bunchberry

Quantum internet is way overhyped and likely will never exist. There are not only no practical benefits to using QM for internet but it has huge inherent problems that make it unlikely to ever scale.

• While technically yes you can make “unbreakable encryption” this is just a glorified one-time cipher which requires the key to be the same length of the message, and AES256 is already considered unbreakable even by quantum computers, so good luck cutting your internet bandwidth in half for purely theoretical benefits that exist on paper but will never be noticeable in practice!
• Since it’s a symmetric cipher it doesn’t even work for internet communication unless you have a way to distribute keys, and there is something called quantum key distribution (QKD) based around algorithms like BB84. However, this algorithm only allows you to guarantee that you can exchange keys without anyone snooping in on it being undetected, but it does not actually stop them from snooping in on your key like Diffie-Hellman achieves. Meaning, a person can literally shut down the entire network traffic just by observing the packets in transit without having to even do anything to do them. How can the government and private companies possibly build an internet whereby you guarantee nobody ever looks at packages as they’re transmitted through the network?
• QKD is also susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks just like Diffie-Hellman, which we solve that problem in classical cryptography with digital signature algorithms. There are quantum digital signature algorithms (QDS) but they rely on Holevo’s theorem which says that the “collapse” is effectively a one-way process and only limited amount of information can be extrapolated from it, and thus you cannot derive the qubit’s initial state simply by measuring it. The problem, however, is Holevo’s theorem also says if you had tons of copies of the same qubit, you could derive even more information from it. Meaning, all public keys would have to be consumable, because making copies of them would undermine their security, and this makes it just not something that can scale.

And all this for what? You have all these drawbacks for what? Imagined security benefits that you won’t actually notice in real life? Only people I could ever see using this are governments that are hyperparanoid. A government intranet could be highly controlled, highly centralized, and not particularly large scale by its very nature that you don’t want many people having access to it. So I could see such a government getting something like that to work, but there would be no reason to replace the internet with it.

I have never understood the argument that QM is evidence for a simulation because the universe is using less resources or something like that by not “rendering” things at that low of a level. The problem is that, yes, it’s probabilistic, but it is not merely probabilistic. We have probability in classical mechanics already like when dealing with gasses in statistical mechanics and we can model that just fine. Modeling wave functions is far more computationally expensive because they do not even exist in traditional spacetime but in an abstract Hilbert space that can grows in complexity exponentially faster than classical systems. That’s the whole reason for building quantum computers, it’s so much more computationally expensive to simulate this that it is more efficient just to have a machine that can do it. The laws of physics at a fundamental level get far more complex and far more computationally expensive, and not the reverse.

My issue it is similar: each “layer” of simulation would necessarily be far simpler than than the layer in which the simulation is built, and so complexity would drop down exponentially such that even an incredibly complex universe would not be able to support conscious beings in simulations within only a few layers. You could imagine that maybe the initial universe is so much more complex than our own that it could support millions of layers, but at that point you’re just guessing, as we have no reason to believe there is even a single layer above our own, and the whole notion that “we’re more likely to be an a simulation than not” just ceases to be true. You can’t actually put a number on it, or even a vague description like “more likely.” it’s ultimately a guess.

If our technology is limited so we can never see beyond something, why even propose it exists? Bell’s theorem also demonstrates that if you do add hidden parameters, it would have to violate Lorentz invariance, meaning it would have to contradict with the predictions of our current best theories of the universe, like GR and QFT. Even as pure speculation it’s rather dubious as there’s no evidence that Lorentz invariance is ever violated.

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.

I don’t believe there is an “illusions that we have free will,” either. Honestly, “illusions” don’t really even exist as they’re traditionally talked about. People say if you place a stick in a cup of water, there is an “illusion” created that the stick is bent. But is there? What you see is just what a non-bent stick looks like in a cup of water. Its appearance is different from one out of water due to light refraction. It’s not as if reality is tricking you by showing you a bent stick when there isn’t one, that’s just what a non-bent stick in water really looks like.

The only “illusion” is your own faulty interpretation of what you are seeing, which upon further inspection you may later find it is wrong and change your mind. There was simply no illusion there to begin with. Reality just presents itself as it actually exists, and it is us who interpret it, and sometimes we make mistakes and interpret it wrong. But it’s not reality’s fault we interpret it wrong sometimes. Reality is not wrong, nor is it right. It just is what it is.

In a similar sense, there is just no “illusion of free will.” Neural networks are pattern recognition machines. We form models of the external world which can approximate different counterfactual realities, and we consider those realities to decide which one will optimize whatever goal we’re trying to achieve. The fact we can consider counterfactual worlds doesn’t mean that those counterfactual worlds really exist, and indeed our very consideration of them is part of the process of determining which decision we make.

Reality never tricks us into the counterfactual worlds really do in some way exist and we are selecting from these possible worlds. That’s just an interpretation we sometimes impose artificially, but honestly I think it’s exaggerated how much of an “illusion” this really is. A lot of regular people if you talk to them will probably admit quite easily that those counterfactual worlds don’t exist anywhere but in their imagination, and that of course the only thing real is the decision that they made and the world they exist within where they made that decision.

Hence, reality is not in any way tricking us into thinking our decisions somehow have more power than they really do. It is some of us (not all of us, I’m not even convinced it’s most of us) who impose greater powers to decision making than it actually has. There just is no “illusion of free will,” at best there is your personal misinterpretation of what decision making actually entails.

