Editor's Blog
Ray Kurzweil spoke at length with the audience Saturday evening. Below is a partial transcript from a recording of that talk.
Ray Kurzweil:
We’ve looked at what the brain does, and we can also look inside the brain and see if we can find anything comparable to quantum computing.
And the first issue: Quantum Computing has a tremendous scalability…but it doesn’t speed up every sort of computation. In fact, it’s pretty inflexible. So the classical problem that it can be applied to is cracking encryption codes based on cracking large numbers… and other combinatory problems like that. So, simulating protiens, solving linear sequences. There are different problems that would be sped up in this exponential manner, but in fact, it’s pretty limited.
But for all those types of problems, human beings do pretty poorly. We can’t even keep up with classical computing, let alone a quantum computer. There’s no indication that our capabilities are demonstrating quantum computing, and we haven’t found anything like quantum computing in the brain.
A more interesting issue is "do we need quantum computing for consciousness?" And I’ve been thinking about the issue of consciousness for a long time, I’m working on a book now called "How The Mind Works And How To Build One." I call it "The Mind" rather than "The Brain." Most of the book talks about the "brain," but the "mind" brings up this issue of consciousness. This ephemeral qualia quality that the mind has that we wouldn’t see in an actual brain…
I’ve actually been thinking about this going back to Junior High School – thinking about this for 50 years…
If I assume I’m conscious, even more than I assume your conscious, though I do that also (audience laughs) but it’s an assumption, a shared assumption. I don’t really even know what I’m conscious of.
"Did you see that bird flying by?" "Well, no, I didn’t." But maybe I did. I don’t remember it, but maybe when it was flying by, I saw it. I can’t actually access what I was conscious of other than my memory of events, but my memory is not perfect. Things can happen. You can be aware of them. Certainly you know that’s true of events that you were desperately conscious of a week ago, and now you’ve forgotten them. So, the fact that we don’t remember something doesn’t mean we weren’t conscious of it at the time.
Note: "How The Mind Works, and How To Build One" will be available from Viking Press in 2011.
Do you think the brain’s calculations go as fast as a quantum computer? What are your thoughts about how we perceive consciousness? Tell us on the blog.
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7 Comments
I am not very sure which quantum theory is being used in the basic premise. Considering so many views on what quantum theory really is, its virtually impossible to conjecture which particular quantum computation model is closely coupled with higher brain processes like the “mind”. What I have raised as a real possibility at a computational neuroscience seminar is the use of quantum computing to solve complex models of brain systems. At least that is clearly achievable.
I am not quite sure, now brain has quite a lot of raw power but the level of quantum computer? My answer is a strickt maybe.
I think we should first asses how does a neuron see information, computer uses 1 and 0 but how does a brain do that? Does it use lets say 4 bit or some other kind of system to make the calculations?
Even more so I am interested about, but don’t know of, that what is the speed of 1 neuron to make a single calculation.
If the human brain uses quantum computing, do monkeys use quantum computing, how about the rat brain or even the fruit fly. We can simulate the fruit fly and the rat where is the exponential jump in processing power. I wouldn’t discount that it could be there but if it was a central part of our consciousness than what happens to people with a genetic defect in thier quantum computer. What desease would that be?
Many fundamental problems in AI can be naturally recast as NP-hard optimization problems–basically all discrete pattern matching problems are like this. There is a class of quantum algorithms for solving problems like this called quantum adiabatic algorithms, which are likely to be the “easiest” quantum algorithms to realize in hardware. These can (and have) been used to build learning systems. It is not a huge stretch to think that something like this could be used as a component of a powerful machine learning system.
Also I’d just like to point out that an evolved system like the brain could use specialized heuristics that use quantum mechanics somehow. But if this is true it certainly does not imply that brains can do universal quantum computation. There could be strong selection pressure on good pattern matching but no selection pressure whatsoever on being able to factor biprimes. In an environment like this a “wetware heuristic” for pattern matching that uses QM could evolve, but the argument that we can’t factor implies no QM is used in the brain fails.
Geordi has it right. All the problems that natural intelligent systems solve well are of that class, even the ones that apes and rats solve, and that simpler animals solve with genetic programming in a limited field. Natural systems are quantum systems, and this suggests that most attempts at neural simulations will ultimately fail to function in the context of the organism being simulated, if it were even possible to do this experiment.
What would “high temperature quatum computing” look like? Might it look like the error prone, but highly functional systems that we see in evolved living systems? Also, keep in mind that UCI is a particular logical formation and may not relate to what “real quantum systems” do, and all of this is at the level of modeling, not real world. Ultimately a classic computer is also a quantum system, it is just being operated at the far end of the fuzz-sharp scale where everything is determined and noise is stamped out by redundancy.
What if the brain has discovered (through evolution and culture) how to use quantum indeterminacy in its function. The brain isn’t designed to “do computations”, but to “be and do in the world of this organism”, and in that context we can meditate upon any question big or small that is relevant to our lives. What is the meditation upon learning and experience if not a kind of quantum computation where our unconscious mind is doing multi-level language based quantum computations?
“How The Mind Works And How To Build One.”
In order to ‘build’ a mind it would have to be composite first. If composite, it would be possible to describe it in terms of attributes, like in case of an apple, brain, mathematical formula or any other thing. If there is not a single attribute of mind it is non-composite and unthinkable-of, let alone constructible. Why would one want to read a book if it has such a clumsy assumption already in the title. Honestly, I haven’t seen a single person worshiped more for just a bunch of unsupported speculations than Kurzweil.
Because I was taught not to judge a book by it’s cover. Also, the mind is a derivative of the brain, if you build a brain, then it’s logical that a mind is built too. The reason people respect Kurzweil is because he’s smart enough to see these things can happen and then help them to be achieved, while most people claim it’s “unthinkable-of” and disregard the possibility.