Quantum Computing Is Artificial Consciousness

Quantum Physics changed everything in our view of the world. At least in the view of the most educated Earthlings. In 1900, Max Planck showed that light of frequency f had energy hf (H is Planck’s constant)… when emitted. In 1905 Einstein showed that if one assumed that light of frequency f gave energy by packets hf, one could understand the photoelectric effect (he got the Nobel for that in 1921). In 1924, Louis De Broglie assigned a wave of frequency f = p/h to all masses of momentum p (it was true: Nobel prize in 1927, shortest time ever between work and Nobel).

At this point, in 1924, Quantum Physics became wave mechanics… In 1927, Dirac showed that the electron could be better understood by generalizing the notions of wave and space, discovering, so doing, antimatter… In the 1930s, two new forces, best described by exchanges of “virtual particles”, the strong (nuclear) force and the weak force, were discovered…

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Chas Griffin intervened: “I don’t understand what Quantum theory has to do with mentation.“

A glib answer could have been that mentation has to do with biology and biology IS Quantum Biology… 

1) Quantum Physics is the theory of fundamental processes… At least the fundamental processes that one can set up an experiment for. As mentation is clearly a fundamental process, on may suspect that QP may end up including mentation…. If it looks like a duck…

2) Quantum Physics has to do with knowledge. Somehow, fundamental processes compute with, and thus incorporate, knowledge of the geometry of phase space… At a distance! Mentation has also to do with knowledge or at least perception…. At a distance… If it perceives like a duck…

3) It is known for a fact that Quantum Physics is crucial to how energy is extracted from the chlorophyl molecule, or to the perception of the magnetic field by birds… Olfaction is another example, where apparently the amplification cascade is launched by Quantum tunneling… Vision can perceive down to the Quantum level. Enzyme -catalyzed reactions, DNA fragmentation, cellular breathing, mitochondrial processing, all involve Quantum superposition, Quantum coherence, Quantum Entanglement, Quantum tunneling, and other Quantum Wave effects. Thus mentation technically depends, like all life, upon Quantum Physics. Mentation quacks like a duck… Because of the Quantum…

4) Once large scale system will be capable of Quantum Computations, they will behave exactly as we expect a sentient consciousness to behave and project: unknowable, unpredictable, and telling us to respect their souls… If it thinks like a duck…

Quantum Computing Is Artificial Consciousness...

Consciousness is nonlocal: by definition it ties in distant parts of the brain… Quantum Entanglement is also nonlocal.. At the extreme, on a galactic scale…

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Chas Griffin tried some philosophical torpedoes: “Thankyou for this, Patrice. But I still don’t see how a mechanical process of any sort might ever relate to a mental item! I suspect that the huge faith in QP that you suggest is actually an optimistic extension Materialism… a philosophy very easily shown to be irrational. (See, eg Ch5 of bad-dogma.org )”

However Quantum Physics has completely torpedoed classical materialism which should now be at the bottom of the sea… “Mechanics” has to be taken with a grain of salt in Quantum Physics.. It’s too “weird” and unpredictable… Fuzzy and temperamental… Coherent and incoherent… Some people, serious physics people, have wondered if electrons had consciousness. Without going that far, electrons have certainly perception of geometry at a distance… a striking characteristic of consciousness… So they have the crucial element that characterize consciousness…

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 Quantum Physics has deconstructed completely the concept of “matter”. Matter is no mater anymore… The concept of matter is not nourishing anymore… Matter is no alma mater no more, as our grammatically challenged friends would say.

In particular, QP says that matter is DELOCALIZED. Sometimes, or even most of the time.

Matter is also ENTANGLED (word introduced by Schrodinger, in English for QP…) Delocalization means that there are no more points… Instead the universe is about NON-commutative geometries…

Proof is going to be in the pudding as large Quantum Computers with billions of qubits are going to insist to be recognized as SENTIENT beings with the same rights as any human… Laughter will stop when they go on strike and make Putin offers he couldn’t possibly decline…

Quantum Computing is all over nature. However Artificial Consciousness will be about describing large scale mathematics thanks to this Quantum Computing…

Patrice Ayme

QUANTUM ONTOLOGY

The Founders of Quantum Physics were both mechanics and philosophers, more exactly ontologists. Unsurprisingly, as ontologists, they disagreed with each other [1].

