Scott Aaronson takes down Roger Penrose's nonsense about human brain having an uncomputable superpower beyond known physics.
If you want to give your AI model quantum noise, because you believe that a source of unpredictable random noise is key to a 'true' intelligence, well, ok. You could absolutely make a computer chip with some analog circuits dependent on subtle temperature fluctuations that add quantum noise to a tensor. Does that make the computer magic like human brains now?
Or does it have to be the specific magic of ions and ion channels? Well, what if we made a machine with tiny containers with water and ions and synthetic ion channels, and conductivity sensors. We plug that ion movement noise into the neural network as a source of noise. Does that do it?
Why base your human chauvinism on quantum noise? Because quantum stuff seems mysterious and cool and seems to do some funky magic stuff at very small scales (while the large scale combinations of it are just the normal workings of the universe which is all we've ever known). Ok, meat-worshipper, but then where will you run if I add ion channels to my AI?
Hurumph. Nice to hear Scott Aaronson tackling this irrational meat-chauvinism.
I think (on "philosophical" grounds) that quantum entanglement probably has a role in the brain, but if the microtubules are involved, I think it's far more likely that each microtubule only contains one or a few logical qubits (stored as topological quantum information, entanglement that resists decoherence because it is wound around the cylinder, as in the Kitaev code).
2Nathan Helm-Burger
Hmm, we're still talking past each other. I'm saying I don't believe any quantum weirdness is behaviorally relevant to the human brain or simulations thereof. Just ordinary analog and digital computer chips, like in ordinary consumer electronics. Nothing special but the neural architecture and learning rules set up by the genome, and the mundane experience of life.
Right, and I disagree with the usual computational theory of mind (at least with respect to "consciousness" and "the self"), according to which the mind is a kind of virtual state machine whose microphysical details are irrelevant. There are sorites problems and binding problems which arise if you want to get consciousness and the self from physically coarse-grained states, which is why I look for explanations based in exact microphysical properties and irreducible complex entities instead.