Quantum Cognition

In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose [1] claimed that quantum-mechanical effects are critical to human intelligence. But those effects need not be represented at the atomic level. A method of encoding conceptual graphs in a continuous representation called a cognitive signature supports a kind of quantum knowledge representation (QKR). It exhibits the key properties of superposition, entanglement, and uncertainty. The operations of searching and graph matching, when performed on a QKR, are analogous to the measurements in quantum-mechanical systems. A quantum computer would be ideal for processing them. But even with today's digital computers, those operations on a QKR can be performed with floating-point computations that scale in logarithmic time. For processing Big Data, they enable an ordinary laptop to outperform a supercomputer. This article shows how a QKR is used to analyze large volumes of documents and answer questions about them.