Of Particles and Humans: the Question of ‘Human Being’ in Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science

Preliminary Considerations

The scope of Quantum Mind and Social Science opens Wendt’s account up to many avenues of discussion and critique, so the first step is to engage with some of those preliminarily before focusing on the core concern discussed in this article. On the broadest level, using quantum theory to contribute to the study of the social sciences or even IR in particular is not altogether new. ¹² We have seen research, as Wendt himself acknowledges, that links insights from a quantum approach in the various ‘hard’ sciences to issues and conceptions usually situated within the humanities or social sciences. ¹³

Wendt, however, starts with a strong (philosophically) realist claim when he says that he intends the argument of human beings as wave functions ‘not as an analogy or metaphor, but as a realist claim about what people really are […] my personal belief is that human beings really are quantum systems’. ¹⁴ While analogies between assumptions of the social sciences and insights derived from quantum theory have been made quite frequently, such a realist claim requires a particularly solid defence. Wendt undoubtedly demonstrates close and wide-ranging familiarity with research across various sciences drawing on quantum theory, but at the same time the trajectory of his argument seems somewhat path-dependent. He openly admits that there are numerous, and indeed sometimes diametrically opposed, interpretations of quantum theory. ¹⁵ At every junction of his journey he informs the reader about the tentative nature of existing research, of possible alternatives that may lead in a completely different direction. Admitting to this volatility and yet pressing forward with a realist claim regarding the nature of human beings and social life more generally, however, seems somewhat odd. In some ways, the argument presented here seems the wrong way around. Wendt postulates the goal and then navigates his way through competing interpretations of quantum theory, picking the path compatible with his overall argument in order to arrive at his destination. Providing analogies and metaphors in this manner seems permissible but placing a realist claim on such a path-dependent reading places an undue burden on the tentative state of quantum theory. It is not that Wendt conceals alternatives or overplays the conclusiveness of the interpretations that he follows. He duly acknowledges the volatility of his choices, but this makes his commitment to a strong realist claim appear more rather than less problematic. I do not want to push this point any further here as any proper evaluation of the plausibility of Wendt’s trajectory would require specialist knowledge concerning quantum theory, which, I admit, I do not have – however, whether any realist argument can be defended on such tentative grounds seems highly questionable.

The second preliminary consideration concerns his objective to unify physical and social ontology by introducing a quantum theory inspired approach to the social sciences. As Wendt argues, the taken for granted assumptions of classical physics on the one hand and the related ‘mystery’ of how mind can develop out of matter on the other have caused long-standing confusion. For Wendt, however, the issue here lies not primarily with conceptual, theoretical or empirical shortcomings of particular solutions to the mind-body problem but rather with the more fundamental reliance on the assumptions of classical physics. ¹⁶ Quantum physics offers an alternative approach that promises a decisive shift at the very basis of these debates by supporting a (neutral) monist ontology that allows mind and matter to be seen as aspects of an ontologically more fundamental level. ‘Rather than accept the duality of aspects as a brute fact, neutral monists seek to explain the emergence of the distinction between the two aspects out of an underlying sub-stratum that is neither mind nor matter’. ¹⁷ If Wendt is successful we will arrive at an ontology in which all kinds of entities – from particles to humans – can be studied and explained within one unified ontological framework. It points, however, also to a deeper shift in the ontological setup; Wendt’s monist ontology, as a deliberate move against (post-) Cartesian dualism, dispenses with a particular notion of ontology that is based on the ontological primacy of determinable substances. Instead, the sub-stratum he refers to, of which mind and matter are aspects, is not an actual substance but quantum coherence. ¹⁸ Consequently, the move away from a dualist ontology to an ontological monism does not just require a different understanding of the characteristics of substances (beings) but also a more fundamental rethinking of the notion of being as such – in other words Wendt’s project raises questions of philosophical ontology, not ‘just’ scientific ontology. ¹⁹

Two issues arise at this point: first, can quantum theory deliver such a framework – this question comes back to the ways in which quantum theory has been interpreted and which interpretations, if any, are sufficiently robust to support this new ontology. The second issue, which is of greater interest to us here, concerns the fundamental shift implicit in Wendt away from a substance ontology, in which the ontological difference between beings and being is concealed. A monist ontology as it is proposed here re-opens the need to engage with the question of being as distinct from questions about beings exactly because the ontological primacy is no longer ascribed to substances – Wendt abandons the metaphysics of presence upheld by classical physics and thereby necessitates deeper reflections on the concept of ‘ontology’ as such – reflections, however, his account barely delivers.

