You don’t have to be sorry, that was stupid of me to write that.
You don’t have to be sorry, that was stupid of me to write that.
Because the same functionality would be available as a cloud service (like AI now). This reduces costs and the need to carry liquid nitrogen around.
Okay, you are just misrepresenting my argument at this point.
Why are you isolating a single algorithm? There are tons of them that speed up various aspects of linear algebra and not just that single one, and many improvements to these algorithms since they were first introduced, there are a lot more in the literature than just in the popular consciousness.
The point is not that it will speed up every major calculation, but these are calculations that could be made use of, and there will likely even be more similar algorithms discovered if quantum computers are more commonplace. There is a whole branch of research called quantum machine learning that is centered solely around figuring out how to make use of these algorithms to provide performance benefits for machine learning algorithms.
If they would offer speed benefits, then why wouldn’t you want to have the chip that offers the speed benefits in your phone? Of course, in practical terms, we likely will not have this due to the difficulty and expense of quantum chips, and the fact they currently have to be cooled below to near zero degrees Kelvin. But your argument suggests that if somehow consumers could have access to technology in their phone that would offer performance benefits to their software that they wouldn’t want it.
That just makes no sense to me. The issue is not that quantum computers could not offer performance benefits in theory. The issue is more about whether or not the theory can be implemented in practical engineering terms, as well as a cost-to-performance ratio. The engineering would have to be good enough to both bring the price down and make the performance benefits high enough to make it worth it.
It is the same with GPUs. A GPU can only speed up certain problems, and it would thus be even more inefficient to try and force every calculation through the GPU. You have libraries that only call the GPU when it is needed for certain calculations. This ends up offering major performance benefits and if the price of the GPU is low enough and the performance benefits high enough to match what the consumers want, they will buy it. We also have separate AI chips now as well which are making their way into some phones. While there’s no reason at the current moment to believe we will see quantum technology shrunk small and cheap enough to show up in consumer phones, if hypothetically that was the case, I don’t see why consumers wouldn’t want it.
I am sure clever software developers would figure out how to make use of them if they were available like that. They likely will not be available like that any time in the near future, if ever, but assuming they are, there would probably be a lot of interesting use cases for them that have not even been thought of yet. They will likely remain something largely used by businesses but in my view it will be mostly because of practical concerns. The benefits of them won’t outweigh the cost anytime soon.
Uh… one of those algorithms in your list is literally for speeding up linear algebra. Do you think just because it sounds technical it’s “businessy”? All modern technology is technical, that’s what technology is. It would be like someone saying, “GPUs would be useless to regular people because all they mainly do is speed up matrix multiplication. Who cares about that except for businesses?” Many of these algorithms here offer potential speedup for linear algebra operations. That is the basis of both graphics and AI. One of those algorithms is even for machine learning in that list. There are various algorithms for potentially speeding up matrix multiplication in the linear. It’s huge for regular consumers… assuming the technology could ever progress to come to regular consumers.
A person who would state they fully understand quantum mechanics is the last person i would trust to have any understanding of it.
I find this sentiment can lead to devolving into quantum woo and mysticism. If you think anyone trying to tell you quantum mechanics can be made sense of rationally must be wrong, then you implicitly are suggesting that quantum mechanics is something that cannot be made sense of, and thus it logically follows that people who are speaking in a way that does not make sense and have no expertise in the subject so they do not even claim to make sense are the more reliable sources.
It’s really a sentiment I am not a fan of. When we encounter difficult problems that seem mysterious to us, we should treat the mystery as an opportunity to learn. It is very enjoyable, in my view, to read all the different views people put forward to try and make sense of quantum mechanics, to understand it, and then to contemplate on what they have to offer. To me, the joy of a mystery is not to revel in the mystery, but to search for solutions for it, and I will say the academic literature is filled with pretty good accounts of QM these days. It’s been around for a century, a lot of ideas are very developed.
I also would not take the game Outer Wilds that seriously. It plays into the myth that quantum effects depend upon whether or not you are “looking,” which is simply not the case and largely a myth. You end up with very bizarre and misleading results from this, for example, in the part where you land on the quantum moon and have to look at the picture of it for it to not disappear because your vision is obscured by fog. This makes no sense in light of real physics because the fog is still part of the moon and your ship is still interacting with the fog, so there is no reason it should hop to somewhere else.
Now quantum science isn’t exactly philosophy, ive always been interested in philosophy but its by studying quantum mechanics, inspired by that game that i learned about the mechanic of emerging properties. I think on a video about the dual slit experiment.
