MIL0010.1177/0305829818779510Millennium: Journal of International StudiesArfi and Kessler 779510research-article2018

Forum: Social Theory Going Quantum-Theoretic? Questions, Alternatives and Challenges

Millennium: Journal of Forum Introduction: 2018, Vol. 47(1) 67­–73 © The Author(s) 2018 Social Theory Going Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Quantum-Theoretic? https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818779510DOI: 10.1177/0305829818779510 journals.sagepub.com/home/mil Questions, Alternatives and Challenges

Badredine Arfi University of Florida, USA

Oliver Kessler University of Erfurt, Germany

Keywords , Social Theory, quantum

Mots-clés Alexander Wendt, Théories Sociales, Théories quantiques.

Palabras clave Alexander Wendt, teoría social, quántum

Alexander Wendt’s and : Unifying Physical and Social Ontology proposes a re-reading of many subjects and topics that have concerned IR theory over the last two decades through the quantum world and word. This book is situ- ated quite uneasily in IR Theory: it touches upon many themes of IR theory while it understands itself to be situated beyond IR’s confines. Alexander Wendt readily admits that this book is more a treatise in social theory than ‘IR’ and he suggests that a third

Corresponding author: Oliver Kessler, University of Erfurt, Nordhäuserstr 63, Erfurt, 99089, Germany. Email: [email protected] 68 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1) book will deal with ‘IR proper’.1 One could even say that this new book by Wendt is not even about a social theory of international politics as defined in his 1999 first – then groundbreaking – book. This book is about the and beyond … much beyond, even if the book does not always announce it as such. The contributors to this Forum agree that the book does raise issues that are relevant for IR and already at this stage can and should be discussed: IR theory has spent much energy discussing questions of ‘realism’, ‘critical realism’, ‘constructivism’, ideas, iden- tities, language, etc. and this book speaks to many of these concerns. Even though the references do not present themselves easily, they are nevertheless there throughout the book. One of the key insights of is that observation by the scientist is not a passive enterprise, but an activity: to put it metaphorically, the particles somehow ‘emerge knowing’ that they are being observed. For example, whether or not the infa- mous Schrödinger’s Cat is dead or alive depends on the act of observation. Observation is thus not a value neutral, objective enterprise, but part of the ‘world’ we want to under- stand. This of course takes up many of the issues that constructivists, practice theorists and ethnographers of all kinds and others have talked about in terms of ‘self-reflexivity’, science as practice, and the impossibility of separating subject and object. In this sense, we do understand the book to be talking directly to our concerns and that the book searches and presents the occasional inroads to IR is eventually a case in point that the book is both inside and outside IR at the same time. Let us first summarise briefly Wendt’s project before we provide a brief overview to the Forum. In his re-reading of social theory through a ‘quantum-theoretic optics’, Alexander Wendt ‘puts consciousness’ back at the core of social theory. To this end he builds a quantum theoretic framework supplemented with a panpsychist hypothesis about a proto-consciousness at every level of the universe to theorise the role of con- sciousness in human subjectivity and social structures. A key concept that Wendt relies on to develop his approach is quantum coherence, which is mathematically expressed through the notion of . Wendt describes it as ‘life force’ ‘which can only be known from the inside, through experience’2 qua the essence of life.3 His argument is not meant to be based on analogies or metaphors; his is ‘a realist claim about what people really are’.4 He insists that ‘we will not make clear progress on the epistemology of a quantum social science until we have a firm basis in its ontology, where little work has been done’.5 He thus proclaims that ‘we are walking wave functions’ qua ontological entities.6 Wendt summarises his inquiry through two questions:

1. How might a quantum theoretic approach explain consciousness and by exten- sion intentional phenomena, and thereby unify physical and social ontology?

1. Private communication with Alexander Wendt. 2. Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 32. 3. Ibid., 92. 4. Ibid., 3. This will be one of the guiding themes for this forum as a whole. 5. Ibid., 6. 6. Ibid., 3. Arfi and Kessler 69

2. What are some implications of the result for contemporary debates in social theory?7

He answers these questions by systematically – one step at a time – constructing a dis- course that draws on a large number of literatures far away from IR theory and even social theory. Two building blocks of Wendt’s project are what he terms ‘quantum brain theory’ and panpsychist hypothesis of proto-consciousness. ‘Quantum brain theory’ is, in fact, as he explains, a set of hypotheses that quantum biologists have put forward and which essentially propose that ‘the brain is able to sustain quantum coherence – a wave function – at the macro, whole-organism level’.8 Therefore, ‘Quantum brain theory takes known effects at the sub-atomic level and scales them upward to the macroscopic level of the brain’.9 The approach specifically suggests that ‘the brain is able to continuously generate quantum coherent processes among particles/waves distributed along its volume’.10 Therefore, ‘life is a macroscopic instantiation of quantum coherence’,11 that is, ‘the brain has an internal structure that continuously produces quantum coherence, even in the face of its constant decoherence in its interaction with the environment’.12 Some readers will surely argue that Wendt’s conflating ‘human life’ with a (quantum or otherwise) coherent functioning of a human brain is reductionist, that is, life is much more than just a functioning brain (in a vat or in a human body). Be that as it may it is still important to ask: Why is this worth highlighting? Because, explains Wendt,

in quantum coherence the whole exists merely as a potentiality (a wave function), and as such is not “real” in the usual sense. It only becomes real in its expression (conceptualised as ), which actualises it into something classical.13

