{"id":86788,"date":"2019-01-18T18:39:24","date_gmt":"2019-01-19T02:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/the-ghost-in-the-quantum-turing-machine"},"modified":"2019-01-18T18:39:24","modified_gmt":"2019-01-19T02:39:24","slug":"the-ghost-in-the-quantum-turing-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/the-ghost-in-the-quantum-turing-machine","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cscRdv57oRQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Interview with Scott Aaronson \u2014 covering whether quantum computers could have subjective experience, whether information is physical and what might be important for consciousness \u2014 he touches on classic philosophical conundrums and the observation that while people want to be thorough-going materialists, unlike traditional computers brain-states are not obviously copyable. Aaronson wrote about this his paper \u2018The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine\u2019 (found here <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1306.0159).\">https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1306.0159).<\/a> Scott also critiques Tononi\u2019s integrated information theory (IIT).<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Scott discusses whether quantum computers could have subjective experience, whether information is physical and what might be important for consciousness \u2014 he touches on classic philosophical conundrums and the observation that while people want to be thorough-going materialists, unlike traditional computers brain-states are not obviously copyable. Aaronson wrote about this his paper \u2018The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine\u2019 (found here <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1306.0159).\">https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1306.0159).<\/a> Scott also critiques Tononi\u2019s integrated information theory (IIT).<\/p>\n<p>Questions include:<br \/> - In \u201cCould a Quantum Computer Have Subjective Experience?\u201d you speculate that a process has to \u2018fully participate in the arrow of time\u2019 to be conscious, and this points to decoherence. If pressed, how might you try to formalize this?<\/p>\n<p>- In \u201cIs \u2018information is physical\u2019 contentful?\u201d you note that if a system crosses the Schwarzschild bound it collapses into a black hole. Do you think this could be used to put an upper bound on the \u2018amount\u2019 of consciousness in any given physical system?<\/p>\n<p>- One of your core objections to IIT is that it produces blatantly counter-intuitive results. But to what degree should we expect intuition to be a guide for phenomenological experience in evolutionarily novel contexts? I.e., Eric Schwitzgebel notes \u201cCommon sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. There\u2019s no way to develop an ambitious, broad-ranging, self- consistent metaphysical system without doing serious violence to common sense somewhere. It\u2019s just impossible. Since common sense is an inconsistent system, you can\u2019t respect it all. Every metaphysician will have to violate it somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/the-ghost-in-the-quantum-turing-machine\">Continue reading \u201cThe Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interview with Scott Aaronson \u2014 covering whether quantum computers could have subjective experience, whether information is physical and what might be important for consciousness \u2014 he touches on classic philosophical conundrums and the observation that while people want to be thorough-going materialists, unlike traditional computers brain-states are not obviously copyable. Aaronson wrote about this his [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":510,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33,47,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology","category-neuroscience","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/510"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86788\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}