The double-slit experiment is a great example of something often misunderstood as somehow evidence observation plays some fundamental role in quantum mechanics. Yes, if you observe the path the two particles take through the slits, the interference pattern disappears. Yet, you can also trivially prove in a few line of calculation that if the particle interacts with a single other particle when it passes through the two slits then it would also lead to a destruction of the interference effects.
You model this by computing what is called a density matrix for both the particle going through the two slits and the particle it interacts with, and then you do what is called a partial trace whereby you “trace out” the particle it interacts with giving you a reduced density matrix of only the particle that passes through the two slits, and you find as a result of interacting with another particle its coherence terms would reduce to zero, i.e. it would decohere and thus lose the ability to interfere with itself.
If a single particle interaction can do this, then it is not surprising it interacting with a whole measuring device can do this. It has nothing to do with humans looking at it.
At that point i did not yet know that emergence was already a known topic in philosophy just quantum science, because i still tried to avoid external influences but it really was the breakthrough I needed and i have gained many new insights from this knowledge since.
Eh, you should be reading books and papers in the literature if you are serious about this topic. I agree that a lot of philosophy out there is bad so sometimes external influences can be negative, but the solution to that shouldn’t be to entirely avoid reading anything at all, but to dig through the trash to find the hidden gems.
My views when it comes to philosophy are pretty fringe as most academics believe the human brain can transcend reality and I reject this notion, and I find most philosophy falls right into place if you reject this notion. However, because my views are a bit fringe, I do find most philosophical literature out there unhelpful, but I don’t entirely not engage with it. I have found plenty of philosophers and physicists who have significantly helped develop my views, such as Jocelyn Benoist, Carlo Rovelli, Francois-Igor Pris, and Alexander Bogdanov.
You should look into contextual realism. You might find it interesting. It is a philosophical school from the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist that basically argues that the best way to solve most of the major philosophical problems and paradoxes (i.e. mind-body problem) is to presume the natural world is context variant all the way down, i.e. there simply is no reality independent of specifying some sort of context under which it is described (kind of like a reference frame).
The physicist Francois-Igor Pris points out that if you apply this thinking to quantum mechanics, then the confusion around interpreting it entirely disappears, because the wave function clearly just becomes a way of accounting for the context under which an observer is observing a system, and that value definiteness is just a context variant property, i.e. two people occupying two different contexts will not always describe the system as having the same definite values, but may describe some as indefinite which the other person describes as definite.
“Observation” is just an interaction, and by interacting with a system you are by definition changing your context, and thus you have to change your accounting for your context (i.e. the wave function) in order to make future predictions. Updating the wave function then just becomes like taring a scale, that is to say, it is like re-centering or “zeroing” your coordinate system, and isn’t “collapsing” anything physical. There is no observer-dependence in the sense that observers are somehow fundamental to nature, only that systems depend upon context and so naturally as an observer describing a system you have to take this into account.
There 100% are…
If you choose to believe so, like I said I don’t really care. Is a quantum computer conscious? I think it’s a bit irrelevant whether or not they exist. I will concede they do for the sake of discussion.
Penrose thinks they’re responsible for consciousness.
Yeah, and as I said, Penrose was wrong, not because the measurement problem isn’t the cause for consciousness, but that there is no measurement problem nor a “hard problem.” Penrose plays on the same logical fallacies I pointed out to come to believe there are two problems where none actually exist and then, because both problems originate from the same logical fallacies. He then notices they are similar and thinks “solving” one is necessary for “solving” the other, when neither problems actually existed in the first place.
Because we also don’t know what makes anesthesia stop consciousness. And anesthesia stops consciousness and stops the quantum process.
You’d need to define what you mean more specifically about “consciousness” and “quantum process.” We don’t remember things that occur when we’re under anesthesia, so are we saying memory is consciousness?
Now, the math isn’t clean. I forget which way it leans, but I think it’s that consciousness kicks out a little before the quantum action is fully inhibited? It’s been a minute, and this shit isn’t simple.
Sure, it’s not simple, because the notion of “consciousness” as used in philosophy is a very vague and slippery word with hundreds of different meanings depending on the context, and this makes it seem “mysterious” as its meaning is slippery and can change from context to context, making it difficult to pin down what is even being talked about.
Yet, if you pin it down, if you are actually specific about what you mean, then you don’t run into any confusion. The “hard problem of consciousness” is not even a “problem” as a “problem” implies you want to solve it, and most philosophers who advocate for it like David Chalmers, well, advocate for it. They spend their whole career arguing in favor of its existence and then using it as a basis for their own dualistic philosophy. It is thus a hard axiom of consciousness and not a hard problem. I simply disagree with the axioms.
