Yeah, Tegmark’s calculations really matter here. More importantly though, quantum computers are just very hard to do without error-correcting codes or cooling things down to very low temperatures. I suspect there’s more like an epsilon chance of us having quantum computers in our brain.
My memory is that I believed in Tegmark’s result before I decided that subjective credence levels could be improved by being held up against the meter stick of Bayes.
I could just say “you idiot, Tegmark did math, brains are too hot, end of story” and the ability to imagine dunking on someone like that was enough of a semantic stopsign for me to not worry about it any more.
Nowadays I mostly only say that I give “epsilon credence” in retrospect, about things I couldn’t imagine not having been true before I actually noticed any alternatives.
Epsilon for me now means something like “that hypothesis was outside the explicit event space of the agent whose credence I’m talking about” not “that hypothesis is inside my event space and now let me list a huge amount of evidence that overwhelmingly makes the posterior impossible to get wrong, like not even due to typos or academic fraud or anything like that”.
But for me… I now can sort of imagine what it would be like for a classical Alice to see glimmers of Bob’s behavior that are consistent with Bob being in cognitive superposition relative to Alice, so… uh...
Currently I feel like I shouldn’t go much lower than like 6%(?) probability on the active claim “there are definitely NO meaningful quantum computational processes in our brains”.
If we had sound money, and competitive 50 year bonds paid 0.2% annualized interest, and yet such a world somehow still had uncertainties like this still laying around…
...then I might be able to think about how to frame a 50 year bet on the results of science here, and say how much of my bankroll Kelly says I should put on a bet?
If you try to make the statement much stronger than “there are definitely NO meaningful quantum computational processes in our brains” then I think it might be trivially false? I’m pretty sure some of our metabolic enzymes aren’t fully classical, like in reactions where an entire ATP (or two or three or four) is a big deal and if quantum tunneling helps a reaction go more cheaply, then the amino acids might very well be set up to enable and use such tunneling. Single photons in a very very dark room can change the physiology (firing / not firing) of a rod in the retina.
Given this lower level uncertainty, making strong claims about the substrate independence of the “computational state of the brain” is no longer totally obvious to me.
It’s not just that brains are too hot, it’s that evolution probably can’t implement quantum computers at all for the last billion or so years because I suspect there’s not a path to locally getting quantum computers through genetics.
I’d take a bet at 1000-1 odds that no meaningful quantum computations are happening in our brains.
Those are big odds. I would want to take that bet, even if I only thought there was a small probability of there being “meaningful quantum computations” in the brain.
But how and when would the bet be decided? I mean, if it becomes unambiguously clear that there’s a cognitively relevant quantum computation in the brain, then the bet is decided in favor of quantum mind theories. But otherwise, you’re trying to prove an absence… would you have to wait until the brain is fully understood, and if all computations in the final brain model are classical, then you win the bet?
I’m also concerned about your ability to pay, at those odds. You could easily be on the hook for millions of dollars if quantum computing was found within the brain after all.
What size stake would you be willing to commit to?
If there’s one lesson I learned, it’s to be less confident in my beliefs. I was both probably wrong, and dangerous to have such high confidence levels.
I got randomly distracted from this conversation, but returning I find: 1) Mitchell said things I would want to say, but probably more succinctly <3 2) Noosphere updated somehow (though to what, and based on what info, I’m unsure) <3
Admittedly, I updated to more of a 5-10:1 bets. A lot of this was the downside risk of betting such huge odds, but I also should have been quite a bit less confident in my own ideas.
Yeah, Tegmark’s calculations really matter here. More importantly though, quantum computers are just very hard to do without error-correcting codes or cooling things down to very low temperatures. I suspect there’s more like an epsilon chance of us having quantum computers in our brain.
My memory is that I believed in Tegmark’s result before I decided that subjective credence levels could be improved by being held up against the meter stick of Bayes.
I could just say “you idiot, Tegmark did math, brains are too hot, end of story” and the ability to imagine dunking on someone like that was enough of a semantic stopsign for me to not worry about it any more.
Nowadays I mostly only say that I give “epsilon credence” in retrospect, about things I couldn’t imagine not having been true before I actually noticed any alternatives.
Epsilon for me now means something like “that hypothesis was outside the explicit event space of the agent whose credence I’m talking about” not “that hypothesis is inside my event space and now let me list a huge amount of evidence that overwhelmingly makes the posterior impossible to get wrong, like not even due to typos or academic fraud or anything like that”.
But for me… I now can sort of imagine what it would be like for a classical Alice to see glimmers of Bob’s behavior that are consistent with Bob being in cognitive superposition relative to Alice, so… uh...
Currently I feel like I shouldn’t go much lower than like 6%(?) probability on the active claim “there are definitely NO meaningful quantum computational processes in our brains”.
If we had sound money, and competitive 50 year bonds paid 0.2% annualized interest, and yet such a world somehow still had uncertainties like this still laying around…
...then I might be able to think about how to frame a 50 year bet on the results of science here, and say how much of my bankroll Kelly says I should put on a bet?
If you try to make the statement much stronger than “there are definitely NO meaningful quantum computational processes in our brains” then I think it might be trivially false? I’m pretty sure some of our metabolic enzymes aren’t fully classical, like in reactions where an entire ATP (or two or three or four) is a big deal and if quantum tunneling helps a reaction go more cheaply, then the amino acids might very well be set up to enable and use such tunneling. Single photons in a very very dark room can change the physiology (firing / not firing) of a rod in the retina.
Given this lower level uncertainty, making strong claims about the substrate independence of the “computational state of the brain” is no longer totally obvious to me.
It’s not just that brains are too hot, it’s that evolution probably can’t implement quantum computers at all for the last billion or so years because I suspect there’s not a path to locally getting quantum computers through genetics.
I’d take a bet at 1000-1 odds that no meaningful quantum computations are happening in our brains.
Those are big odds. I would want to take that bet, even if I only thought there was a small probability of there being “meaningful quantum computations” in the brain.
But how and when would the bet be decided? I mean, if it becomes unambiguously clear that there’s a cognitively relevant quantum computation in the brain, then the bet is decided in favor of quantum mind theories. But otherwise, you’re trying to prove an absence… would you have to wait until the brain is fully understood, and if all computations in the final brain model are classical, then you win the bet?
Yes, though I’d probably accept a position where no brain region (not wiring) uses quantum computations. Still, this would be a hard bet to do well.
I’m also concerned about your ability to pay, at those odds. You could easily be on the hook for millions of dollars if quantum computing was found within the brain after all.
What size stake would you be willing to commit to?
$30, as a starting point for my stakes.
If there’s one lesson I learned, it’s to be less confident in my beliefs. I was both probably wrong, and dangerous to have such high confidence levels.
I got randomly distracted from this conversation, but returning I find:
1) Mitchell said things I would want to say, but probably more succinctly <3
2) Noosphere updated somehow (though to what, and based on what info, I’m unsure) <3
Admittedly, I updated to more of a 5-10:1 bets. A lot of this was the downside risk of betting such huge odds, but I also should have been quite a bit less confident in my own ideas.