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Quantum Theory May Explain Wishful Thinking
explosivejared writes "Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.' This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making — and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall."
Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory. These paradoxical findings have resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. A quantum probability model, based on a Hilbert space representation and Schrodinger's equation, provides a simple and elegant explanation for this behaviour. The quantum model is compared with an equivalent Markov model and it is shown that the latter is unable to account for violations of the sure thing principle. Accordingly, it is argued that quantum probability provides a better framework for modelling human decision-making.
The human brain is a complex organ. Unfortunately the kind people at the "Royal Society for Articles Only People with Money Can Read" would not allow me to review this research. I would have found this research much more compelling had they reported a much more thorough sample analysis. I'm going to predict that people from different walks of life would respond differently to the Prisoner's Dilemma game. For instance, if you did this on regular citizens with no history of jail time versus convicts serving sentences, I would expect you to have to adapt your model.
Because you encountered some percentage of "wishful thinking" does not necessarily make that a tried and true percentage unless it is true for human beings in different groups that may affect this decision making. If it truly is quantum mechanics at work, I would suspect that you would see the same percentage in convicts vs non-convicts, Russians vs Americans, women vs men, scientists vs priests, orphans vs parented children, etc. For you see, I'm going to make the assumption that people are deciding on wishful thinking based on their history of interacting with other humans.
I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.
My work here is dung.
The same mathematical model does not necessarily mean that thought processes are driven by anything quantum mechanical. Quantum theory uses probability models as do psychological models. They are defined by probability theory and not the other way round. i.e. quantum theory uses models that existed before the discretization of energy was even considered.
Or is that just wishful thinking?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
which is why I make sure every cat I put in a box has been killed beforehand. Suck on that, Schrodinger.
That seems a much simpler explanation.
Especially when I see contestants on Deal or No Deal who turn-down $50,000 "banker payoffs" and end-up with only $100 or less in their cases. Pure logic dictates that your odds of winning the big prize is almost nothing, and you should take the banker payoff, but people don't use logic. They use emotion. They "feel" their way through life instead of thinking.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's all well and good to use the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics in other fields but the math by itself is not quantum theory. I get really annoyed with the "Ohhh something weird and mysterious we don't understand it must be because of QM" nonsense. Hello, decoherence anyone? Outside of carefully prepared states, large collections of particles behave classically. You know, that's why we discovered classical physics first.
How would free will be explained on the quantum level? Randomness or probability doesn't account for free will, either. Free will is simply magic of the mind, a sort of god-of-the-gaps for not knowing the complex web of the interaction between heredity and environment and the many antecedent events acting upon it.
In other news: a recent study by the American Wave Mechanics Society suggests wishful thinking may explain quantum mechanics.
This type of decision making might simply be an evolutionarily-selected random seeding.
For example, when running an evolutionary algorithm, it is vital to have randomness seeded into the mix. This allows for the system or algorithm to escape from local maxima.
Douglas Adams had a great quote at the end of one of his last lectures regarding humans' re-invention of everything - nothing is ever 'good enough': http://www.guba.com/watch/3000053272
Perhaps this is all that just random, unpredictable outcomes from a horrendously complex system we call the brain, which has emerged out of a random, unpredictable and horrendously complex universe.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
The human mind is not a special and unique snowflake. You are a computer. I am a computer. You are a computer. The brain is literally a quivering mound of hacks: look at fMRI studies sometime. We operate according to the same laws of physics that govern that boiler over in the corner. Get over yourselves already.
Look: maybe it was acceptable in the 18th century to imagine some special mechanism for the human mind, but no longer. There are simply no mental phenomena that require quantum mechanics to understand. It's far easier to suppose that we are simply flawed creatures that sometimes make bad decisions using heuristics adapted more for the African savannah than New York.
..fear of prison..
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a generalized model for decision-making in a non-zero-sum game (net cooperation must yield more than net defection.) A story involving prisoner's and jail time is only the most popular canonical representation for the game. While I've nothing to say in defense of the researchers' intelligence: to levy criticism that the researchers have perhaps overlooked subjects' aversion to actual prison time is to suggest that the researchers are, perhaps, extremely stupid, and have no idea what they are doing at all.
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
It sounds like you are reading more into that concept than is actually there (which is a common mistake - see the pseudoscience in What The [Bleep] Do We Know?). The effect in question isn't about conscious observers. It's about physical interactions between particles.
An electron microscope will have an effect on the subject being imaged whether or not a grad student is looking through it. In addition, a grad student (like any other human) will certainly impart their own biases on the results - even if it's by failing to notice something in the image because they were only looking where they expected to find something, and not elsewhere. But the second isn't a quantum-mechanical effect. It's a procedural/data-processing issue.
Apologies if I read something into your post that wasn't actually there.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman