2015/07/01 by Mathias Albert · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #History of Science and Medicine #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies #Ontology #Sociology #Social ontology #Library science #Epistemology #Philosophy #Computer science
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12348
openalex publication_date 2015/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
While written by one of the leading scholars in the field, at first glance this is not a book about International Relations (IR). It certainly is a book about almost everything else, including definitions of life, will, subjectivity and consciousness. Particularly, a quantum-based theory of the latter is a cornerstone of the book, as it is seen to provide nothing less than a solution for—or better, to do away with—the ‘mind—body problem’ in philosophy and beyond. While this might sound strange to most students of International Relations, there are good reasons why they should read Quantum mind and social science. In addition, and contrary to first impressions, the book's basic question is quite simple: given that even social scientists agree that the social world cannot somehow ‘escape’ the physical world and its laws, and given that physicists have agreed, for a long time, that the world is not made up of material ‘things’ such as ‘particles’, but, at its quantum mechanical base, needs to be seen as made up of wave functions, what does it mean to think about the social world in terms of quantum theory? The book is based on this question and on the rejection of one orthodox assumption in physics, namely that quantum theory appropriately describes reality on the sub-atomic scale but quantum effects ‘wash out’ beyond that, giving way to a world that is ‘classical’—and in which the laws of Newton and Einstein prevail.