In other words, continuous decoherence is what makes the brain a reality and this cannot be as such without also constantly being first a potentiality, that is, a wave function or a coherent whole. The panpsychist hypothesis of proto-consciousness ‘takes a known effect at the mac- roscopic level – that we are conscious – and scales it downward to the sub-atomic level, meaning that matter is intrinsically minded’,14 both for organic and inorganic matter alike.15 Wendt states that it is ‘, which does the crucial work in explaining consciousness’, whereas ‘quantum brain theory offers a solution to … the “combination problem” of how the zillions of proto-conscious elements in matter combine into the

7. Ibid., 29. 8. Ibid., 30. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. Ibid., 97. 11. Ibid., 138. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Ibid., 141. 14. Ibid., 31. 15. Ibid., 117. 70 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1) unitary consciousness of the brain’.16 This aspect of Wendt’s project is beyond the pur- view of the quantum theory that he works with, but the latter does not a priori exclude it. The other aspect of this proto-consciousness is that beings are also conscious of one another and each is conscious of its place (a sort of proto-self-consciousness) in the grand scheme of creation. Readers who do not accept Wendt’s argument on the impor- tance of quantum theory would not necessarily reject this. Panpsychism is not necessar- ily incompatible with classical physics, quantum theory, and other ways of thinking about life. As Wendt makes clear, his quantum consciousness hypothesis is foundationally based on the proposition of a panpsychist proto-consciousness. This makes us wonder which of the two building blocks takes precedence for Wendt’s argument about quantum social science. Wendt says that they are equally crucial, however others would say that panpsy- chism is not needed as they propose a ‘purely’ quantum theoretic approach, something noted by Wendt himself. One could also venture to say that Wendt’s deployment of quan- tum-theoretic ideas is purely instrumental in the sense that it does the work for him of bridging his speculative proposition of panpsychism and social reality, which he terms as ‘the combination’ problem. One of Wendt’s defining contributions consists of deploying quantum theoretic ideas to conceptualise the brain/mind connection by proposing that ‘the essential features of psyche or subjectivity … are Cognition, Experience, and Will’,17 where ‘Cognition is thinking,’ and ‘“Experience” (or “Consciousness”) is feeling’.18 Whereas Cognition, according to Wendt, can be observed, Experience is private and stands for ‘what it is like’ simply to feel, at the most basic level;’ ‘experiences are the inside manifestation of what on the outside appears as the collapse of wave functions into particles’.19 According to Wendt, ‘Will … is active and purposeful, a drive that imposes itself upon, and thus changes, the world’.20 In short, ‘With the wave function as Cognition and its collapse as Experience, Will would then be the force that brings collapse about’21 and ‘human beings are literally walking wave functions’.22 On the social side of his project, Wendt proposes a new conceptualisation of the agent- structure question based on the idea of . The latter stands for the notion that before observation through measurement a quantum system is simultaneously in all possible states of the system until it is observed. After measurement, the system always ends up being in one of those possible states. Wendt argues that social structures are ‘actu- ally …, physically, … superpositions of shared mental states – social wave functions’,23 where a wave function in quantum theory is a mathematical function which characterises the state of an isolated quantum system and is a solution to Schrödinger’s equation.

16. Ibid., 92. 17. Ibid., 115. 18. Ibid., 116. 19. Ibid., 141. 20. Ibid., 116. 21. Ibid., 121. 22. Ibid., 154. 23. Ibid., 258. Arfi and Kessler 71