For large parts of the book, Wendt’s treatment of the potential of quantum physics for the social sciences remains firmly situated in the scientific ontological realm, the realm concerned with delineating which entities exist and what characteristics they have. Beings, not being, is the focus of his deliberations. He accepts that there are qualitative differences between different entities (particles, rocks, plants, humans etc) ²⁰ but proposes a shared ontology across the physical and social realm. This focus, however, relies upon a very specific understanding of ‘ontology’, still occupied with a concern about entities and their defining characteristics – an understanding that also structures the classical physics he seeks to leave behind and comes at the expense of equally crucial considerations concerning the nature of being resulting from having shifted the ground away from a substance ontology.

This shift, however, is a crucial consequence of the proposed monist ontological position and is not particular to Wendt’s reflections on quantum theory. Niels Bohr already raised the question of what quantum reality ‘is’, what lies beyond the substances we study scientifically (although he thought it unanswerable). ²¹ Wendt on rare occasions seems to allude to such deeper questions, for instance when he distinguishes between ‘universal’ and ‘social’ ontologies, ²² yet he never penetrates the realm in which questions of being and their consequences for his approach are raised – a possibly costly neglect.

Even if we accept that human beings, as one of the entities he considers, may in their ‘physicality’ be subject to the same laws, their form of being may well require further meta-physical consideration (something Wendt is generally not opposed to) ²³ if we aim for an explanation or understanding of their behaviour. In other words, within Wendt’s quantum ontology, the question that should at least be considered is whether human being (not human beings) is qualitatively the same as other forms of being (i.e. is the form of existence of particles the same as the form of existence of humans) and if not, what follows for the study of human beings in a quantum approach. Wendt himself in his frequent references to the phenomenological tradition ²⁴ provides one avenue to explore those questions.

The Question of Human Being in a Quantum Approach

The role and nature of consciousness has provided the impetus behind much of phenomenological thought and equally provides one way to open such reflections on being rather than beings in Wendt’s account. While Wendt discusses consciousness in order to ground his panpsychic vitalism ontologically, ²⁵ further questions can be raised regarding his treatment of consciousness (and particularly his lack of reflection of self-consciousness) in relation to the study of social contexts. Despite Wendt’s commitment to a monist and contextually situated account in which potentialities rather than efficient causal chains characterise human behaviour, ²⁶ he leaves two core concerns unaddressed: the affirmation of the ontological primacy of consciousness and considerations regarding the hermeneutic nature of human being and its impact on formulating and collapsing the wave function.

Regarding the first point, consciousness for Wendt is ‘the subjective manifestation of wave function collapse in the moment’; ²⁷ it emerges at the moment the wave function collapses and one of the potential realities becomes enacted or ‘present’ ²⁸ in the same way as particles do not exist in any actual sense until an observation takes place. As Wendt himself suggests, consciousness and with it the actualisation of a situated subject is manifest at the moment the wave function collapses – it is exactly not given essentially from the beginning. Further, the context in which and against which this subject emerges is also not ontologically given but co-emergent with the subject when the wave function collapses. As Wendt points out: ‘As superpositions social structures are only potentialities rather than actualities, but this is equally the case for agents. Their superposed states are co-emergent, and if they become real realities they do so together in localised practices, which themselves are emergent from the dynamic process of wave function collapse’. ²⁹ As a result, the actuality of human experience, if understood as a collapse of the wave function, does not establish an efficiently casual chain of ‘events’ between given entities, but rather the involved realisation of one out of many potentialities. ³⁰ Ontologically, this also raises central questions about the status of the human subject and consciousness as they only appear factically at the moment of the collapse of the wave function.

The key here is that Wendt himself implies that consciousness as experience cannot be ontologically primary as it only emerges as an actuality with the collapse of the wave function. The question that arises then is how to grasp ontologically the pre-collapsed state of an unobserved wave function – a question pertaining to the form of being rather than the constitution of beings. Some quantum physicists have reflected upon this quantum reality and thought it to be beyond conceptualisation. ‘According to Bohr, quantum reality defaults all distinctions, all objectuality’. ³¹ Quantum reality, exactly because it precedes the collapse of the wave function, is ontologically more fundamental than the emergence or either consciousness or subject – it pertains to existence or, in other words, being. ³² Bohr himself, as Wendt correctly points out, ³³ of course refused to address ontological questions about what quantum reality ‘is’, yet questions concerning its effects in manifesting forms of being can be raised and addressed. ³⁴

