Sabine1

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A new theory of consciousness just dropped. And it's quite an ambitious one. Not only does
it supposedly explain what consciousness is, it also gives you free will.

And all of that thanks to quantum physics. It sounds like bullshit. But it comes from Hartmut
Neven at Google Quantum AI and my favourite panpsychist Christoph Koch.

Though saying that I have a favourite panpsychist is kind of like saying I have a favourite
type of mouldy bread. I had a look. Hartmut Neven is a German computer scientist and
currently vice president of engineering at Google, so not exactly a crank.

He's the Neven of Neven's law, that's the insight that exponential scaling of an exponential
scaling makes a double exponential scaling. Amazing stuff. Christoph Koch is one of the
biggest proponents of integrated information theory, IIT for short.

According to this theory, consciousness can be measured in a single number, the big psi,
which can be calculated from the connectivity of a system. I wouldn't exactly call him a
crank either. Oh, and these two have eight co-authors who'd be insulted if I didn't mention
them, so just imagine I read the entire list and you forgot about it.

For what I'm concerned, IIT was killed years ago by Scott Aaronson, who showed that there
are ways to distribute the execution of simple algorithms on computer chips so that it'd
have arbitrarily high consciousness. Then again, maybe my psi just isn't high enough to
understand what these geniuses are even talking about. The new paper now is supposedly
an improvement over Penrose's idea that the collapse of the wave function causes
consciousness and that this happens in the human brain every once in a while.

You see, in quantum mechanics, particles can do this weird thing that they come into what
we call a superposition, in which they do different things at the same time. Say they go both
left and right. But we never observe this.

When we observe a particle, it always does only one thing. It's either left or right. This is why
we say that the state of the particle, which is described by a wave function, collapses when
we look at it.

It collapses into a normal, definite, non-quantum state. The trouble is, you can't observe the
collapse itself, because whenever you observe a particle, it's already collapsed. It's kind of
like my invisible friend who leaves the room each time you come in.

The reason that Penrose thinks the collapse of the wave function creates consciousness is
that he believes consciousness can't be computed. And since we know that everything
besides the collapse of the wave function is computable in physics, the collapse must be it.
Penrose also has this idea that the collapse of the wave function is caused by gravity, though
that process is calculable, so make of this what you wish.

The authors of the new paper now say, first of all, let's forget about gravity. Second, they
discard the idea that consciousness is caused by collapse. Instead, they postulate that
consciousness is created when a superposition forms.
What happens with a superposition later? Nothing, because these people believe in the
many worlds interpretation. Basically, their idea is that in the brain, you could get
superpositions of possible experiences. Say, instead of a particle going left and right, your
brain might try to produce an experience which this sentence is both funny and not funny.

But you never experience this. What you experience is a sentence that's either funny or not
funny. So, in the moment when the funny-not-funny superposition could be created, your
brain needs to select one.

And in that moment, through their idea, consciousness is created. That might sound
plausible if you phrase it in words, but mathematically, I see a few problems. The biggest
problem is that their idea of experience is ill-defined.

The maths doesn't know that funny and not funny is not something you'll ever experience.
Mathematically, funny and not funny is exactly as good or bad as funny or not funny or
funny minus i times not funny and so on, even if that doesn't sound funny at all. They try to
define experiences as those states of your brain which will eventually not decohere and say
that you could use IIT to define it, but if they'd actually written down a definition and tried
to calculate something with it, they'd have noticed that it doesn't work.

How do I know that? Because no one's ever managed to do it. There's just a lot of physicists
who think someone else has done it. It's actually quite funny.

Or maybe both funny and not funny. In any case, since they don't have a definition for what
an experience is, they can't explain anything, I'm afraid. But wait, there's more.

Next, they say that they want to test this idea by connecting a brain to a quantum computer
because this should enable richer conscious experiences and make you a quantum cyborg.
Yes, you know, I'm pretty sure that hooking your brain up to a quantum computer will be
quite some experience. They then argue that this sort of expanded consciousness occurs
during psychedelic, mystical, near-death and other types of extraordinary experiences.

I'm sure lots of students will be sympathetic to the idea that quantum mechanics is a sort of
near-death experience, but I'm not sure that this explains anything. Finally, they claim that
this gives humans free will because maybe an organism can exercise some degree of choice
in the libertarian sense over which classical configuration it is going to experience next. And
what, I wonder, is it going to exercise that choice with? Is it free will that creates free will?
This might leave you thinking this paper's pretty useless, but it does have a very interesting
aspect.

It's that the authors don't notice that their theory is super deterministic. You see, they split
the experiences at the moment the superposition is formed. This is not the case in the many
worlds theory.

In that theory, the worlds only split when the measurement happens. If you instead split
worlds when the superpositions form, you have for practical purposes invented a local
collapse model. And now, Bell's theorem comes to bite you, because that tells you that such
a theory needs to be super deterministic, that is, it has a hidden variable that's correlated
with the measurement that you make.

What's the hidden variable? Well, that's the experience which forms instead of the
superposition. Why is it correlated with the measurement setting? Because once you've
selected this one thing as an experience, you know that you'll not measure a superposition
of it with something else. In summary, I think the idea is both interesting and not
interesting.

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