Many contemporary social theorists and philosophers would argue that social struc- tures are much more than just superpositions of ‘mental states’ since such a perspective ignores the role of body in determining social structures. For example, one cannot ignore the role of bodily affects in the formation of the social as such. Considered as ‘superposi- tions of shared mental states’, social structures are ‘ontologically emergent … in the quantum sense of entanglement among the agents who constitute them’.24 Therefore, ‘the relationship of agents and social structures is not a process of causal interaction over time, but a non-local, synchronic state from which both are emergent’.25 Wendt’s argument unfolds in five parts. The very structuring of the book into five parts with a 38-page preface, which effectively constitutes on its merit a separate sixth part of the book, speaks for itself in terms of the richness of major themes that are dis- cussed. The long preface outlines the promises, hopes, challenges and difficulties (as well as many subtexts as the various contributions of this Forum will make clear) that the book develops in subsequent chapters. Whereas Part I endeavours to present a reader- friendly version of quantum mechanics geared towards the uninitiated social scientist/ theorist, it is Part II that constitutes the centre of the whole project, or, to pun, the ‘quan- tum mind’ of the project. It is in this section of the book that Wendt arguably makes or breaks the case for his quantum consciousness project as a necessary basis for develop- ing a social theory that goes beyond the deadlocks of classically undergirded understand- ing and explanation of social reality. The three chapters of this part of the book going from quantum brain theory to panpsychism to quantum vitalism endeavour to make the case for quantum consciousness and as such challenge the many presuppositions and preconceptions that not only social scientists but also philosophers make about con- sciousness and its roles in life. The implications of this part of the book are examined and complemented in the subsequent parts of the book. Part III proposes a quantum model of man, while Part V reignites the debates on agent-structure problématique by proposing quantum emergence as the two-way path connecting quantum man and quantum struc- tures. The in-between Part IV addresses from a quantum-theoretic perspective the ‘prob- lems’ of language and meaning formation/emergence as well as the ‘problematique’ of other minds. These complex and mind-challenging discussions lead Wendt to argue in the end that his ontology is one that unifies the physical and the social sides of life – a flat ontology – and that his project is ‘too elegant not to be true’, reminding us of those particle physicists who use artistic designations to describe many discoveries in the ever- expanding realm of particle physics (e.g. charm, top, bottom, ‘god-particle’). Therefore, organising a Forum to discuss such a book is simultaneously easy and hard. It is easy because there are so many themes in the book that can constitute axes of examination. It is hard because the themes of the book are intertwined, and it is hard to separate them from each other without committing too much injustice to the text and its promises. Not to mention of course the fact that the great majority of social scientists have a rather vanishing, if any at all, knowledge, let alone, understanding, of quantum mechanics and much less acquaintance with its philosophical debates. In this respect, Wendt does an excellent job in helping the non-initiated to get at least some flavour of

24. Ibid., 259. 25. Ibid., 260. 72 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47(1) some of the key questions and some answers thereof that the quantum revolution has been dealing with for almost a century now. At the same time, he makes it also very hard as he, at least it seems to us, pushes the envelope considerably by giving his own particu- lar interpretation for which he combines and uses various disciplines. That being said, the contributions to this Forum have many questions to ask and they touch upon different angles and dimensions of the book. The unifying concern of the individual contributions is the question of ‘being’ in a quantum world. The one sentence that made us all wonder is his convictions that human beings are walking wave func- tions. Each article takes this up in its own particular way. Oliver Kessler reconstructs the argument put forward by Wendt by comparing Quantum Mind with the now classic Social Theory of by means of the mind-body problem. Kessler raises the question whether quantum can be treated more as an ‘analogy’ and less as a ‘foundation’ as the latter seems to run into conceptual difficulties when it comes to the social and runs the risk of buying into a higher-order positivism. Bentley Allan’s contribution reads Quantum Mind as a work of social theory in order to highlight its distinctive theory of action. Allan shows how Wendt uses quantum lin- guistics and quantum decision theory to build a contextual account of human agency. He argues that while this model is compelling in certain ways, such a model can be devel- oped outside what Wendt calls the physics constraint. Instead, Allan proposes that we draw on Wendt’s quantum theory of action alongside other critics of , deter- minism, mechanism and individualism in order to advance a post-classical theory of human agency. Badredine Arfi continues the discussion of the quantum by showing how Wendt’s insistence that he is developing a literally-speaking quantum-theoretic approach presents him with a quantum challenge to his conception of ‘Will’, a challenge of background- independence to his ‘flat ontology’, and a challenge posed by what philosophers of phys- ics call ‘the problem of time’ to his notion of time emerging through symmetry breaking. Arfi suggests that these challenges can be addressed by delving alongside mathematical physicists and philosophers of physics into one cutting-edge and revolutionary contem- porary approach to the foundations of quantum theory, namely, category-theoretic rela- tionality as an analytical and conceptual framework. Torsten Michel opens the discussion by exploring the ramifications of Wendt’s pro- ject for our understanding of human being. Michel takes Wendt’s attempt at unifying social and natural ontologies and concomitant abandonment of a substance ontology as a vantage point to explore the relevance of the ontological difference between beings and being. He seeks to show how an engagement with forms of being, particularly human being, has wider implications that get lost in the process of Wendt’s quantum reconstructions. Lastly, Peter Burgess enriches the discussion on ‘being’ by explicating how Quantum Mind is nothing if not true to its aims. Indeed, through rigorous argumentation and solid erudition Wendt draws the logical lines from state-of-the-art quantum physics theory to social reality to offer a set of conclusions about the nature of social life that appear both plausible and convincing. And yet, argues Burgess, the voyage comes at a high price. For in order to reach its goal, Wendt’s reasoning blithely navigates around most traces of Arfi and Kessler 73 meaningful human experience or social relation that do not already hold social scientific currency. In other words, caught in a narrow understanding of the question of being as the question of ‘which being’, Quantum Mind, argues Burgess, ends up missing the chance for truly insightful discoveries about the nature of social relations. We hope that this Forum provides enough food for thought to make a case for a seri- ous reading of Wendt’s book. Whereas the authors do not necessarily agree with Wendt’s conclusions or even framing of the many questions that he tackles in the book, they nonetheless believe that Wendt does raise many important questions using a perspective – quantum theory – which is rarely, if at all, brought to bear on the important questions that IR grapples with. We look forward to a discussion of the issues raised by this forum with Wendt and others as a way of enlarging the rich debates of IR literature on ontology and epistemology.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.