Act II, Scene 5

Are We Bits or Qubits?

The physical sciences have always been the source of analogies that help us understand the social sciences and human behavior. For example, we talk about the “momentum” of a candidate’s campaign for president or we bemoan the “inertia” of an organization that is resistant to change. Quantum science gives us an analogy that may be particularly useful in the present “highly polarized” times. We often think of people as being bits – either “red” or “blue” with predictable positions on a wide range of issues and as being so determined in their opinions as almost living in alternate universes. This is the classic world of computing with bits that are either 0 or 1.

In the world of quantum computing the basic idea is “qubits” that can be thought of in two ways. In one way we think of as qubit as being in a superposition of many possible states. The state is resolved into a single state by a measurement or encounter. In another way we think of a qubit’s state as being a high dimensional object and a measurement or encounter is projection onto a lower dimensional space.

Modeling people as qubits rather than as bits might very well lead to more useful models. As a thought experiment think of situations in which you or someone you knew reacted in a very different way than might be expected from a simple red-blue characterization.