Penrose is an odd case because he accepts the axioms and then carries that same thinking into QM where the same contradiction re-emerges but actually thinks it is somehow solvable. What is a “measurement” if not an “observation,” and what is an “observation” if not an “experience”? The same “measurement problem” is just a reflection of the very same “hard problem” about the supposed “phenomenality” of experience and the explanatory gap between what we actually experience and what supposedly exists beyond it.
It’s the quantum wave function collapse that’s important.
Why should I believe there is a physical collapse? This requires you to, again, posit that there physically exists something that lies beyond all possibilities of us ever observing it (paralleling Kant’s “noumenon”) which suddenly transforms itself into something we can actually observe the moment we try to look at it (paralleling Kant’s “phenomenon”). This clearly introduces an explanatory gap as to how this process occurs, which is the basis of the measurement problem in the first place.
There is no reason to posit a physical “collapse” or even that there exists at all a realm of waves floating about in Hilbert space. These are unnecessary metaphysical assumptions that are purely philosophical and contribute nothing but confusion to an understanding of the mathematics of the theory. Again, just like Chalmers’ so-called “hard problem,” Penrose is inventing a problem to solve which we have no reason to believe is even a problem in the first place: nothing about quantum theory demands that you believe particles really turn into invisible waves in Hilbert space when you aren’t looking at them and suddenly turn back into visible particles in spacetime when you do look at them.
That’s entirely metaphysical and arbitrary to believe in.
There’s no spinning out where multiple things happen, there is only one thing. After wave collapse, is when you look in the box and see if the cats dead. In a sense it’s the literal “observer effect” happening our head. And that is probably what consciousness is.
There is only an “observer effect” if you believe the cat literally did turn into a wave and you perturbed that wave by looking at it and caused it to “collapse” like a house of cards. What did the cat see in its perspective? How did it feel for the cat to turn into a wave? The whole point of Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment was that Schrodinger was trying to argue against believing particles really turn into waves because then you’d have to believe unreasonable things like cats turning into waves.
All of this is entirely metaphysical, there is no observations that can confirm this interpretation. You can only justify the claim that cats literally turn into waves when you don’t look at them and there is a physical collapse of that wave when you do look at them on purely philosophical grounds. It is not demanded by the theory at all. You choose to believe it purely on philosophical grounds which then leads you to think there is some “problem” with the theory that needs to be “solved,” but it is purely metaphysical.
There is no actual contradiction between theory and evidence/observation, only contradiction between people’s metaphysical assumptions that they refuse to question for some reason and what they a priori think the theory should be, rather than just rethinking their assumptions.
That’s how science works. Most won’t know who Penrose is till he’s dead.
I’d hardly consider what Penrose is doing to be “science” at all. All these physical “theories of consciousness” that purport not to just be explaining intelligence or self-awareness or things like that, but more specifically claim to be solving Chalmers’ hard axiom of consciousness (that humans possess some immaterial invisible substance that is somehow attached to the brain but is not the brain itself), are all pseudoscience, because they are beginning with an unreasonable axiom which we have no scientific reason at all to take seriously and then trying to use science to “solve” it.
It is no different then claiming to use science to try and answer the question as to why humans have souls. Any “scientific” approach you use to try and answer that question is inherently pseudoscience because the axiomatic premise itself is flawed: it would be trying to solve a problem it never established is even a problem to be solved in the first place.
Roger Penrose is pretty much the only dude looking into consciousness from the perspective of a physicist
I would recommend reading the philosophers Jocelyn Benoist and Francois-Igor Pris who argue very convincingly that both the “hard problem of consciousness” and the “measurement problem” stem from the same logical fallacies of conflating subjectivity (or sometimes called phenomenality) with contextuality, and that both disappear when you make this distinction, and so neither are actually problems for physics to solve but are caused by fallacious reasoning in some of our a priori assumptions about the properties of reality.
Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism and Pris’ book Contextual Realism and Quantum Mechanics both cover this really well. They are based in late Wittgensteinian philosophy, so maybe reading Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a good primer.
That’s the only way free will could exist…What would give humans free will would be the inherent randomness if the whole “quantum bubble collapse” was a fundamental part of consciousness.
