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 given form by an underlying classical deterministic process, incorporating essentially logical thought and its indeterministic version modeled by classical probability theory; (ii) a layer given form under influence of the totality of the surrounding conceptual landscape, where the different concepts figure as individual entities rather than (logical) combinations of others, with measurable quantities such as 'typicality', 'membership', 'representativeness', 'similarity', 'applicability', 'preference' or 'utility' carrying the influences. We call the process in this second layer 'quantum conceptual thought', which is indeterministic in essence, and contains holistic aspects, but is equally well, although very differently, organized than logical thought. A substantial part of the 'quantum conceptual thought process' can be modeled by quantum mechanical probabilistic and mathematical structures. We consider examples of three specific domains of research where the effects of the presence of quantum 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.
The 'expected utility hypothesis' is one of the foundations of classical
approaches to economics and decision theory and Savage's 'Sure-Thing Principle'
is a fundamental element of it. It has been put forward that real-life
situations exist, illustrated by the 'Allais' and 'Ellsberg paradoxes', in
which the Sure-Thing Principle is violated, and where also the expected utility
hypothesis does not hold. We have recently presented strong arguments for the
presence of a double layer structure, a 'classical logical' and a 'quantum
conceptual', in human thought and that the quantum conceptual mode is
responsible of the above violation. We consider in this paper the Ellsberg
paradox, perform an experiment with real test subjects on the situation
considered by Ellsberg, and use the collected data to elaborate a model for the
conceptual landscape surrounding the decision situation of the paradox. We show
that it is the conceptual landscape which gives rise to a violation of the
Sure-Thing Principle and leads to the paradoxical situation discovered by
Ellsberg.Comment: 11 page
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