Potential of the Path Integral and Quantum Computing for the Study of Humanities: An Underlying Principle of Human Evolution and the Function of Consciousness

Abstract

The “(classical) scientific view of the world” that characterizes the modern history of human civilization has been successful by objectifying nature, humans, and society, for reductive analysis into (approximate) linear causation to allow prediction and control. However, because of its growing maturity and complexity, our modern society now confronts the complexity of multilayered causal structures underlying the real phenomena, which classical science has abstracted through reductive approximation, and consequently, modern scientists are perplexed by the limitations on comprehension, predictability, and controllability. The “uncertainty principle” of quantum physics, discovered a century ago, has overthrown this classical mechanistic and deterministic worldview, but the “(quantum) scientific worldview” remained confined at the level of microscopic science and has to date never extended onward to the life-size human world. However, as practical applications of the quantum computer are now becoming realistic, it might provide us with an innovative way to manipulate such complex causal structures and open up a new era in the history of civilization. In this paper, we build ideas on our earlier research findings in the context of the evolutionary patterns of human cognition, so as to extrapolate them to advance speculations on the mechanism of the phase transition of worldviews from classical to quantum causal structure-based ones, expecting to obtain insights into practical ways of computation to realize such a transition. The paper begins with a section examining the origin of the linear approximation adopted in classical science, back casting from the evolutionary history of the (linguistic) consciousness of our human ancestors. In the next section, we show how human intelligence and civilization have in fact evolved as analog with quantum laws, and review the limitations of modern science in finding an expression of these laws in Eastern philosophy. This section proceeds to show the potential of quantum computation to not only realize a fusion of Eastern and Western approaches but also integrate the humanities and natural sciences. The final section concludes that this new framework can expand and develop the structure and function of human “consciousness” and build a bridgehead against recent “anti-scientism” that is rooted in skepticism concerning the (classical) scientific view of the world and humanity.