I don't have anything to say about quantum computing but I did form an opinion about consciousness/self-awareness research in AI: we should actively attempt to develop an AI with these characteristics.
My logic first assumes that if it could happen it will. Based on that it would be better for it to happen while we're trying than it to happen when we're not even paying attention. It also means that if the AI exhibits some of the intended behaviours that we will be more skeptical of it being fake, where-as if it arises accidentally it could more easily be viewed as real and emergent. We we have cases of behaviours which appear to be self-directed and counter to our continued existence, we can learn to manage it from small cases to larger ones. This last point assumes that we won't have a big-bang step of going from nothing to the full thing to deal with in which case we only accelerated the timeline.
It has always been obvious to me that consciousness is something that sits outside the computational realm because if it wasn’t, you would end up with self-contradictions, much like Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Intuitively, this would be related to quantum mechanics, as this is a part of physics which does not seem to be fully computational (ie. have things which we can only describe as random).
The problem with using quantum computing to explore this is that quantum computers, as they are now, use quantum phenomena that can be fully modelled computationally.
There are plenty of experiments that show that this is pseudoscience and we don't need quantum phenomenon to explain consciousness.
Maybe none of those theories explain the hard problem of consciousness, which is why do we feel or sense anything? Why does anything feel anything?
Maybe you can get close enough to an explanation (that could satisfy SOME philosophers but maybe not very many) just by coming up with an explanation of how it works. Something like, predictive coding feedback and global circuitry integration, connected to a body with senses.
Assuming we eventually can come up with a functional explanation then we may find out that humans are just the starting point for a type of organism that is much larger. Maybe we will have a new metasystem transition in this century. Possibly facilitated by high bandwidth BCI?
Or maybe someone will come up with a way to make some portion of the internet with AI servers "wake up" and form a unified consciousness. Still a reasonable chance that happens before GTA 6 comes out.
What if the quantum domain is consciousness and life evolved from it rather than the other way around?
Random btw, is the human interpretation. Superpositions and superstates have rules which may not be precisely predicted, yet as a whole they resolve to produce all state and “certainty” we imagine and experience.
Life may well have evolved from consciousness rather than the other way around.
Is an electron conscious at some level? If we use a quantum particle instead of a pseudorandom number generator in ChatGPT does it become conscious? This seems extremely unlikely to me.
Do non-quantum, classical effects of the brain, all the electric and chemical interactions, contribute to consciousness? This seems much more likely.
I think it's possible that quantum effects contribute to consciousness in the brain in some way, but it seems off to almost define consciousness as quantum physics just because we don't understand either.
> Is an electron conscious at some level?
I am suggesting all existential reality is dormant consciousness and life is a technology which provides a feedback loop with the rest of existential reality.
> If we use a quantum particle instead of a pseudorandom number generator in ChatGPT does it become conscious?
There is no particle. What you call a particle is a stably bound potential. That potential is a subjectively bound scope of the universe’s consciousness. When it is disturbed it vibrates. That vibration could be said to be its experience yet this is far too primitive a stage to call it living consciousness.
The biotechnology of life provides an electrochemical interface for this potential feedback mechanism. Memory, cognition, and other traits are all technologies taking on tangential forms as life struggles in chaotic hostile reality.
> This seems extremely unlikely to me.
You think consciousness is a “thing”, and I suggest it is an intrinsic property of existential reality. Dormant of course, animated by life. The bridge between dormant physical embodiment and living system might be a billion years of electrolytic soup.
Life would then be a technology for capacitating consciousness and interfacing with the rest of existential reality.
> Do non-quantum, classical effects of the brain, all the electric and chemical interactions, contribute to consciousness?
Without a doubt. The electrochemical activity is our biotechnology for perturbing and passively “reading” the interface between the cell and the quantum flux.
This could be something as soft and gentle as a bias (not instruction set.) or synapse sparks are flashing our ROM.
I think of this domain as an analog holographic sieve.
Remove your every preconception of what it means to be consciousness. Consciousness is not intelligence, consciousness co-opts intelligence (and intelligence consciousness memetically.) consciousness is not complexity, however complexity may very well be scalar capacity for consciousness.
Holographically consciousness entangles millions of cells, each with a means to bias. Collectively, through constructive and destructive interference in the human mind they have a resolution as great as any experience you may have (maybe many times over.)
> This seems much more likely. I think it's possible that quantum effects contribute to consciousness in the brain in some way, but it seems off to almost define consciousness as quantum physics just because we don't understand either.
What you mean “we?”
I am sceptical and think this sounds a lot like bullshit.
Quantum entanglement as an abstract theory how the brain works was already discussed in the 1980s. This was always a non experimentally validable theory and therefore not really accepted in psychology.
(Elitist reference: I work in QC my partner in conciousness research.)
Obvious xkcd style comic reference: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
"Quantum computing and conciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent"