Quantum Attention

This article proposes a semiotic reconfiguration of how meaning is conceptualized in contemporary cultural and religious environments, drawing on formal models derived from quantum theory. It argues that recent epistemic transformations — marked by probabilistic computation, non-linear dynamics, and distributed agency — require the humanities to adopt a renewed regime of theoretical attention. Meaning can no longer be approached as a stable object or as a determinate content awaiting interpretation; rather, it emerges as a transient configuration, contingent upon acts of observation, contextual activation, and selective actualization. The article introduces the notion of quantum attention to designate a mode of semiotic vigilance oriented toward superposition, entanglement, and interpretive collapse. From this perspective, deixis is reconceptualized as a semiotic analogue of measurement: prior to interpretation, meaning exists as a structured field of potentialities, which is contextually actualized through enunciative acts. Interpretation does not reveal a pre-existing meaning, but produces a situated state while excluding alternative configurations. This approach displaces the classical logic of binary opposition and continuous modulation, reframing non-contradiction as a local effect of interpretation rather than a global constraint. To formalize this shift, the article mobilizes specific quantum models — the Bloch sphere, the Hopf fibration, and the Fubini–Study metric — not as metaphors, but as conceptual instruments for modelling semiotic states, spaces, and trajectories. The Bloch sphere allows cultural and religious meanings to be described as states rather than positions; the semiosphere is reinterpreted as a space of semiotic states characterized by non-local correlations; and enunciation is approached as a topological trajectory rather than a linear transition. In its concluding section, the article advances the proposal of quantic humanities, understood as an epistemological reorientation of the sciences of meaning. Rather than offering predictive explanations, quantum models discipline semiotic attention by foregrounding indeterminacy, relationality, and the irreversibility of interpretive collapse. What is at stake is the cultivation of a theoretical ethos capable of engaging complexity without reducing it, and of sustaining uncertainty without renouncing rigor.