Even if they discover quantum phenomena in the brain, all that would show is our brain is like a quantum computer. But nobody would argue quantum computers have free will, do they? People often like to conflate the determinism/free will debate with the debate over Laplacian determinism specifically, which should not be conflated, as randomness clearly has nothing to do with the question of free will.
If the state forced everyone into a job for life the moment they turned 18, but they chose that job using a quantum random number generator, would it be “free”? Obviously not. But we can also look at it in the reverse sense. If there was a God that knew every decision you were going to make, would that negate free will? Not necessarily. Just because something knows your decision ahead of time doesn’t necessarily mean you did not make that decision yourself.
The determinism/free will debate is ultimately about whether or not human decisions are reducible to the laws of physics or not. Even if there is quantum phenomena in the brain that plays a real role in decision making, our decisions would still be reducible to the laws of physics and thus determined by them. Quantum mechanics is still deterministic in the nomological sense of the word, meaning, determinism according to the laws of physics. It is just not deterministic in the absolute Laplacian sense of the word that says you can predict the future with certainty if you knew all properties of all systems in the present.
If the conditions are exactly the same down to an atomic level… You’ll get the same results every time
I think a distinction should be made between Laplacian determinism and fatalism (not sure if there’s a better word for the latter category). The difference here is that both claim there is only one future, but only the former claims the future is perfectly predictable from the states of things at present. So fatalism is less strict: even in quantum mechanics that is random, there is a single outcome that is “fated to be,” but you could never predict it ahead of time.
Unless you ascribe to the Many Worlds Interpretation, I think you kind of have to accept a fatalistic position in regards to quantum mechanics, mainly due not to quantum mechanics itself but special relativity. In special relativity, different observers see time passing at different rates. You can thus build a time machine that can take you into the future just by traveling really fast, near the speed of light, then turning around and coming back home.
The only way for this to even be possible for there to be different reference frames that see time pass differently is if the future already, in some sense, pre-exists. This is sometimes known as the “block universe” which suggests that the future, present, and past are all equally “real” in some sense. For the future to be real, then, there has to be an outcome of each of the quantum random events already “decided” so to speak. Quantum mechanics is nomologically deterministic in the sense that it does describe nature as reducible to the laws of physics, but not deterministic in the Laplacian sense that you can predict the future with certainty knowing even in principle. It is more comparable to fatalism, that there is a single outcome fated to be (that is, again, unless you ascribe to MWI), but it’s impossible to know ahead of time.
What is it then? If you say it’s a wave, well, that wave is in Hilbert space which is infinitely dimensional, not in spacetime which is four dimensional, so what does it mean to say the wave is “going through” the slit if it doesn’t exist in spacetime? Personally, I think all the confusion around QM stems from trying to objectify a probability distribution, which is what people do when they claim it turns into a literal wave.
To be honest, I think it’s cheating. People are used to physics being continuous, but in quantum mechanics it is discrete. Schrodinger showed that if you take any operator and compute a derivative, you can “fill in the gaps” in between interactions, but this is just purely metaphysical. You never see these “in between” gaps. It’s just a nice little mathematical trick and nothing more. Even Schrodinger later abandoned this idea and admitted that trying to fill in the gaps between interactions just leads to confusion in his book Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism.
What’s even more problematic about this viewpoint is that Schrodinger’s wave equation is a result of a very particular mathematical formalism. It is not actually needed to make correct predictions. Heisenberg had developed what is known as matrix mechanics whereby you evolve the observables themselves rather than the state vector. Every time there is an interaction, you apply a discrete change to the observables. You always get the right statistical predictions and yet you don’t need the wave function at all.
The wave function is purely a result of a particular mathematical formalism and there is no reason to assign it ontological reality. Even then, if you have ever worked with quantum mechanics, it is quite apparent that the wave function is just a function for picking probability amplitudes from a state vector, and the state vector is merely a list of, well, probability amplitudes. Quantum mechanics is probabilistic so we assign things a list of probabilities. Treating a list of probabilities as if it has ontological existence doesn’t even make any sense, and it baffles me that it is so popular for people to do so.
This is why Hilbert space is infinitely dimensional. If I have a single qubit, there are two possible outcomes, 0 and 1. If I have two qubits, there are four possible outcomes, 00, 01, 10, and 11. If I have three qubits, there are eight possible outcomes, 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. If I assigned a probability amplitude to each event occurring, then the degrees of freedom would grow exponentially as I include more qubits into my system. The number of degrees of freedom are unbounded.
This is exactly how Hilbert space works. Interpreting this as a physical infinitely dimensional space where waves really propagate through it just makes absolutely no sense!