However, Wendt’s quantum solution to the mind-body problem and the related invocation of subjectivity and consciousness as part of a panpsychic vitalism, which imbues matter with mind, has too quickly glossed over these deeper questions concerning philosophical ontology and the related particularities of human being and its relation to the world. To be fair, Wendt does provide some references to these deeper ontological questions, not only, as shown above, when he sees social structures and human agents as co-emergent but also when he observes: ‘For if there is one place in nature where time and causality seem to work backwards it is in human action, with its strongly teleological quality. Thus, while from an external, material perspective our behaviour seems “pushed” by the interactions of matter in the past, from an internal, phenomenological perspective it feels more like we are “pulled” by reasons advanced into – indeed in a sense from – the future’. ³⁵ ‘Being pulled by reasons advanced into the future’, however, already points towards a very particular way in which human being relates to its world which warrants further scrutiny.

On an individual level, i.e. the level concerning the characteristics of human beings, Wendt recognises unique characteristics, particularly the proposed ability of our brains to maintain a continued state of quantum coherence, ³⁶ a position central to his claim that human subjects are basically walking wave functions. ³⁷ Crucially, this ability, compared to other entities such as stones or plants, allows for a continuous sense of existence in which past, present and future coalesce. ³⁸ This continuity across space and time provides for the possibility of a single coherent subject fusing mental and material aspects in the form of a panpsychic vitalism that overcomes the perennial mind-body dualism and its concomitant philosophical challenges.

When moving his arguments from the realm of particles to the social realm, Wendt subscribes to a form in individualism that underwrites his otherwise holist ontology. As he explains: ‘Unlike the physicist’s particles, which literally do come from nowhere, our elementary units are given at birth by nature, and as such impose a “rump individualist” limit of a holist argument’. ³⁹ Wendt’s treatment of human subjects as compared to particles is somewhat ambiguous throughout, however. On a general level he is happy to state that ‘in social life the “particles” are biological individuals whose bodies cannot fuse even in principle’ ⁴⁰ and further that ‘social life is not essentially different from that of sub-atomic particles’. ⁴¹ Such commitments to an underlying consistency stretching across particles and human beings is of course not surprising given that his overall endeavour is to establish a unified physical and social ontology. Doing so requires entities to share fundamental characteristics and to be subjected to the same fundamental forces while recognising that the study of human behaviour necessarily creates a much more formidable challenge for the researcher. As walking wave functions, human individuals are entangled on a quantum level, normatively and linguistically. ⁴² This means that ‘individual action’ in the strictest sense is not possible; context and established social structures provide an inevitable framework in which and against which action must be understood. In the end, ‘who we are at a given moment cannot be separated from our context. And given that our contexts are vastly more complex subtle and varied than those in physics, that means compared to sub-atomic particles our behaviour will be vastly more complex, subtle and varied as well’. ⁴³ Nevertheless, Wendt remains confident that despite the increase in complexity wave functions can be formulated for human beings as they can for particles.

A number of questions arise at this point though that lead beyond the account of the characteristics of human beings and pertain to the deeper form of being humans may exhibit. The ability of the human brain to maintain quantum coherence (if we follow this supposition) and the concomitant effect of creating a form of being which is no longer definable by its actual presence alone has a number of ramifications. For one, the ability to form and maintain a coherent identity throughout time imbues human being with a disposition of openness towards its own future. Human being assumes a sense of directionality which transcends the immediacy of the circumstances in which it finds itself. Equally, as a second consequence, the awareness of a particular past cannot be separated from the analysis of any particular present. Human being in its actuality is circumscribed by both its past actualities and its future possibilities. Most importantly, however, this contextual situatedness is accompanied by the emergence not only of consciousness but also self-consciousness, the ability to reflect upon the very conditions of existence and project a specific intended trajectory into a yet to be realised future. Finally, the continuity of human being across time, coupled with the concomitant situatedness and the ability of reflexively relating to its own existence, also reveals a very particular relation between human being and the world it inhabits.

This form of being exhibits a qualitatively different characteristic from the being of particles, not only ontically (i.e. concerning human beings as qualitatively different entities compared to particles) but also, and more fundamentally, ontologically (i.e. exhibiting a different form of being). If ‘the distinctive feature of … human life … is that … living human beings relate themselves interpretively to their lives, that they understand themselves in a continuous process of self-understanding, experience and re-interpretation’ ⁴⁴ then, as Wendt himself suggests, the past acquires its meaning in light of present experiences and anticipations while the meaning of the present and the anticipation of the future are conditioned by the way in which the past has been understood. As was alluded to above, Wendt has glimpses of this more fundamental dimension shining through some of his arguments, yet he fails to recognise its significance for his own undertaking. Recognising the particularity of the form of being that constitutes human existence, however, raises issues that are in need of clarification if a quantum account is to be successful in studying the social world.

