Andrew Knight is Qualified to Endorse

The universe is more unpredictable than I had imagined. 

As I discussed here, I was certain I had been blacklisted from the arXiv.  I have submitted ten papers to it, five of which question the assumption of U (the assumption that quantum wave states universally evolve linearly/reversibly).  Exactly five of those ten papers were rejected… can you guess which ones?

Two days ago, I submitted my new paper (“Wigner’s Friend Depends on Self-Contradictory Quantum Amplification”) to several preprint archives, as well as the arXiv just for the hell of it.  As with most of my submissions to arXiv, it immediately went “on hold” and I fully expected it to be rejected.  Amazingly, it was published last night and can be accessed here.

I don’t get it.  This new paper is not all that different from several others I’ve submitted.  The argument is somewhat different, and it’s shorter and clearer.  It also directly responds to an article that was published last year in Physical Review Letters that essentially shows that reversible measurements are a logical contradiction.  But, like my other articles that have been rejected by arXiv on the indefensible basis that they were “unrefereeable,” this article bluntly rejects U – and the physical possibilities of Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend – on a purely logical basis.

What’s even more amazing is that I submitted it under the subtopic physics.hist-ph (history and philosophy of physics), but some anonymous arXiv moderator moved it to quant-ph (quantum physics), which makes it my third arXiv publication in that topic.

Here’s why that’s amazing.  You can’t submit to arXiv unless someone, who is already regarded as sufficiently competent on a particular topic, endorses you in that topic.  This is one way that arXiv tries to keep out the crackpots.  (As it turns out, Scott Aaronson was the person who originally endorsed me for the quant-ph topic years ago.  He also sent me a snarky email this morning adamantly opposing the argument in this new paper.)  So how do you become an arXiv “expert” on a particular topic?  By getting three articles on arXiv in that topic.  I had already had three articles in the physics.hist-ph topic, but I only had two in quant-ph.  Indeed, I submitted the current article to the physics.hist-ph topic. 

But not only was my article published on arXiv, someone intentionally reclassified it as quant-ph, which makes it my third article in that topic.  I am now “qualified to endorse” in the quant-ph topic on arXiv.  In other words, by arXiv’s own standards, I am now, due to the reclassifying and publishing of an article that rejects the assumption of U, sufficiently competent in quantum physics to help screen out other crackpots.

WTF.  Seriously, WTF.  Either I'm finally getting heard, or someone at arXiv made a huge mistake.  Smart money's on the latter.

Schrodinger's Cat is Dead... and its Proponents are Braindead

It has become clear to me now that there is an entire industry that thrives on the ambiguity inherent in Schrodinger’s Cat and Wigner’s Friend. 

They are both based on contradictory assumptions.  And contradictions are false.

I have explained it in a simple paper understandable by anyone, including by those in the academy whose prestige and paychecks depend on perpetuating the contradictions.

The paper is here.  It won’t be published, but I don’t care anymore.  Grass is green and the sky is blue, and even if 10,000 academics publish papers to the contrary, all they are doing is perpetuating a system of mutual masturbation which is not interested in – and does not value – truth. 

It is now extraordinarily clear to me that any physicist who actually believes that Schrodinger’s Cat is physically possible in the actual universe is – to use the words of asshole Richard Dawkins – either ignorant or stupid.

I am done with this silly game.

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 3

Is there an afterlife?  Can a computer be conscious?  In Part 1, I pointed out that the popular science answers to these questions depend on the assumption that the brain causes consciousness.  In Part 2, I introduced two statements which, if taken together, imply that the brain does not cause consciousness.  I then explained why Statement 1 is true.  The two statements are:

1)     A brain can be copied.

2)     A person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

In today’s post, I’ll address Statement 2.  This statement is definitely more difficult to prove, which is why it’s so revolutionary.  The clearest explanation, I think, is this 23-minute video that I presented at the 2020 Science of Consciousness conference.  (There is also a more thorough video explanation here.)  The most detailed and precise explanation is in my paper.  But since my goal in this blog post series is to explain things to a lay audience without all the fancy bullshit, this post will (I hope) convince you of Statement 2 with a simpler explanation.

To convince you of Statement 2, I’ll start by assuming the opposite, and then show how it leads to a problem or contradiction.  So let’s assume that you’re in some conscious state that can be copied.  Let’s call that conscious state C1.  Since it can be copied, and we live in a physical world, there must be some underlying physical state that we can copy.  Maybe that physical state is the positions of all the atoms in your brain.  We don't have to know exactly what that physical state is -- the point is that there is some physical state that can be copied.  Let’s call that physical state S1.

