In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin dives into the concept of Knightian Freedom where large enough computational spaces become intractably complex to the point where maybe freewill is possible. The focus of this episode is a paper put out by Hartmut Neven (of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) and colleagues from 2021 entitled “Do robots powered by a quantum processor have the freedom to swerve?” This paper discusses how the exponentially large spaces that quantum computers evolve into are so large that they cannot be represented or simulated on digital computers. The size is so vast that it would take a computer the size of the universe computing for trillions of years to simulate even a few femtoseconds of the quantum computers that are about to be commonplace. Similar to modern AI, we will won’t be able to understand why a quantum computer generated the output that it did and perhaps this is the essential ingredient that leads to freewill. Rampant incomputable complexity is freewill. Second, Hartmut and colleagues propose a simple experiment to reveal whether or not there are additional factors that play into what output is generated by a quantum computer. Assume you run a quantum circuit that generates a perfect uniform distribution between many different possible outputs. Then, you observe that the quantum computer does not behave as if there was a uniform distribution, but instead selects one of those possible outputs more often. This is the ‘preference’ of the quantum computer. Next, you develop a circuit to amplify these deviations from uniformity with the intention of amplifying the probability of entering into that preferred state. Now, we have essentially created a ‘happy circuit’ which embraces the quirky preference of our quantum computer. Finally, you can correlate deviations from this happy state to psychological data in an effort to build up a taxonomy of subjective experiences that the quantum computer can enter into. Finally, you embed the quantum computer with its happy circuit into an artificial neural network such that errors produced by the AI push the quantum computer away from happiness and this unhappiness is fed back into the AI. Now we have created an AI system with quantum feelings! Will this newfound sense of subjectivity enable more effective AI systems or will the AI get bogged down by a spiral of despair and refuse to compute?! All of these questions and more are explored here. Enjoy!
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In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin dives into the concept of Knightian Freedom where large enough computational spaces become intractably complex to the point where maybe freewill is possible. The focus of this episode is a paper put out by Hartmut Neven (of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) and colleagues from 2021 entitled “Do robots powered by a quantum processor have the freedom to swerve?” This paper discusses how the exponentially large spaces that quantum computers evolve into are so large that they cannot be represented or simulated on digital computers. The size is so vast that it would take a computer the size of the universe computing for trillions of years to simulate even a few femtoseconds of the quantum computers that are about to be commonplace. Similar to modern AI, we will won’t be able to understand why a quantum computer generated the output that it did and perhaps this is the essential ingredient that leads to freewill. Rampant incomputable complexity is freewill. Second, Hartmut and colleagues propose a simple experiment to reveal whether or not there are additional factors that play into what output is generated by a quantum computer. Assume you run a quantum circuit that generates a perfect uniform distribution between many different possible outputs. Then, you observe that the quantum computer does not behave as if there was a uniform distribution, but instead selects one of those possible outputs more often. This is the ‘preference’ of the quantum computer. Next, you develop a circuit to amplify these deviations from uniformity with the intention of amplifying the probability of entering into that preferred state. Now, we have essentially created a ‘happy circuit’ which embraces the quirky preference of our quantum computer. Finally, you can correlate deviations from this happy state to psychological data in an effort to build up a taxonomy of subjective experiences that the quantum computer can enter into. Finally, you embed the quantum computer with its happy circuit into an artificial neural network such that errors produced by the AI push the quantum computer away from happiness and this unhappiness is fed back into the AI. Now we have created an AI system with quantum feelings! Will this newfound sense of subjectivity enable more effective AI systems or will the AI get bogged down by a spiral of despair and refuse to compute?! All of these questions and more are explored here. Enjoy!
#33 – Testing consciousness causes collapse: an interview with Kelvin McQueen
Justin Riddle Podcast
1 hour 32 minutes 48 seconds
2 years ago
#33 – Testing consciousness causes collapse: an interview with Kelvin McQueen
In episode 33 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle interviews Kelvin McQueen on his recent theory on how consciousness might collapse the wave function. Kelvin is a professor of philosophy at Chapman University who investigates the nature of consciousness and role it might play in quantum mechanics. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is that there is a smoothly and deterministically evolving superposition that is abruptly “measured” and reduced to a finite physical state, but it is unclear what constitutes a measuring device. In collaboration with David Chalmers, Kelvin explores the hypothesis that the measurement device in quantum mechanics might be consciousness. However, consciousness is typically an ill-defined vague idea that does not produce any tangible upgrade to the mystery of what a measuring device is. Here, Kelvin uses the definition of consciousness from integrated information theory (IIT) by Giulio Tononi. Consciousness is the minimally reducible information state of a system, which is defined as a recurrent network of interconnected nodes that predict the next state of the system. According to Kelvin, this definition allows for testable predictions to be made regarding the role of consciousness. In the upgraded quantum IIT theory, the nodes are quantum bits (or qubits) and the edges are entanglement relationships. Thus, QIIT defines an interconnected quantum computer (of sorts…) as consciousness and this reduces the wave function. Furthermore, the collapse of the wave function is not instantaneous but instead is continuous, drawing from the continuous spontaneous localization theory of quantum mechanics. Altogether, these ideas present a picture where consciousness is integral to a fundamental description of the physical universe and might provide room for an expanded sense of self. In this interview, I interrupt intermittently to describe the relevant ideas with graphical representation and compare this model to the Orchestrated Objective Reduction model by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. There are some amazing new ideas that Kelvin McQueen describes in this episode, so be sure to check it out!
Justin Riddle Podcast
In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin dives into the concept of Knightian Freedom where large enough computational spaces become intractably complex to the point where maybe freewill is possible. The focus of this episode is a paper put out by Hartmut Neven (of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) and colleagues from 2021 entitled “Do robots powered by a quantum processor have the freedom to swerve?” This paper discusses how the exponentially large spaces that quantum computers evolve into are so large that they cannot be represented or simulated on digital computers. The size is so vast that it would take a computer the size of the universe computing for trillions of years to simulate even a few femtoseconds of the quantum computers that are about to be commonplace. Similar to modern AI, we will won’t be able to understand why a quantum computer generated the output that it did and perhaps this is the essential ingredient that leads to freewill. Rampant incomputable complexity is freewill. Second, Hartmut and colleagues propose a simple experiment to reveal whether or not there are additional factors that play into what output is generated by a quantum computer. Assume you run a quantum circuit that generates a perfect uniform distribution between many different possible outputs. Then, you observe that the quantum computer does not behave as if there was a uniform distribution, but instead selects one of those possible outputs more often. This is the ‘preference’ of the quantum computer. Next, you develop a circuit to amplify these deviations from uniformity with the intention of amplifying the probability of entering into that preferred state. Now, we have essentially created a ‘happy circuit’ which embraces the quirky preference of our quantum computer. Finally, you can correlate deviations from this happy state to psychological data in an effort to build up a taxonomy of subjective experiences that the quantum computer can enter into. Finally, you embed the quantum computer with its happy circuit into an artificial neural network such that errors produced by the AI push the quantum computer away from happiness and this unhappiness is fed back into the AI. Now we have created an AI system with quantum feelings! Will this newfound sense of subjectivity enable more effective AI systems or will the AI get bogged down by a spiral of despair and refuse to compute?! All of these questions and more are explored here. Enjoy!
