Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
Ok, so get a cat to do it.
This isn’t hard to test if someone would fund it.
I don’t blame you because half of PhD physicists are obsessed with quantum woo themselves and believe silly things like this, so there’s no shame in a Laymen making such a mistake.
But there is no scientific reason to believe that there is any physical wave that exists when you’re not looking and suddenly “collapses” when you look to begin with.
The reality is much simpler. Bell’s theorem proves that quantum mechanics is non-local, but the no-communication theorem proves that this non-locality never bubbles up to the level of something directly measurable, so you cannot communicate with it. You can only notice the non-locality by bringing measurements together and then making inferences about things that you did not directly measure.
This is significant because special relativity is both logically and mathematically incompatible with anything non-local. However, if what you directly measure never exhibits anything non-local, then you can construct a theory which only talks about what happens at measurement and nothing else, and then that theory would remain mathematically consistent with special relativity.
That is how textbook quantum mechanics is formulated: it is purely a theory of measurements. It is simply not a theory of physical reality. It makes no claim as to there being, in physical reality, some infinite-dimensional waveform that floats around in Hilbert space with no address in physical that “collapses” down when you look at it. It makes no claims at all to what physical reality is doing when you are not looking.
The wavefunction is just taken to be a book keeping tool to make a prediction as to what will happen if you make a measurement, and you have to update it in response to the measurement, and so “measurements” are taken to be fundamental in the theory, as a fundamental axiom. There is no derivation of what the measuring device is actually even measuring at all, because it is not a theory of reality. There is no claim that “consciousness” is involved, or anything at all, because it is not a theory of reality.
It is a theory of measurement outcomes and nothing more is said. Injecting things about the wavefunction collapsing because a cat looking at it is going beyond the textbook axioms. The textbook axioms of quantum mechanics really are entirely operational: they just provide a book keeping method for the physicist to make predictions as to what they will measure. The dependence upon the measuring device as fundamental is not a claim that measurements are actually fundamental to reality, but it is just a consequence of the operational nature of the theory. Treating it as a theory of physical reality will always lead to nonsense.
Yeah, hey - what degrees do you hold in physics?