Let’s be clear.  You are experiencing conscious state C1.  And that conscious state is entirely created by physical state S1.  So if we were to copy that state S1, and then recreate it somewhere else, then that copy of S1 would produce your conscious state C1.  That’s the whole point of the assumption.  If you are experiencing state C1, and we recreate state C1 on a distant planet in the Wazoo Galaxy (by copying the underlying physical state S1), then you would experience state C1 on that distant planet.[1] 

Now, let’s say we make a copy of physical state S1 (which produces your experience of conscious state C1).  We then recreate it on Mars (preferably in a habitable station), and then simultaneously kill you on Earth.  There’s no problem, right?  You would just experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Mars in the next.  It would just feel like you were teleported to Mars.[2] 

But what if we also recreate physical state S1 (which produces your experience of conscious state C1) on Venus?  What would you experience if there were two versions of you, both experiencing conscious state C1 created by underlying physical state S1? 

More specifically, what would you experience the moment after that?  Being alive on Mars and Venus would be vastly different experiences.  Let’s say that on Mars, your physical state S1 would change to S2_M (which creates conscious state C2_M), while on Venus, your physical state S1 would change to S2_V (which creates conscious state C2_V).  State C2_M might be the conscious experience of looking out at a vast orange desert, while state C2_V might be the conscious experience of looking out at a dark, cloudy, lava-scorched land.  I don’t know exactly what it would feel like, but certainly the two conscious states would differ.

Which conscious state would you experience, C2_M or C2_V?  There are only three possibilities:

·       Neither

·       Both

·       One or the other

Before proceeding, I should mention something important about physics: locality.  Generally speaking, you can only affect, or be affected by, things that are nearby (or “local”).  If you’re at a baseball game and worried about getting hit in the head with a fly ball, sit far away from home plate.  That way, you’ll have plenty of time to move if a fly ball is heading your way.  Even though the idea is simple, it’s an extremely important and fundamental feature of the physical world.  Einstein is famous for formalizing the concept of locality in his Special Theory of Relativity, which asserts that nothing, including information, can travel faster than the speed of light.

The speed of light is very fast (186,282 miles per second), but it is still finite.  Nothing that happens in a distant galaxy can immediately affect you, because it takes time for information of that event to reach you.  In fact, our own sun is about 8 light-minutes away, which means that if it exploded, it would not affect us for another eight minutes.  The only known violation of locality is quantum entanglement, but even quantum entanglement does not allow information or matter to be transmitted faster than light.

Getting back to the above example, when we recreate physical states S1 on Mars and Venus, those states are not local to each other, which means they can’t affect each other.  And Mars and Venus are far enough apart that subsequent physical states (S2_M on Mars and S2_V on Venus) also can’t affect each other.[3]

We already know that when we create state S1 on Mars (and kill you on Earth), you would experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Mars in the next, as if you teleported to Mars.  Your subsequent conscious states (C2_M, C3_M, C4_M, and so forth) would change according to what you experienced on Mars.

And if we had instead created state S1 on Venus (but not on Mars), you would experience being on Earth in one moment and then on Venus in the next, as if you teleported to Venus.  Your subsequent conscious states (C2_V, C3_V, C4_V, and so forth) would change according to what you experienced on Venus.

So what would happen if we create state S1 (which produces conscious state C1) on Mars and on Venus?  Which conscious state will you next experience, C2_M or C2_V?  As I said before, there are only three possibilities, which I’ll analyze below:

·       Neither

·       Both

·       One or the other

Neither.  Maybe it’s neither.  Maybe the universe doesn’t like it when we create multiple copies of a conscious state, so when you create two or more copies, they both get blocked or eliminated or something.  Here’s the problem.  When you are created on Mars, your conscious state cannot be affected by what is happening on Venus because the two events are nonlocal.  There is no way for your physical state S1 on Mars to “know” that state S1 was also created on Venus because it takes time for information to travel from Venus to Mars, even if that information is traveling at the speed of light.  Your physical state S1 will change to S2_M (which produces your conscious state C2_M) long before a signal can be sent to stop it.  Therefore, you will experience conscious state C2_M, so the correct answer cannot be “neither.”

