result of communication with one another that derives in the construction of a plural semantics because the world is experienced from a shared perspective.

Wendt (2015) believes that Schmid’s proposal has physical implications that lead to a quantum model. According to Schmid (2014) the individual self does not exist prior to self-consciousness which is consistent with the previously addressed proposition that the natural state of mind is superposition and is only actualized in the collapse of its wave function, i.e., experience.

The we-feel is not limited to the consciousness of separable individuals, nor is it a collective object or subject that exists above them. If we apply quantum knowledge it is a social wave function, which could arise from co-presence in a concrete situation (visual or verbal structured by language). For Wendt (2015) the social wave function occurs when individuals actualize it in the collapse that they experience as a we. In doing so, they constitute themselves as separable individuals, but by virtue of entanglement this experience is also connected non-locally to others. It entails not only the construction of a subjective sense about the “we feel,” but a shared semantics for the “we.” The object and subject of collective intentions are not prior to collective consciousness, but emergent from it in a quantum sense.

This argument can support a physical basis for collective consciousness, but there are issues to be clarified. Most problematic is to overcome the strongly rooted conviction that consciousness is indivisible, unitary and subjective. Referring to Schmid Wendt (2015) clarifies that groups do not have personalistic views like individuals. There is no “I, state”, only the “we, the people”. So it will be important to reinforce the argument that the consciousness of individuals is collective.

Third. The idea that the consciousness of individuals is collective is formulated. Wendt (2015) begins to pose the problem in terms of the constituent parts of life and reasons about the collective individual nature of cells. His attention turns to cell theory to argue for collective consciousness. Being superorganisms cells would emulate some of the properties of human groups, so Wendt (2015) posits that cells may have some kind of consciousness that provides them with subjectivity because this is co-extensive with it, and it would not be a marginal approach because philosophers such as Whitehead or Schrodinger have already raised it. In this complex web Wendt (2015) argues that cellular consciousness could be governed by hierarchies so that a dominant unit experiences the whole and carries with it the rest of the emerging units.

In conclusion, Wendt’s proposal would aim at conceiving a pan-social ontology based on the social metaphor used to construct cellular theory. Instead of starting with individuals and building from there, it is suggested to follow the reverse path. It is suggested that the apparently unitary consciousness of individuals is collective. If we apply this principle to the reality of the State we would recognize that this structure depends on a dominant unit that speaks and experiences for the whole, while the other units will experience obedience as “it is for all”.

NOTES:

(1) The problem with physicalism in the social sciences is that it assumes that all reality is material, i.e. that the whole world is physical, including individuals and society. The problem is that the physicality of social structures is puzzling because it cannot be observed.

(2) It is important to note that none of these activities allow us to see the State. Wendt clarifies that the wave functions are not really there because the practices are not the State as a whole.

(3) A hologram is a three-dimensional image that uses the quantum principle of interference to create its content. Unlike traditional two-dimensional images, holograms capture depth and perspective, giving them a more realistic and immersive appearance.

(4) This novel hologram attribution is based on the interference pattern. For example, one can destroy most of a holographic plate, but still recover the overall image (albeit blurred) of what remains.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Schmid, Hans Bernhard (2014) “Plural Self-Awareness” on Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9317-z

Wendt, Alexander. 2015. Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.