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 but it comes from hmood Nev at Google Quantum Ai and my favorite pan psychist Kristoff they saying that I have a favorite pan psychist is kind of like saying I have a favorite type of moldy brat I had a look hmood Nevan is a German computer scientist and currently vice president of engineering at Google so not exactly a
crank he's the Nevan of nevan's law that's the Insight that exponential scaling of an exponential scaling makes a double exponential scaling amazing stuff Kristoff 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 sigh which can be calculated from the connectivity of the 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 Aronson who showed that there are ways to distribute the execution of simple algorithms on computer chips so that it it have arbitrarily High Consciousness then again maybe my side just isn't high enough to understand what these Geniuses are even talking about then 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 collaps it's kind of like my invisible
friend who leaves the room each time you come in the reason that panu things to collapse of the way function creates Consciousness is that he believes Consciousness can't be computed and since we knew that everything besides the collapse of the wave function is computable in physics the collapse must be it Panos 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 super positions of possible experiences say instead of a particle going left and right your brain might try to produce an experience in 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 so 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 il 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 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 had 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 access 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 words theory in that theory the words only split when the measurement happens if you that split words 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 a 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' have 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 to me science is more than a profession it's a way to understand the world and to solve problems this is why I'm happy to work together with brilliant whose mission is to help you learn science in the easiest and most engaging way possible all courses on brilliant have interactive visualizations and come with follow-up questions I
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