Great talk! If it helps anybody here are three points. All are tangential to the actual focus of the talk:
1. Quantum Computers speed up computation by bypassing certain steps a classical computer needs to perform. To be brief these are usually steps involving building up some overall feature of a function, like its period, from parts of the function, like its values for specific inputs. Quantum Computers can ignore this because they directly manipulate holistic properties of systems and don't need to manipulate the parts.
In an even briefer form: A Quantum Computer can just evaluate the truth of the total system "A or B or C...or Z" without needing to evaluate A, B ,etc individually.
Deutsch conjectured that quantum computers would be faster due to using superposition, but that is now known to be incorrect. It's the holism and contextual aspects of quantum theory that provide the speed up, not superposition.
Tim is correct in saying there is no usable quantum computer currently. There are also other subtler issues with them like that one can prove there is no such thing as a Universal Quantum Computer, but I won't overload this comment.
2. Quantum Darwinism is an attempt to explain how some properties of objects are classical and not quantum, by positing that being slightly classical gives properties a better chance to influence the environment and if they manage to successfully influence the environment they become more classical, which in turn increases the chance to influence even more of the environment and so on. So you get a selection effect whereby by the time a property has "survived" to influence a wide area, like how the colour of a tree can be seen over a whole forest, its fully classical.
Today it would be seen as one of the ways things become classical.
3. As for Many Worlds, most physicists don't accept it because its genuinely very hard to interpret the mathematics of quantum theory that way as the justifications of several standard theorems don't make sense in a Many-Worlds framework and the mathematics of quantum theory can be proven to be part of probability theory, so reading it in a deterministic way seems to make no mathematical sense.
The spirit of this exchange and ideas and concepts certainly clarify the value of science and the hermetic synthesis of all antinomies. I found it, especially interesting in how The many isms in Scientific and philosophical terms eventually distilled into Creativity which of course brings The artist in concepts, Berdeyev into greater clarity through the illustrations you brought forward and the current revelations through science. Thank you so much for your Turning Work into play.
Love the piece. I've been privately working on much the same from a Hegelian angle (which always seems to have quite a bit in common with Whitehead)...
In the Hegelian sense the issue of computable v incomputable is baked into the dialectic vis a vis quantitative/computational thresholds. Meaning the brute force computation model of consciousness is not incorrect - so long as the brute force exceeds its own capacity for self-computation... to produce a computationally saturated, indeterminate state of systemic interiority (sublation). So the issue of computable path to consciousness v incomputable path to consciousness or RR, etc., is from my perspective somewhat of a trap, as thresholds of computation produce the incomputable to begin with. Imo the predictive and active inference operations which place errors into settled schemas are likewise using a computational model - designed to be computationally limited - and that what actually settles errors and produces the incomputable "self" is computational excess.
Anyhow. Sorry for using your comment section as my notepad. But it was too inspiring:)
A recent discussion about this paper featuring Stu Kauffman and others: https://youtu.be/c9LaBsmVEcE?si=Cnr9UV_x58QyJuJd
Great talk! If it helps anybody here are three points. All are tangential to the actual focus of the talk:
1. Quantum Computers speed up computation by bypassing certain steps a classical computer needs to perform. To be brief these are usually steps involving building up some overall feature of a function, like its period, from parts of the function, like its values for specific inputs. Quantum Computers can ignore this because they directly manipulate holistic properties of systems and don't need to manipulate the parts.
In an even briefer form: A Quantum Computer can just evaluate the truth of the total system "A or B or C...or Z" without needing to evaluate A, B ,etc individually.
Deutsch conjectured that quantum computers would be faster due to using superposition, but that is now known to be incorrect. It's the holism and contextual aspects of quantum theory that provide the speed up, not superposition.
Tim is correct in saying there is no usable quantum computer currently. There are also other subtler issues with them like that one can prove there is no such thing as a Universal Quantum Computer, but I won't overload this comment.
2. Quantum Darwinism is an attempt to explain how some properties of objects are classical and not quantum, by positing that being slightly classical gives properties a better chance to influence the environment and if they manage to successfully influence the environment they become more classical, which in turn increases the chance to influence even more of the environment and so on. So you get a selection effect whereby by the time a property has "survived" to influence a wide area, like how the colour of a tree can be seen over a whole forest, its fully classical.
Today it would be seen as one of the ways things become classical.
3. As for Many Worlds, most physicists don't accept it because its genuinely very hard to interpret the mathematics of quantum theory that way as the justifications of several standard theorems don't make sense in a Many-Worlds framework and the mathematics of quantum theory can be proven to be part of probability theory, so reading it in a deterministic way seems to make no mathematical sense.
Very helpful, thanks!
The spirit of this exchange and ideas and concepts certainly clarify the value of science and the hermetic synthesis of all antinomies. I found it, especially interesting in how The many isms in Scientific and philosophical terms eventually distilled into Creativity which of course brings The artist in concepts, Berdeyev into greater clarity through the illustrations you brought forward and the current revelations through science. Thank you so much for your Turning Work into play.
Love the piece. I've been privately working on much the same from a Hegelian angle (which always seems to have quite a bit in common with Whitehead)...
In the Hegelian sense the issue of computable v incomputable is baked into the dialectic vis a vis quantitative/computational thresholds. Meaning the brute force computation model of consciousness is not incorrect - so long as the brute force exceeds its own capacity for self-computation... to produce a computationally saturated, indeterminate state of systemic interiority (sublation). So the issue of computable path to consciousness v incomputable path to consciousness or RR, etc., is from my perspective somewhat of a trap, as thresholds of computation produce the incomputable to begin with. Imo the predictive and active inference operations which place errors into settled schemas are likewise using a computational model - designed to be computationally limited - and that what actually settles errors and produces the incomputable "self" is computational excess.
Anyhow. Sorry for using your comment section as my notepad. But it was too inspiring:)