Creator Gods, Part II
“We don’t have to understand it to use it.”
Just as there is distributed computing, there’s distributed comprehension. I learned about distributed comprehension from Daniel Dennett: termite consciousness, he says, exists within the community; no one creature has it; it’s only in the group, together, that it can carry out its purpose. Ants, too; and bees. Reading David Haskell on trees, I learn that the ecology of forests are also a kind of distributed comprehension. There’s more here about that concept, too.
Dennett writes,
“We find ourselves indirectly making things that we only partially understand, and they in turn may create things we don’t understand at all. Since some of these things have wonderful powers, we may begin to doubt the value — or at least the preeminent value — of understanding. Comprehension is so passé, so vieux jeux, so old-fashioned! Who needs understanding when we can all be the beneficiaries of artifacts that save us that arduous effort?”
Comprehension is one thing; consciousness is something altogether different. Kurzweil called it “the most important ontological question” facing us in dealing with the Singularity. Among people who concern themselves with such things as superintelligence there seem to be two schools on the issue of consciousness. Nobody knows exactly what consciousness is; but some think that someday we’ll be able to replicate it with programming, and in that case we’d create “conscious” superintelligence. Others believe that no non-biological thing can ever achieve consciousness.
The fact that consciousness cannot be commodified is not stopping the drive to achieve the Singularity. Harari calls it the “big decoupling”: There’s a growing acceptance of the idea that a robot with artificial intelligence need not have “consciousness.” Consciousness is overrated; silicon life can proceed, people seem to be deciding, entirely without it.
Over the course of the 20th century, physicists decided that it was more important to put quantum mechanics to work to accomplish more better faster than to understand how it works.
In fall of 2019 Google claimed “quantum supremacy,” as they phrased it. The New York Times said this meant “a machine that runs on the mind-boggling physics of quantum mechanics has reportedly solved a problem that would stump the world’s top supercomputers.” There were of course skeptics, IBM among them, who doubted the whole thing. At least doubted that Google had “supremacy.” Nobody doubted quantum computing was coming, even though scientists admit they haven’t any real clue as to what quantum mechanics is or means. But understanding doesn’t seem to matter.
“The most obvious potential applications of this research are in the realm of national security,” wrote the Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan. “Entangled particles could one day be used for ‘quantum communication’— a means of sending super-secure messages that doesn’t rely on cables or wireless signals [read: bitcoin]. The tremendous processing power of quantum computers might be used to break previously unbreakable codes…. Biologists might use quantum computers to understand natural processes far too complex for classical machines to simulate. Pharmaceutical researchers could employ them to discover new drugs. Quantum computing promises to generate better artificial intelligence and more-effective nanotechnologies.”
Like most everything having to do with “quantum” — physics, mechanics, computing — there was what it could do, which was starting to be shown (hence the “quantum supremacy” media gimmick) and what it meant. How it worked. What the laws governing it looked like.
“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That was in 1964.
Fast-forward to 2020, and “what’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have,” writes Sean Carroll. Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “Scientists can use quantum mechanics with perfect confidence. But it’s a black box. We can set up a physical situation, and make predictions about what will happen next that are verified to spectacular accuracy. What we don’t do is claim to understand quantum mechanics. Physicists don’t understand their own theory any better than a typical smartphone user understands what’s going on inside the device.”
As all students of quantum mechanics learn, quantum objects behave differently when we’re observing them than when we’re not. Until we “observe” them they seem to exist in what’s called “superpositions” — nothing’s fixed; they can be in different places — but when we look at them they behave differently; they’re in one single place. But it can’t be known — until we observe them — what it is, exactly that they’ll do. We have to make predictions of what they might do; but there’s no certainly; there’s only probabilities.
“The whole thing is preposterous,” Carroll continues. “Why are observations special? What counts as an ‘observation,’ anyway? When exactly does it happen? Does it need to be performed by a person?”
It doesn’t seem that scientists can even agree on what it is that quantum theory is a theory about. Is it about the universe? Is it about the Laws of Nature which we once thought we understood?
Carroll asks, “”Is consciousness somehow involved”? In the “basic rules of reality”?
But lack of comprehension seems to be no deterrent to creator gods, and quantum computing is the almost-here future.
