Link between quantum physics and game theory found

>Personally I think consciousness, perception, and free will are a great unknown, and likely involve the makeup of the cosmos including quantum interactions.

You're taking a whole slew of things we're ignorant about, waving your hands and saying,"They must be related to some great truth hidden in particle physics!" I find this kind of thinking bizarre.

I, too, am fascinated with what we may come to discover about ourselves, our minds, and our connections (both local and non-local) as we increase our quantum understanding.

Robert A. Burton's On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not and A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves may interest you. Not exactly in the realm of quantum theory, but if you're interested in understanding consciousness and perception, you really can't go wrong with reading up on neuroscience and related philosophy fields (mind, consciousness, being, etc.).

Beyond that, I think you're going to want to look for works on quantum physics with relation to neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Here's an article from 2005: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/360/1458/1309...

Roger Penrose has a few works on the subject of quantum theory and human consciousness (as mentioned by a sibling comment), and Max Tegmark argues against him, suggesting neurons are too warm to perform quantum computations. However, Henry Stapp (one of the authors of the linked article above), while admitting that Tegmark's work poses a significant problem for Penrose's theories, says his own theories are unaffected.

Despite that, there are perception issues (e.g., precognition) which offer curiosities regarding backward causality in time, on which discussion occurs to ponder potential quantum effects. Here, you'd want to look into quantum mechanics/theory and human perception.

Quantum mechanics is not a nonlocal theory. The result the article was referring to - Bell inequality - states simply that "No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics."

The wording is important. You can have nonlocal hidden variables, or you can have.. local theories without hidden variables. The most famous of the latter would be MWI.

Locality (in physics) can be translated (in game theory) as a constraint on correlated equilibria, by pretty basic observations about Bayesian probability.

Generally in game theory when you lift constraints on correlated equilibria you (weakly) expand the possible Nash equilibria.

So one of their points seems to be that the quantum context (non-locality) allows for more (potentially better) equilibria.

They don't emphasize applications of this, but one of them could be that distributed quantum systems could have better outcomes than distributed systems in the classical setting. (One way to analyze distributed systems is by viewing components as independent actors in a game.)

There is also an identification between payoff functions and Bell inequalities, but I am not sure how profound this is really. It feels more like a technical point. Payoff functions are not terribly fundamental in game theory (compared to equilibria, for instance).

However, in certain cases the players may adapt their strategy depending on a piece of advice. The latter is delivered to all players by an advisor. This opens the possibility for the players to adopt correlated strategies, which can outperform independent strategies. There are various forms that advice can take. For example in the case of correlated classical advice, the advice is represented by a classical variable, l, with prior r(l). Each player can then choose a strategy depending on his type and on l.

...

For Bayesian games, the possibility of having access to nonlocal correlations, for instance using entanglement, has important implications. First let us imagine that the players can share quantum advice, that is, the advisor is able to produce entangled particles and to send them to the players, who then perform local measurements on their particles. Since the statistics of such measurements can in general not be reproduced by any classical local model, the players now have access to strategies which would be impossible in the case of a classical advisor. Thus, players sharing quantum advice can outperform any classical players.

So, if some players have information that other players don't, they can outperform the others? Astonishing :-|