No quantum institutions- this is nothing more than groovy metaphor

(Andrew W., PoliSci@Madison, Our place in the universe: Alexander Wendt and

quantum mechanics International Theory (2022), 14 (1), 130–145 doi:10.1017/S1752971921000063)

Chapter 13 addresses the question of what social structures are, and how they relate to individuals. The supervenience approach argues that social structures are just mental states in fully separable individuals. Wendt engages several debates on related topics before articulating his view that ‘what social structures actually are, physically, are superpositions of shared mental states – social wave functions’. 26 As such they help constitute individuals, and exercise downward causation, affecting individual behavior through teleological causation. As in the previous chapter, if we are to take this as anything more than a groovy metaphor, we must be prepared to argue that wave functions in individual brains are entangled, not just between individuals in close proximity who are having a conversation, but across thousands or millions of individuals in large modern societies. Most of these people will never meet each other, or meet anyone who has met the other. Yet, somehow these millions of minds contain wave functions that somehow were at some point entangled, and remain so despite the ever present danger of impact on a physical object and consequent collapse. How are these wave functions produced, how are they entangled, how are they introduced into so many minds without collapsing, and why don’t they collapse subsequently? These questions are not even addressed, much less answered.