Don't Look Now, Cont'd
But perhaps I was too eager to embrace the extravagant claims made for GoogleQ.
Sean Carroll, Professor of Natural Philosophy (!) at Johns Hopkins, is a brilliant expositor of the state of modern physics. For Great Courses, he has given a whole set of lectures on the "Many Worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which he seems to embrace. According to that interpretation, when a wave function assigns a set of probabilities to the position of a particle, each position that has any probability assigned to it actually exists as a location for the particle in some real world! This undermines, if it does not eliminate, the role of "measurement" and "observation," and hence of consciousness, in fixing "what is actually happening" as opposed to "what is predicted to happen." Measurement and observation certainly do not depend upon the existence of a human observer. Schrodinger's cat is actually alive in one world, actually dead in another.
And so I feel so much better now that we are back on solid empirical ground (sarcasm).
Don't Look Now
But sources say that scientists connected with Google, of all places, have just made a profound discovery.
Quantum mechanics holds, of course, that at the tiniest levels, wave and particle are both accurate descriptions of the phenomena before us. Before observation, we can only say that a wave function predicts the probability of a particle having a particular location; it is only upon observation, however, that the wave resolves to a particle at a particular spot.
This by itself is highly mysterious; why should it be so? It seems to be too anthropocentric for the modern world, rather a throwback to the times before Galileo when we were assumed to be at the center of all things.
I do not understand quantum computing. I guess that quantum concepts can be exploited to create computers that are vastly quicker and more efficient than ones that rely on conventional computation. To date, though, quantum computers are said to have been plagued with little errors, inherent in the nature of how they work, that have been a big barrier to commercial development.
Now, though, comes a system developed by Google that promises to break the big barrier. It does this by melding the work of the physical quantum machine with a particular and novel form of Artificial Intelligence that is able to predict and adjust for the effect of these errors before they happen! The machine and the AI talk to each other in real time, and the machine improves its operations by learning, continuously, from the AI component! Let us call this breakthrough technology, for now, GoogleQ.
Even before all of this, it was fair to ask, apropos of quantum mechanical theory in general, whether the gaze of an orangutan counts as "observation" sufficient to fix the location of a particle. And beyond that, could the gaze of a perfect android do the same? If so, the theory would no longer be anthropocentric, but we would be faced with a different but no less profound ontological shock -- a merging of man and machine "in the eyes of the universe" as it were!
Well, it seems that we are here. The people running GoogleQ need a break once in a while as we all do. As I understand it, they could all lock the doors of the lab with the machine and the AI running over this coming Memorial Day weekend, and the observer-induced wave collapses would continue to occur!
Some have called the Google breakthrough "a philosophical earthquake" that buttresses the idea that consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. It would seem as well to drive a stake through the heart of pancomputationalism, the view that all the world is a computer, because if it were, and computers can "observe" in a quantum sense, then there would be nothing that is not observed!
And indeed, what exactly is "unobserved" after GoogleQ?
Wind the clock back to 1965. We are in a state-of-the-art (for 1965) pencil factory in Dubuque. At one point in the assembly line, there are hundreds of two-foot-long lengths of wood and graphite, proceeding apace. A cutting machine is employed to cut them into uniform lengths of six inches. But the machine is not perfect. It sometimes errs, but always on the side of making the pencils too big! Accordingly, further down the line there is a little ruler against which each pencil is laid. If it is too long, another blade automatically comes down and trims it to six inches exactly.
Certainly this machine, without human intervention, can be said to have "measured" the pencils. Did it need to "observe" them in a quantum sense to measure them? Isn't GoogleQ doing something very similar to what the assembly line did in more primitive fashion?
It seems that we are on the verge of teasing out the relationship between information technology and consciousness itself. This is something that Jacques Vallee, the brilliant computer scientist and ufologist, has long predicted, raising quizzical looks as he did. It makes me wish that I had another 20 years before me in this life, just to "see what happens."