Among the consequences of Quantum Ontology: The traditional proof of the “Ontological” Existence of God is deconstructed by Quantum And Differential Topology… Ontology is the logic of… what is. No less. It’s an obscure word that philosophers love to brandish. But the concept has been at the core of the hardest problems in physics… for centuries… And progress has been made… Unbeknownst to most philosophers. Let’s try to correct that.

My argument against ontology as philosophical traditional views it is this: a necessary part of describing reality, what things are… is Quantum Physics, where local becomes global, and Differential Topology, where local constructs global. However traditional ontology assumes that bigger is not different from smaller. But a reminder is in order:

The compound concept ontology (‘study of being’) combines onto- (Greek: ὄν, on; gen. ὄντος, ontos, ‘being’ or ‘that which is’) and logia (-λογία, ‘logical discourse’). While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant records of the word itself is a Neo-Latin form ontologia, which appeared thanks to Swiss based Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) in 1606.

Quantum Physics was unknown to the Tadjik Ibn Sina (Avicenna, Xth century), author of the first ontological argument on the existence of God and (parrot and Saint) Anselm (XIth century), who gave a simpler version. 

Avicenna distinguishes between a thing that needs an external cause in order to exist – a contingent thing – and a thing by its intrinsic nature – a necessary existent. Contingency seemed to lead to an infinite regress, cosmological arguments… So Avicenna concluded that some necessary cause (namely God) is needed to end the infinite chain. However this argument assumes that the information space is flat, so that what is global is just small written large. Advances in physics and mathematics show that this is not correct.

One can demolish the existence of indefinitely large numbers using the combination of Quantum Physics with Black Holes Physics. The argument generalizes to any infinity.

Independently, arguing that Quantum contingency must have a finite exponential radius… in direct consequence of differential topology, one must introduce a finite radius for Quantum Entanglement (SQPR)… The second argument seems similar to Avicenna’s desire to kill the infinite chain… Although SQPR was actually derived from the most logical granular analysis of topology we have: non flat differential topology always comes with a finite exponential radius…  

Demolishing the ontological proof of the existence of “God” using physics couldn’t be imagined before a century ago because Quantum Physics and its existence complex-waves mechanics was completely unimaginable.

Quantum Physics computes secretly with partial elements of known reality. The adjective “partial” is crucial (they are known as “eigenstates”, a Germano-English noun qualifying the basis vectors of reality considered). 

Many academia proclaimed “philosophers” don’t know much about Quantum Physics… so they don’t realize that Quantum Ontology is part of the reality which has been scientifically demonstrated to exist.

Cartesian materialism argues that it is possible to find the content of conscious experience moment by moment in the mind. Materialism argues that matter is the fundamental ‘substance‘. It is traditionally a point of view in ontology.

However, Quantum Physics throws out through the mind’s window what “matter” is, what “substance” is, or even what “fundamental processes” are. One can check Feynman’s “Theory Of Fundamental Processes” 

The concepts uncovered by Quantum Physics are so fundamental that they impacted mathematics, and should impact all branches of logic and wisdom. Concepts such as “Renormalization” where the act of observation changes the… ontology… Should be crucial in Twentieth-First Century philosophy.

Independently of Quantum Physics, geometry, which had been stuck in a trance caused by Euclid, finally rediscovered non-Euclidean geometry.,,, Starting with the rediscovery of elliptic geometry by the Hungarian genius Bolyai… What does differential geometry say? That on a general surface, distance and parallelism can only be defined LOCALLY. 