The first issue concerns the primacy of consciousness in the newly developed quantum ontology. On the level of scientific ontology, which seeks to establish the entities that exist and their characteristics, the treatment of consciousness is central to Wendt’s account. Yet, its primacy on the level of philosophical ontology is highly questionable. In moments where Wendt relates consciousness to the collapse of the wave function, the spectre of a more fundamental ontological shift away from a substance ontology shines through. If consciousness understood as experience is manifest in the collapse of wave functions, i.e. in the actualisation of potentialities, then, ontologically speaking, consciousness is not primary but secondary – ontological primacy rather lies with the uncollapsed wave function and its inherent possibilities. This, however, also means that any ontological foregrounding of subjectivity and consciousness proposed in the book is unwarranted. Instead we would need to ask how to understand, ontologically, the existence of wave functions as pure agglomerations of potentialities – this, however, relates to questions of being rather than beings. This can be done by shifting our focus away from individual beings and enquiring into the form of being that constitutes their existence. Doing so brings us to the notion of human being as a form of being which engages with the world self-reflexively and whose actualisations and in fact its processes of individuation are ontologically secondary. Wendt fails to develop this account of being sufficiently; his monist, quantum-based ontology remains ‘stuck’ on a scientific ontological level dealing with substances while at the same time acknowledging that substances no longer have ontological primacy.

The second, concomitant question concerns the formulation of wave functions. If human being is inherently self-reflexive and relates interpretively to the world, the question arises as to how wave functions are actually derived. For Wendt, this does not seem a particular challenge when he states: ‘That means that just as for the particle in the cloud chamber, an outside observer could in principle write a single equation to describe our behaviour’. ⁴⁵ At the same time he recognises that the fusion of the third and first-person perspective in the case of human beings opens the possibility of two positions from which any one wave function could be drawn up. If we were to write the wave function for ‘Jones’ we need to acknowledge that ‘even if Jones and Smith might write the same equation describing Jones’ wave function in a given context – and to that extent have similar third-person knowledge about him – Jones has a privileged form of access to this equation from the inside’. ⁴⁶

Initially, one can see what makes Wendt think that Smith and Jones will actually write the same equation expressing Jones’ wave function. His scientific ontological position basically inscribes parallels between all entities and hence the same basic physical constraints apply. Human beings may be more complex than particles but nevertheless can be subsumed under the same ontological framework. For Wendt they are walking wave functions and while they show temporal coherence and the ability to provide a first-person perspective (and are therefore qualitatively different entities compared to particles), their wave functions can be formulated. They resemble Leibnizian monads and their particular context and conditions for action can be described and hence their potentialities captured. He acknowledges that ‘who we are at any given moment cannot be separated from our context’ ⁴⁷ and even goes so far as to claim that ‘we cannot speak of a stable, objective reality’. ⁴⁸ Yet, this contextualisation only means that the way we ‘measure’ influences the result – for particles as for humans. It does still leave open the possibility that knowing the context and way of measurement, we formulate a wave function (although there seem to be big question marks here as well). ⁴⁹

If we shift focus, however, to the underlying considerations about forms of being and not just characteristics of beings, questions arise. Compared to the wave function for particles, for instance, formulating potentialities to become actualised in the case of human beings requires a hermeneutic understanding; each human being relates interpretively to their world and the very meaning they inscribe to this world will inevitably impact on the formulation of the wave function. The interpretive layer which self-reflexivity affords human beings makes it seemingly impossible to reduce the potentialities to a single wave function – instead there will be as many wave functions for a human being as there will be interpretively relating beings discerning potentialities. Because Wendt does not engage with the deeper notion of being he is unable to properly address the hermeneutic nature of human being and, concomitantly, lacks a proper consideration of the effects of self-reflexivity in his account; he seems to posit a simple parallel between the delineation of a wave function for a particle and the delineation of a wave function for human beings. This is basically done on the basis that both are forms of matter imbued with mind. What seems to separate particles and humans for Wendt is the more complex form of consciousness that affords humans the ability to develop a coherent experience in time. This difference, however, moves beyond degrees of complexity of consciousness in that human beings exhibit a particular form of being that allows them – compared to particles – to relate interpretively to their world.