Both.  Maybe you will experience both conscious states C2_M and C2_V.  I certainly have no idea what it’s like to experience two different conscious states at (what I would perceive as) the same time.  Nevertheless, maybe it’s possible.  But here’s the problem.  Your conscious experience of C2_M is created by physical state S2_M, which is affected by stuff on Mars, while your conscious experience of C2_V is created by physical state S2_V, which is affected by stuff on Venus.  For example, if state C2_M is your experience of looking out at a vast orange desert, it’s because light rays bouncing off Martian dunes interacted with your physical state S1 to produce S2_M.  But information about that interaction is inaccessible to whomever is experiencing state C2_V on Venus, once again because information does not travel fast enough between the two planets.  Therefore, whoever is experiencing state C2_V on Venus cannot also be experiencing state C2_M on Mars.  Therefore, maybe you’re experiencing state C2_M or C2_V, but you can’t be experiencing both.

One or the other.  The correct answer to the above question is not “neither” and it’s not “both.”  The only remaining option is that you experience either C2_M or C2_V.  But which one?  How could nature choose?  Maybe you experience the “first” one created.  The problem here is, once again, nonlocality.  Let’s say that, according to my clock on Earth, state S1 is created on Mars at 12:00:00pm, and state S1 is created on Venus at 12:00:01pm – in other words, one second later by my clock.  The problem is that there is no way for state S1 on Venus to “know” about the creation of state S1 on Mars (and to then prevent your conscious experience of state C2_V on Venus), because it takes much longer than one second for information to travel between the two planets.[4]  Therefore, the universe cannot “choose” between C2_M or C2_V based on time.  And because state S1 on Mars is physically identical to state S1 on Venus, there is no other physical means by which the universe can choose one over the other.  If S1 changes to S2_M (which produces C2_M) on Mars and S1 changes to S2_V (which produces C2_V) on Venus, there is no known physical means for the universe to somehow decide that you will experience only C2_M or C2_V (but not both).  Therefore, you cannot experience just one or the other.    

We have ruled out all three possibilities.  What does this mean?  It means that the original assumption – that a person’s conscious state can be copied – is wrong.  Think about the logic this way:

          i.          If statement A is true, then either B or C or D must be true. 

        ii.          But B, C, and D are all false. 

      iii.          Therefore, statement A must be false.

In this case, statement A is “a person’s conscious state can be copied” and statements B, C, and D correspond to “neither,” “both,” and “one or the other,” like this:

       i.          If a person’s conscious state can be copied, then we can put copies on Mars and Venus.  Either the person will experience neither copy, or will experience both copies, or will experience one or the other. 

     ii.          I showed that none of these are possible (because they conflict with special relativity). 

   iii.          Therefore, a person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

 

If you recall, this conclusion is the same as Statement 2 at the beginning of this post:

1)     A brain can be copied.

2)     A person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

If I have convinced you of Statement 2 in this post, and of Statement 1 in the previous post, then what do they imply?  This is what they imply:

 

If a brain can be copied, but a conscious state cannot, then the brain cannot create consciousness.

 

Certainly the brain can affect consciousness.  If someone sticks electrodes in my brain, I have no doubt that it will probably affect my conscious experience.  But consciousness cannot be produced entirely by the brain.  In other words, conscious experience must depend on stuff (events and states) beyond the skull. 

This conclusion should be shocking, but taken seriously, by anyone who wants to understand and scientifically study consciousness.  Its implications are significant.  For example, getting back to the big-picture questions posed in Part 1, can a computer be conscious?  A digital computer has a state that can be easily copied.  If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to copy files, buy software, or even run software.  But as I proved above, a person’s conscious state cannot be copied.  Therefore, a person’s conscious state cannot be embedded or executed on a digital computer, because if it could, then the person’s conscious state could be easily copied.  A digital computer cannot be conscious because conscious states cannot be copied.[5]  Also, mind uploading is impossible because if a computer can’t be conscious, then there’s no way to upload or simulate a conscious mind on a computer.  Also, consciousness cannot be algorithmic.  An algorithm is a set of instructions that can be executed on any general purpose computer.  Once again, an algorithm can be easily copied but a person’s conscious state can’t, so consciousness cannot be algorithmic.

And what about the other question posed in Part 1: Is there an afterlife?  Well, my arguments here certainly don’t prove that consciousness continues after brain death.  However, the strongest (and perhaps only) scientific argument against an afterlife depends on the assumption that the brain causes consciousness.  But I’ve shown that’s false.  Further, I’ve shown that consciousness transcends the brain, at least to some degree.  The fact that what we consciously perceive is produced by something beyond our brains is at least circumstantial evidence that the existence of consciousness does not necessarily depend on whether a brain is alive.

