Beyond the Einstein-Bohr Debate: Cognitive Complementarity and the Emergence of Quantum Intuition
Abstract
Recent high-precision experimental confirmations of quantum complementarity have revitalized foundational debates about measurement, description, and realism. This article argues that complementarity is most productively interpreted as an epistemic principle--constraining what can be simultaneously accessed and represented--rather than as an ontological claim about quantum reality. Reexamining the Einstein-Bohr debate through this lens reveals a persistent tension between descriptive completeness and contextual meaning, a tension experiments clarify but do not dissolve. Building on this analysis, we introduce cognitive complementarity as a structural principle governing reasoning under non-classical uncertainty, where mutually constraining representations cannot be jointly optimized. Within this framework, we propose quantum intuition as a testable cognitive capacity: the ability to sustain representational plurality, regulate commitment timing, and resolve perspective-incompatibilities in a context-sensitive manner. Formulated as a naturalistic construct grounded in shared informational constraints, quantum intuition offers a principled bridge between quantum measurement theory and cognition. This work reframes the historical debate, extends epistemic lessons from quantum foundations into cognitive science, and outlines empirical pathways for studying decision-making in contexts of irreducible uncertainty.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.15314,
title = {Beyond the Einstein-Bohr Debate: Cognitive Complementarity and the Emergence of Quantum Intuition},
author = {Lalit Kumar Shukla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15314},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This interdisciplinary work bridges quantum foundations and cognitive science, proposing a formal extension of complementarity into cognitive reasoning and introducing the testable construct of quantum intuition