Encinitas 2023 2_11 hartmut neven 1080p 1
Keynote Speaker
Quantum Consciousness
presented at the Summer Symposium:
Neuroscience Needs a Revolution to Understand Consciousness
hosted by California Institute for Human Science and the
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
August 18-20, 2023 Encinitas, California
Testing the conjecture that quantum operations are necessary and sufficient to create sentience
Harmut Neven
Google, Mountain View, CA, USA
Categories by Discipline
4.0 Physical and Biological Sciences
Primary Topic Area - TSC Taxonomy
[03.12]........Artificial intelligence and robotics
Abstract
Building on the work of Penrose and Hameroff, we consider the hypothesis that a moment of conscious experience is implemented when a single classical configuration is selected from the multitude of configurations contained in a quantum mechanical superposition state. We investigate which quantum processes, such as creating or collapsing superposition states, might be most suitable to implement the physical correlate of consciousness. We propose a sequence of experiments to test this conjecture. The final capstone experiment involves coherently coupling suitable degrees of freedom in a human brain to a quantum processor, which, if the conjecture is correct, should cause richer experiences which require more bits to describe. Prior to attempting this, we propose to identify which degrees of freedom are suitable to couple to by experimenting with brain organoids.
Keywords
quantum mechanical superposition state, quantum processes, physical correlate of consciousness, degrees of freedom, brain organoids
