On 8/8/2019 2:39 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 4:29 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/8/2019 2:05 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
Quantum computers can emulate any classical computation. If
a brain emulated on a quantum computer answers "no" when
asked the question "are you conscious?" while the same brain
emulated on a Pentium III processor answers "yes" when asked
the same question, then you have a violation of the
Church-Turing thesis.
The Church-Turing thesis doesn't show that a computer must be
ignorant of everything about it.
Because any program can be run as part of an emulation of some
particular hardware implementation running that program, no program
can be implemented that can make a certain determination about its
ultimate computing substrate. This is exploited to run emulators
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_console_emulator> of
different gaming hardware, or virtual machines
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine>. This is a direct
consequence of any Turing Machine being able to simulated any other.
If a program's behavior would branch differently based on its ultimate
computing substrate, you could use this as a routine to determine the
underlying computing substrate, and it would make it impossible for
one Turing machine to simulate that other one.
If you are actually running the same algorithim on the quantum computer
and the Pentium III, then they must both give the same answer. So your
hypothetical has a false premise.
Have you not noticed that you can get both "yes" and "no" by
polling human philosophers. What do you conclude from that?
Different brains.
Different substrates? or different ideas of what "consciousness" means?
This is a program that can determine something about its
underlying hardware (whether its a classical or quantum
computer). If instead, you hold that both emulations answer
"yes", then you have a violation of the anti-zombie
principle
<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYAuNJX2ecH2uFqZ9/the-generalized-anti-zombie-principle>.
Either consequence is distasteful to me.
If the quantum computer didn't decohere to a quasi-classcial
mixture it would answer "Yes and no." (to every question).
I am assuming in this example that the brain emulation is
deterministic (no superpositions need be used as inputs).
I don't understand the relevance of that remark. Any pure input
can be expressed as a superposition.
What I mean is that the qubits are have defined values, as either 1s
or 0s, at the start of the brain emulation. Such that the entire
computation is deterministic.
So the system is represented by a vector in Hilbert space whose
dimensionality is 2x(number of qubits). It is just one vector in this
space.
Brent
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