The Paradox of Quantum Thinking

At Sonar Festival in June, I spoke to lots of people interested in “quantum thinking” as a way of re-imagining, for instance, diversity or creativity in corporate structures. These people would say something along the lines of “quantum thinking allowing us to imagine lots of different voices and types of people present or following two creative strategies at once”.

But these are not quantum.

Diversity is already defined as lots of different voices and types of people being present, and we can already imagine following two different creative strategies at once. Quantum takes us beyond the existing in new radical ways. Let’s go there and not fall back on old ways of thinking.

I know the radical nature of quantum from my mathematical training.

But how can I communicate this to people who haven’t studied quantum mechanics?

Since Sonar, I’ve started to think about whether “quantum thinking” without mathematics is even possible at all.

At the moment, I don’t think it is.

I’m neither a philosopher or a cognitive scientist, but here is why I have come to this conclusion.

Thinking, in its commonly understood form, is to engage in a process of mental representation. In both philosophy and cognitive science thinking is often viewed as a process that operates on representations, e.g. models of the reality.

Thinking therefore requires representations, e.g. words or images, in order to exist. For instance, when I think of my dog, I think of a mental image or a concept that represents my dog. We can think of things that do not exist i.e. a blue dog, or in terms of abstractions, but this brings us back to mathematics. But thoughts of things that do not exist are still mirrored in our minds through sets of categories and mental models of a macroscopic Newtonian reality even if they are shifting, hybridised or fuzzy.

In May’s newsletter, I wrote about how genuine quantum computer art cannot be representational and that quantum physics is beyond visual representation. 

I would argue that quantum is also beyond words – therefore, if quantum is beyond linguistic and visual representation and thought depends on representation, does it not follow that “quantum thinking” is not possible (if it is to be truly quantum)?

So what does that leave us with?

There are non-verbal or non-representational modes of thought. For instance, dance can be considered a type of motor thinking, or sensing that something feels wrong, like a “gut feeling” is a type of intuitive thinking. However, I would class these as embodied and emotional forms of knowing rather than thinking per se.

So perhaps we should no longer speak of quantum thinking but rather quantum embodiment or quantum feeling?

Quantum embodiment or quantum feeling emphasise the shift beyond representation – beyond solely our minds. Quantum embodiment and quantum feeling can then help us link to the connections between quantum and art, quantum and non-dualism, quantum and indigenous forms of knowing, and quantum and trauma…. There is lots to explore here.