Classical vs. Quantum Thought?

Classical Logical versus Quantum Conceptual Thought: Examples in Economy, Decision theory and Concept Theory

Inspired by a quantum mechanical formalism to model concepts and their disjunctions and conjunctions, we put forward in this paper a specific hypothesis. Namely that within human thought two superposed layers can be distinguished: (i) a layer guided by an underlying classical deterministic process, giving rise to essentially logical thought and its indeterministic version modeled by classical probability theory; (ii) a layer guided by conceptual weights of different types, such as 'typicality', 'membership', 'representativeness', 'similarity', 'applicability', 'preference' or 'utility', giving rise to what we call 'conceptual thought', indeterministic in essence, but equally well, although very differently, organized than logical thought. A substantial part of the conceptual thought process can be modeled by quantum mechanical probabilistic structures. We consider examples of three specific domains of research where the effects of the presence of conceptual thought and its deviations from classical logical thought have been noticed and studied, i.e. economics, decision theory, and concept theories and which provide experimental evidence for our hypothesis.