Summary/Abstract |
A key claim that Alexander Wendt makes in his book Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology is that he is not using the ‘quantum’ as a metaphor. Nor is he drawing analogies either. He argues that he is constructing a quantum theory of the human subject and social structures through a quantum-theoretic explanation of consciousness undergirded by a panpsychist hypothesis of primitive proto-consciousness. In this article I show how Wendt’s insistence that he is developing a literally-speaking quantum-theoretic approach presents him with a number of must-not-ignore challenges that originate in quantum theory. I specifically discuss three challenges:
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