The brain does not cause consciousness.  Much of what science tells us about consciousness, to the extent that it relies on an invalid assumption, is likely false. 

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[1] If physical state S1 wasn’t sufficient to produce a conscious state of YOU – in other words, if physical state S1 is inadequate to produce your conscious identity – then consciousness must be produced in part by something nonphysical.  And that would be a real problem for scientists!

[2] If you weren’t also killed on Earth, this would be the “teleportation problem” that Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose discusses in The Emperor’s New Mind.

[3] To use physics language, the creation of states S1 on Mars and Venus (and their subsequent evolutions to S2_M and S2_V, respectively) are spacelike separated events.  The argument I’m making here applies equally to timelike separated events, which I discuss in my paper.

[4] In fact, there is no such thing as “simultaneous” events when we are talking about spacelike separated events.  Even though my clock may say that S1 was created on Mars first, the clock of another observer may say that S1 was created on Venus first.  There is no objective fact about which event occurs first if the events are spacelike separated.

[5] Maybe this argument doesn’t apply to quantum computers.  However, as I’ve explained repeatedly, a quantum computer sufficiently large to create anything we might regard as intelligent is just as physically impossible as producing Schrodinger’s Cat or Wigner’s Friend. 

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 2

Is there an afterlife?  Can a computer be conscious?  In Part 1, I pointed out that the popular science answers to these questions depend on an often unstated assumption:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.

I am going to show in this and subsequent posts why there is very good reason to doubt this assumption, and why it’s almost certainly false.  To do that, I’m going to try to convince you of two statements [1] which, taken together, imply that the brain does not cause consciousness:

1)     A brain can be copied.  (Even if it cannot be done today due to technological limitations, there is no physical law preventing the physical state of a brain from being copied.)

2)     A person’s conscious state cannot be copied.

In today’s post, I’ll address Statement 1.  First of all, I think most people, particularly scientists, would already agree with it.  And since my goal is to convince you, the reader, then if you already agree with it, there’s no need to read further.  Instead, just move on to the next post in this series, where I’ll address Statement 2.

Of course, no one thinks that a brain can be copied today.  But what physical law prevents copying a brain in the future?  The only known physical principle of which I’m aware is the quantum no-cloning theorem, which says that a quantum state cannot be copied.  And a brain, like all things in the universe, is presumably in a quantum state, so in that sense it can never be perfectly copied.  But that doesn’t matter as long as quantum effects are not relevant to the brain and its functions.  In other words, the only thing that would prevent a brain from being copied adequately to replicate consciousness is if consciousness depends on quantum effects. 

For example, if a conscious state depended on quantum entanglements with objects outside the brain, then there is inadequate information in the brain to specify a conscious state.  Quantum entanglement is “nonlocal,” which means that Object A can affect entangled Object B instantaneously, even if they are separated by a large distance, and the effect is not limited by the speed of light.  So if my current conscious state depends at least in part on an event in another galaxy (which we cannot detect until we receive light from the event), then consciousness is nonlocal.  This recent paper argues that consciousness is nonlocal, but I doubt many in the scientific community have taken notice.

Another way that consciousness may depend on quantum effects is if, to copy the brain, you’d have to measure the state of objects in the brain (like neurons) so precisely that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle kicks in, and the measurement itself starts changing the brain’s physical state.  For example, Scott Aaronson suggests in this paper that if a brain is “unclonable for fundamental physical reasons,” then that unclonability could be a consequence of quantum no-cloning if the granularity a brain would need to be simulated at in order to duplicate someone’s subjective identity was down to the quantum level. 

In general, though, few scientists believe that consciousness or brain function depend on quantum effects, and most who discuss the possibility are quickly dismissed as mystics or pseudoscientists.[2]  As long as consciousness does not depend on quantum effects, then we don’t need to worry about quantum no-cloning, and there is nothing that would prevent a future engineer from scanning a person’s brain and then reproducing a functional duplicate with the same conscious state.

Are you convinced of Statement 1 yet?… that a brain can be copied in principle?  Maybe you’re still concerned about possible quantum effects.  OK, here’s another argument.

