Quantum Conscience or Conscient Quantum?

The second hard problem of modern science is the origin of consciousness or the problem of free will. This post focuses on the relation of this problem with quantum mechanics. As an example of the difficulty of the matter, I begin by including two famous quotes from renowned scientists:

·         J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927): The universe [of quantum theory] is, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

·         James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (1930): The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Natural and artificial intelligence

As we saw in the previous post, the book Free Agents by Kevin Mitchell deals with the origins of human consciousness and free will. In a brief epilogue, the book addresses the topic of strong artificial intelligence—the real kind, which doesn't yet exist—and formulates some hypotheses about the possibility of its becoming feasible.

It emphasizes that one of the most active branches of research in AI, especially in recent years, is the field of artificial neural networks, which has led to advances such as Large Language Models (LLMs). It compares these neural networks in our programs with those that exist in our brains and in the brains of many animals more or less similar to us. It says that we are witnessing impressive advances in fields such as image recognition, text prediction, speech recognition, and language translation, based on the use of deep learning, remotely inspired on the architecture of the cerebral cortex.

Theories about self-consciousness

Svetlana before the mirror
Painting by Karl Briuliov

As I have said in other posts in this blog, the question of self-consciousness is more philosophical than scientific. In this regard, two great philosophical theories have coexisted since time immemorial:

·         Monism: Everything we can perceive, including consciousness, can be explained in terms of a single component: matter, in the broadest sense of the term, which also includes energy. In turn, monism can be classified into two different theories:

o   Reductionist Monism: It asserts that the entire functioning of the universe has a bottom-up explanation. In other words, if we knew enough about elementary particles and their properties, we could explain everything, including self-consciousness.

o   Emergentist Monism: It asserts that the lower level does not explain everything that happens at the higher level, since there are properties (including self-awareness) that only have a top-down explanation. That is to say, complex systems can have a behavior unpredictable in the bottom-up direction.

Downloading consciousness

If we could download our consciousness in a computer or a robot, we could go on living indefinitely inside the hardware and thus achieve immortality. This is what some futurists and supporters of transhumanism hold. But is there any chance that this will come true?

If this were possible, we could also keep backup copies. Thus, in the event of an accident, the dead person could be retrieved and put back into operation with minimal memory loss. As usual, science fiction arrived there first, as in Cory Doctorow's novel Down and out in the Magic Kingdom.

Four ways to achieve immortality

Herodotus

As I have explained in previous posts in this blog, some people believe that we are about to achieve immortality. Of course, depending on the way to do it, it might not be applicable to everyone, because it would be very expensive. Perhaps it would just be feasible for a few enormously wealthy people. Or maybe it could be done in a more democratic way, so that everybody would be immortal. Many journalists, politicians, tycoons, philosophers, futurologists, and even ordinary people are convinced that sooner or later all of us, or at least some of us, will be immortal.

This is not a new hope; it comes from deep in the past. One of the oldest known masterpieces of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written 4,000 to 4,500 years ago, deals with the quest for immortality. We also have the legend of the fountain of youth, which would give immortality to those who drink from its waters. According to Herodotus, it would be located in Ethiopia, although some say that Ponce de León searched for it in vain in Florida.

Will we be able to build conscious beings?

I use the term conscious beings, because the term conscious machines has materialistic connotations that I do not share, while artificial intelligence has been burned and abused by generalist media.

Before trying to answer this question, I want to make a few previous clarifications:

1. We are now capable of building conscious beings: our children. Four billion years of evolution have led to the appearance of a type of beings (us) endowed with self-awareness and capable of reproducing. This was a natural process, which we have not designed ourselves, but has been given to us since before we existed. However, when someone poses the question in the title of this post, it is usually interpreted thus: will we be able to build artificial conscious beings, by means other than natural, devised and developed exclusively by ourselves?

Conscience, Self-conscience and Artificial Intelligence

Ramón López de Mántaras

In an article published on 3/22/2021, these words are attributed to Josu Bilbao, head of the ICT area of ​​IKERLAN:

In three years, artificial intelligence will make an intelligent dialogue with machines possible.

We have seen many similar predictions since the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was invented over 60 years ago. In most cases (if not all) those predictions have been too optimistic. Is the same going to happen here?

I have consulted with one of the world's leading experts in the field of the automatic analysis of natural language, a technique used to implement the type of applications referred to in the article I am commenting, and he told me this:

It depends on how "intelligent dialogue" is defined. If it is restricted to a specific domain, for example, controlling your home automation systems using Google Home, that can be done now with a success rate above 70%, while ten years ago it was science fiction. If you want to have a philosophical conversation where your interlocutor understands what he is saying, rather than generating texts from a language model, this is too optimistic.