[ExI] quantum brains

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/18/2010 4:14 PM, Serafino cited:

> ->   http://physicsandcake.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/quantum-brains/

which links to

<http://nonstopbison.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/can-an-artificial-general-intelligence-arise-from-a-purely-classical-software-system/>

which has these nice Fermi comments:

<# Dave Bacon Says:
September 4, 2008 at 4:41 pm | Reply

A variant of this is to just append classical computational power of 
modern computers to our own brain. If you had the laptop I’m typing this 
on directly wired to your brain such that it could access some of your 
current thinking processes, then you’d be able to do some pretty amazing 
things. I mean if I could quickly do the number crunching I periodically 
write programs to carry out, well then, I’d be a fundamentally different 
intelligence wouldn’t I? Of course I wouldn’t be able to factor 
exceptionally fast…but a lot faster than I can factor right now :)

Maybe the reason we don’t see intelligences out there is that they have 
all migrated to quantum brains and so they avoid any contact with 
classical beings who will destroy their coherence…
# Geordie Says:
September 4, 2008 at 4:51 pm | Reply

Hi Dave! Yes you’re right, although it is possible that the 
number-crunching powers of our laptops could evolve in biological brains 
if there were sufficient selection pressure on these capabilities.

I’m not sure if you were joking about that last bit, but it seems likely 
that “migrating to quantum brains” would include decoupling from 
environments… maybe the end-point of the evolution of intelligence is 
floating in perfectly isolated spheres in deep outer space…

You know, you could take this idea a step further. Let’s say there are a 
set of increasingly accurate but also increasingly difficult to “see” 
physical theories T_1, T_2, … where T_1 is classical physics, T_2 is 
quantum mechanics, T_3 is quantum gravity, T_4 is some crazy membrane 
whatnot, etc… imagine you can get increasing computational capability at 
every level of this hierarchy. Since each is increasingly “difficult to 
see” for its precursors, in order to harness the capabilities at level 
T_j you probably have to do a lot to make sure those “hard to see” 
effects can be used, which probably isolates you from the precursor 
levels…. in this picture the quantum brains would isolate themselves 
from the classical brains, and the quantum gravity brains (needing of 
course to be near black holes) would be hidden to the two precursor 
levels, etc. etc. etc.>