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.

No, we don’t know the brain is making use of any quantum phenomena. At best if there is any quantum phenomena in the brain it would just contribute noise. The idea that interference phenomena is actually made use of in the brain for computation is just not backed by anything.

The subjective experience of consciousness is directly observable, and definitely real, no?

Experience is definitely real, but there is no such thing as “subjective experience.” It is not logically possible to say there is “subjective experience” without inherently entailing that there is some sort of “objective experience,” in the same way that saying something is “inside of” something makes no sense unless there is an “outside of” it. Without implicitly entailing some sort of “objective experience” then the qualifier “subjective” would become meaningless.

If you associate “experience” with “minds,” then you’d be implying there is some sort of objective mind, i.e. a cosmic consciousness of some sorts. Which, you can believe that, but at that point you’ve just embraced objective idealism. The very usage of the term “subjective experience” that is supposedly inherently irreducible to non-minds inherently entails objective idealism, there is no way out of it once you’ve accepted that premise.

The conflation between experience with “subjectivity” is largely done because we all experience the world in a way unique to us, so we conclude experience is “subjective.” But a lot of things can be experienced differently between different observers. Two observers, for example, can measure the same object to be different velocities, not because velocity is subjective, but because they occupy different frames of reference. In other words, the notion that something being unique to us proves it is “subjective” is a non sequitur, there can be other reasons for it to be unique to us, which is just that nature is context-dependent.

Reality itself depends upon where you are standing in it, how you are looking at it, everything in your surroundings, etc, how everything relates to everything else from a particular reference frame. So, naturally, two observers occupying different contexts will perceive the world differently, not because their perception is “subjective,” but in spite of it. We experience the world as it exists independent of our observation of it, but not independent of the context of our observation. Experience itself is not subjective, although what we take experience to be might be subjective.

We can misinterpret things for example, we can come to falsely believe we experienced some particular thing and later it turns out we actually perceived something else, and thus were mistaken in our initial interpretation which we later replaced with a new interpretation. However, at no point did it become false that there was experience. Reality can never be true or false, it always just is what it is. The notion that there is some sort of “explanatory gap” between what humans experience and some sort of cosmic experience is just an invented problem. There is no gap because what we experience is indeed reality independent of conscious observers being there to interpret it, but absolutely dependent upon the context under which it is observed.

Again, I’d recommend reading Jocelyn Benoist’s Toward a Contextual Realism. All this is explained in detail and any possible rebuttal you’re thinking of has already been addressed. People are often afraid of treating experience as real because they operate on this Kantian “phenomenal-noumenal” paradigm (inherently implied by the usage of “subjective experience”) and then think if they admit that this unobservable “noumenon” is a meaningless construct then they have to default to only accepting the “phenomenon,” i.e. that there’s only “subjective experience” and we’re all “trapped in our minds” so to speak. But the whole point of contextual realism is to point out this fear is unfounded because both the phenomenal and noumenal categories are problematic and both have to be discarded: experience is not “phenomenal” as a “phenomenal” means “appearance of reality” but it is not the appearance of reality but is reality.

You only enter into subjectivity, again, when you take reality to be something, when you begin assigning labels to it, when you begin to invent abstract categories and names to try and categorize what you are experiencing. (Although the overwhelming majority of abstract categories you use were not created by you but are social constructs, part of what Wittgenstein called the “language game.”)

(I don’t think adding some metaphysical element does much of anything, and Penrose still doesn’t really explain it, just provides a potential mechanism for it in the brain. It’s still a real “thing”, unexplained by current physics though.)

We don’t need more metaphysical elements, we need less. We need to stop presuming things that have no reason to be presumed, then presuming other things to fix contradictions created by those false presumptions. We need to discard those bad assumptions that led to the contradiction in the first place (discard then phenomenal-noumenal distinction entirely, not just one or the other).

Also, to your other point, my I believe everything is just an evolving wave function.

This is basically the Many Worlds Interpretation. I don’t really buy it because we can’t observe wave functions, so if the entire universe is made of wave functions… how does that explain what we observe? You end up with an explanatory gap between what we observe and the mathematical description.

The whole point of science is to explain the reality which we observe, which is synonymous with experience, which again experience just is reality. That’s what science is supposed to do: explain experiential reality, so we have to tie it back to experience, what Bell called “local beables,” things we can actually point to identify in our observations.

The biggest issue with MWI is that there is simply no way to tie it back to what we actually observe because it contains nothing observable. There is an explanatory gap between the world of waves in Hilbert space and what we actually observe in reality.

The Copenhagen interpretation is just how the many worlds universe appears to behave to a conscious observer.

What you’ve basically done is just wrapped up the difficult question of how the invisible world of waves in Hilbert space converts itself to the visible world of particles in spacetime by just saying “oh it has something to do with our consciousness.” I mean, sure, if you find that to be satisfactory, I personally don’t.

I agree experience is incalculable but not because it is some special immaterial substance but because experience just is objective reality from a particular context frame. I can do all the calculations I want on a piece of paper describing the properties of fire, but the paper it’s written on won’t suddenly burst into flames. A description of an object will never converge into a real object, and by no means will descriptions of reality ever become reality itself. The notion that experience is incalculable is just uninteresting. Of course, we can say the same about the wave function. We use it as a tool to predict where we will see real particles. You also cannot compute the real particles from the wave function either because it’s not a real entity but a description of relationships between observations (i.e. experiences) of real things.