The amount of information that can be contained in a volume of space is limited.  This is called the Bekenstein bound.  It’s a ridiculously large number but it’s still finite.  For example, the Bekenstein bound Wikipedia page calculates that the maximum information necessary to recreate a human brain, including its entire quantum state, is on the order of 10^42 bits (where a single “bit” of information is either a 0 or 1).  That’s a huge number… it looks like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, but it’s still much, much smaller than the number of particles in the universe.  Also, the Bekenstein bound for the brain is an upper physical limit that’s based on a brain so dense with information that it’s right on the verge of collapsing into a black hole!  I think it’s reasonable to surmise that we aren’t walking around with potential black holes in our skulls, so the actual information necessary to specify the quantum state of a brain is probably much, much, much, much smaller than 10^42 bits.  But it doesn’t actually matter.  Here’s why.

Even if we can’t in practice copy a human brain, the universe should be able to.  I’m referring to a Boltzmann Brain.  Physicists currently believe that essentially any physical state can be created by randomness (i.e., accident).  So even though it’s extremely unlikely, a physicist will say that there is some chance that atoms and particles will accidentally come together somewhere in the universe to create your brain.  And even if we include quantum effects, and even if that accidental collection of atoms has to specify the 10^42 bits that could potentially be specified in the physical state of your brain, there is some nonzero probability that it will occur. 

In other words, there is no known physical law that will prevent the exact recreation of your brain elsewhere.  The universe can copy your brain, even if your brain’s function depends on quantum effects.  Therefore, a brain can be copied.  Statement 1 is true.

In my next post, I’ll address Statement 2.  As for now, do you have any questions or concerns about Statement 1?

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[1] As I mentioned previously, I would ordinarily try to be more precise with my words, arguments, and proofs.  But the purpose of this and subsequent posts is to write more colloquially without alienating lay readers.  Better precision can be found, e.g., in my papers.

[2] Don’t forget that consensus does not equal truth.  There is, and perhaps always has been, a bully culture in science, which is why scientific paradigms tend to be changed only by independent mavericks.

Does the Brain Cause Consciousness? Part 1

I have spent so much time and effort trying (and ultimately failing) to successfully communicate with people in the physics and philosophy academies, using their complicated and abstruse language and math equations, that I’ve made many of my insights, discoveries, and contributions completely inaccessible to the rest of the world, including my own friends and family.

My close friend Adam recently asked me some important questions, like whether computers could be conscious.  Of course, I’ve answered this question many times, and in great detail, on this blog and in my papers (particularly this and this).  But I realized that I really only addressed people who already knew the language of quantum mechanics, computer science, philosophical logic, and so forth.  So in this and subsequent posts, I’m going to try to address some important questions in direct, ordinary language without all the bullshit jargon.

Today, I want to mention two such questions:

·       Is there an afterlife?

·       Can a computer be conscious?

Ask these questions of a physicist, biologist, or computer scientist, and probably the vast majority will answer firmly and with conviction: No, there is no afterlife; Yes, a computer can be conscious.  And if you probe them further as to why they are so certain of these answers, you’ll find that there is an (often unstated) assumption that pervades the scientific community about consciousness:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.[1]

Is that assumption true?  If it is, then it’s not unreasonable to believe that consciousness ends when the brain dies.  Or that someday we’ll be able to copy the brain and recreate a person’s consciousness.  Or that a person’s brain could be simulated in a computer, thus producing consciousness in a computer.

But again, all these popular ideas stem from that one assumption, and there aren’t many scientists who question it (or even acknowledge it as an assumption).  So that’s where I’ll start.  Consider, again, the assumption:

Assumption: The brain causes consciousness.

Several questions for you about that assumption:

·       Do you believe it?

·       If so, why?  What evidence do you have that it is true?

·       What evidence has the scientific community offered to support it?

·       Which beliefs depend on it?  For example, anyone who believes that consciousness ends with brain death necessarily makes the above assumption.  Anyone who believes that a computer will someday be conscious by simulating a brain also makes the above assumption.  Many, many other popular science beliefs depend on this assumption.

·       What if the assumption is incorrect?  Is it possible to prove that it is false?  How might it be disproven?  If the assumption could actually be disproven, how might that impact your beliefs?  How might it impact the popular scientific beliefs about consciousness?

Next in this series: Part 2

Last in this series: Part 3

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[1] Note on this post: Ordinarily, I would try to be more precise with my words.  For example, the assumption is actually that a conscious state entirely depends on the physical state of a living brain, but this is where the eyes of ordinary readers start to glaze over.  So I won’t be so precise in this and related future blog posts.