Quantum Experiential Dynamics: An Open Quantum Systems Architecture for Experiential State Evolution

Abstract

Release V1.13-v6.2 What this is Quantum Experiential Dynamics is a formal model of emotional (experiential) state evolution built entirely within the open-quantum-systems framework, together with the analyses that test it. Each agent's affective state lives on Russell's circumplex, mapped to the Bloch equator of a qubit so that opposite emotions are orthogonal. Deliberation is an open-system quantum trajectory on a qutrit whose outcomes are perception, conflict, and limbo, the last being indecision as a located outcome rather than a failure to converge. The point of the model is a single falsifiable prediction. The ambivalence dynamics underlying deliberation violate the Leggett-Garg inequality, and the shape of that violation as a function of the conflict between percept and expectation is one no macrorealist account can reproduce. Because the coupling follows from the geometry rather than from a fitted parameter, the prediction is a curve rather than a threshold, and it tells an experimenter where to sample. This archive contains the interactive model as a single self-contained HTML file, the Leggett-Garg and order-effect analyses, a classical Markov-jump twin that isolates coherence as the load-bearing ingredient, three adversarial robustness checks, the experience-sampling comparisons, the findings documents including the negative results, and the concept paper. Read the paper: paper/paper-v2-concept-en.pdf Run the model in your browser: bewustzijn-model-v6.2.html Repository: willemvanderkrieken/quantum-experiential-dynamics The paper is a working concept draft, circulated for expert feedback. It has not been submitted and is not peer reviewed. Author: Willem van der Krieken, Flying Kiwi BV / Just Willem BV, Boekel, the Netherlands. Please cite the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21470109, which always resolves to the most recent version. What changed in V1.13-v6.2 This release does one thing: it places the central prediction against work that already exists, including a result we should have cited from the start. No measurement was repeated and no line of model code was touched. The claim the paper makes is now narrower than it was, and we think that is an improvement. The precedent we were missing A Leggett-Garg violation in human cognition is not new. Zhan, Khrennikov and Zhu (2024, Entropy 26(11), 950) report violations of a rank-3 cyclic Leggett-Garg inequality in the perception of ambiguous cup-like objects: across two experiments with 93 and 90 participants, between 23% and 36% of the estimated K values exceed the macrorealist bound at 99% confidence, while a control condition using identical contexts produces no value above 1. Section 1 now states this plainly and cites it as the precedent that settles the existence question. What remains as our claim is the part that was always the interesting one, and it is smaller than "the bound can be violated": we predict the shape of the violation as a function of the conflict between percept and expectation, with a coupling that follows from the overlap geometry as (1 - cos theta)/2 rather than being fitted. A bare violation is generic; a curve with a quadratic onset at small conflict is not, and it tells an experimenter where to look. We had been warned about this. A reviewer of the draft noted early on that generic Leggett-Garg violations are easy to come by. This result is the concrete form of that warning, and the draft should have carried it before now. A feasibility anchor for the proposed experiment Section 4 quotes a requirement of roughly one hundred participants per conflict level for the joint margin-plus-outcome signature. That figure now has a precedent beside it rather than standing alone: the study above ran a rank-3 cyclic Leggett-Garg protocol on binary perceptual judgments at 93 and 90 participants, the same order of magnitude, which puts the proposed design within reach of a single study rather than a multi-site effort. A neighbouring model family, delimited Section 1 now also positions the work against Alodjants et al. (2025, Scientific Reports 15, 35052), who model affective states as two-level cognitive systems on an emotional sphere and study their spread through a scale-free network of agents. The representation is close to ours; the object of prediction is not. Their target is collective diffusion across a network, ours is the deliberation of a single individual, and their account offers no discriminating prediction against a calibrated classical rival. We state the difference rather than leaving a reader to wonder whether we knew of the work. Consistency checking A new automated check (A12) pins the participant counts and violation percentages cited in Sections 1 and 4 to the source assessment they came from, and fails if a number is altered in one place and not the other or becomes detached from the sentence that attributes it. It was tested by introducing three separate faults, each of which it caught. What did not change The model is byte-identical to the previous release. The Leggett-Garg prediction, the classical twin, the generalization test, the BIC power analysis, the experience-sampling contact point, and every reported number are unchanged from V1.12-v6.2. The paper label moves from v2.7 to v2.8. The central open item is also unchanged, and it is the honest limit of this work: the prediction has never been put to a human. Everything reported here is model against model.