Given that this reflexivity is an ontological feature of human existence, human beings’ aims and objectives, tasks and priorities change constantly in line with their hermeneutic form of existence. Furthermore, as the interpretive situatedness is a basic feature of human being, judging the potentialities and formulating the equation of the wave function will always be done from a situated perspective and no situated perspective is the same exactly because, as Wendt recognises, context is non-local, i.e. includes memories, experiences, projections and so on which individualise context and the meaning of the context for each human being. Whose equation about Jones is authoritative? His own because he has privileged access? But to what extent can we even speak of ‘his own’ given the multi-layered entanglement human beings are subject to? ⁵⁰ We reach here the limits of Wendt’s notion of subjectivity. Although we may be able to biologically discern material boundaries, the content of the subject’s self is not private but public; it is precisely not the self-transparent consciousness that knows itself but the self-transcendent consciousness that underlines the always public construction of identity. The fundamentally situated and hermeneutic form of being human beings exhibit forecloses the possibility of any ‘neutral’ ground from which potentialities can be derived and translated into an equation expressing the wave function of an individual. There will be as many wave functions as there will be observers and no grounds to judge which is the ‘correct’ one since even the materialisation of an actual state of affairs from a potential one will in its meaning be socially negotiated and constructed; after all, it is commonplace in politics that ‘events’ (i.e. actualised potentialities) are inscribed with completely different, often diametrically opposed meanings.

But even if we were able to formulate equations expressing the wave functions of individuals two further issues arise. First, how stable are wave functions of human beings? How often do we have to adjust the wave function to reflect the changing projections of individual human beings and incorporate the potentialities inherent in these projections? If we formulate such an equation of particles in controlled experimental setups, these wave functions will be very stable. If we do not change the manner of observation, results will be constant. Given all the above reflections on human being as a hermeneutic form of being, however, how can we assume the same for human beings (and that is even without raising the issue of translating the complexities and subtleties of human meaning into the straightjacket of mathematical symbolism)? The main challenge in formulating wave functions for human beings compared to particles seems to lie in the fact that human beings relate interpretively and self-consciously to their environment while particles do not. The relative stability we can achieve in formulating wave functions for particles seems jeopardised in the case of human beings. And if we can’t assume such stability, how volatile, and subsequently how ‘useful’ will these equations be (independent of the wider epistemological question of whether they would actually tell us everything we need to and want to know)?

As we can see, Wendt delivers a quite coherent, if tentative account, of a quantum social science as long as his reflections remain at the level of scientific ontology, i.e. re-descriptions of the qualities and characteristics of entities. Wider considerations, made implicitly necessary by his abandonment of a substance ontology, however, suggest necessary reflections on questions of being, and for the social sciences, particularly human being.

Final Remarks

Overall, Quantum Mind and Social Science delivers a provocative contribution to the meta-theory of the social sciences. Wendt provides a wide-ranging, substantive and accessible account of how and why taking quantum theory seriously in social research can promise to provide new inputs into deadlocked debates. The sense in which it identifies the rootedness of competing accounts in an underlying commitment to the laws of classical physics provides an opening to fundamentally rethink social science ontologically by shifting ground towards and taking seriously cutting-edge research in quantum science.

As we have seen, however, for all the eloquence with which the case for quantum social science is made, challenges remain. These are not only linked to the still raging debates within quantum theory about competing interpretations but also, and more specifically about the application of any interpretation of quantum theory to the social sciences, particularly if pushed on realist grounds. This article has focused on Wendt’s treatment of the key entity the social sciences are concerned with – human beings. Wendt’s monist position and its explicit rejection of (post-)Cartesian dualism has opened ways to engage anew with the protracted mind-body problem putting forward a pan-psychic and vitalist argument that fundamentally changes the conception of the beings we study. At the same time, however, and hidden from view in Wendt’s account, such a move abandons the notion of substance ontology in which the notion of being is collapsed into the presence of beings. Developing a monist ontology in which substances (most centrally mind and matter) are no longer primary but aspects of a deeper ontological sub-stratum also provides the opportunity and the need to re-think our conception of ontology and ask anew questions pertaining to form of human being in a quantum account. Wendt does on rare occasions venture into deeper ontological questions but overall remains, contradictorily, stuck within a metaphysics of presence when focusing on the delineation of characteristics of existing beings without asking questions about their form of being, questions that his own approach raises. This article has highlighted how asking these deeper questions can philosophically complement Wendt’s account but equally, how their neglect raises questions regarding the practicalities of bringing a quantum approach to social science.