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Forum Introduction: Social Theory Going Quantum-Theoretic? MIL0010.1177/0305829818779510Millennium: Journal of International StudiesArfi and Kessler 779510research-article2018 Forum: Social Theory Going Quantum-Theoretic? Questions, Alternatives and Challenges Millennium: Journal of International Studies 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 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory, quantum Mots-clés Alexander Wendt, Théories Sociales, Théories quantiques. Palabras clave Alexander Wendt, teoría social, quántum Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science: 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 philosophy of science 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 quantum mechanics 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 wave function. 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 wave function collapse), 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 ‘panpsychism, 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 quantum superposition.
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