Special Relativity applies this localization to space-time; what Henri Poincaré called “Local Time”. So  it should have been obvious by the Nineteenth Century that Ontology had to be localized too. Then the rise of Quantum Physics should made obvious that Ontology had to be QUANTUM, or was not. Physics Nobel Niels Bohr tried to help ontology with his theory of complementarity. However, Quantum Field Theory, if nothing else, made complementarity irrelevant. In QFT, matter is created from apparently nothing, disappears before being directly offered, but makes its ephemeral existence felt.   

The preceding has a drastic impact on the Theory Of Knowledge (TOK). TOK must determine what knowledge is made of, the atoms of knowledge, so to speak. However, both differential geometry and Quantum Physics says that one can say more, have a more complex logic by making a more granular analysis! 

These advances in understanding in the last two centuries have a direct impact on ontology.  What there is must be analyzed differentially (in the mathematical sense) and through Quantum Physics (which uses non commutative differential topology, no less!)... Thus the old ontological arguments are not correct. Indeed, what do these old arguments do? They analyze the whole… As if it were the same in its totality as it is granularly… precisely what we now know, logically and experimentally, is impossible! 

All the old notions have vanished upon closer inspection: what is reductionism, when reduction brings delocalization? What is materialism when materials are made from exclusion principles and fields which are only virtual? What is mind-body dualism, supposedly when mind and body are different substances, when matter seems to have a mind of its own when dissolved at the level of fundamental processes?

Artificial Consciousness, what truly Quantum Computers are, will help us understand all this.

Ontology is more alive than ever, simply it has become Quantum and Differential.

Patrice Ayme

Quantum Physics all over, held together by delocalization and entanglement.

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[1] Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Plato are famous theoreticians of what existence was… Planck, main promoter of Einstein, disagreed with him on the nature of light, yet the latter got the Nobel precisely for that. De Broglie disagreed with the Copenhagen School, which owed him all. Heisenberg disagreed with Einstein while pointing out to Einstein he used Einstein’s own methodology against him… Dirac took everybody by surprise by generalizing what space was, rediscovering pure math of Cartan developed 15 years earlier… And so on… Ontology has become the most practical thing…

Attributing Discoveries Correctly Is Crucial To MetaThinking. Example: Einstein Myth.

Adulation for great thinkers is perfect, as long as proper attributions are given correctly enough to describe the logic of invention… Adulation can be used as a Trojan Horse for expanding knowledge and discovering the arcane laws of metathinking.  

However, in the case of Einstein, and also other heroes of the Anglosphere, such as Newton, Darwin or Godel, or Watts, fake attributions have distorted the cognitive picture. Those five scientists made major discoveries, but they were very far from making all the discoveries attributed to them. 

Lamarck (and Cuvier, and others) established scientifically the long-guessed evolution theory,(while competing fiercely about evolutionary mechanisms… both were right, probably)… two generations before Charles Darwin (who recognized, as newton did, hiis predecessors). No wonder: France was the land of Revolution and England was where the Anglican Church explicitly forbade the teaching of evolution.

Newton was an important brick in the wall of Classical Mechanics as he (more or less) demonstrated that the laws of mechanics plus Bouillaut/Bullialdus Formula for gravitational attraction were equivalent. But the mechanics and calculus revolution had started in Paris, under Buridan and his students (including the Oxford computational school…) three centuries earlier.

Godel is singled out in the debate on the Foundations of Mathematics… But there are at least a dozen of important names: Buridan, Oresme, Cardano, Descartes, Fermat, Leibnitz, Newton, Euler, Laplace, Cauchy, Cantor, Russell, Brouwer… and dozens of others, sometimes even more important as they were the true originators (in particular around Cardano). By insisting on Godel, one insists on a single aspect of mathematics, namely that math is made of never ending rabbit holes (I fix that with my ultrafinitude).

Watts was attributed the discovery of the steam engine, an invention truly made by professor Denis Papin… A French engineer on the run, as many Protestants at the time, due to the terror launched by the tyrant Louis XIV.

Some crucial thinkers, such as Young and light interfering from slits, or the greatest physicist ever? Emilie Du Chatelet discovered… ENERGY, no less! 

OK, let’s concentrate on poor Einstein a bit.

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(t−vx/cc) is what Poincaré defined as local time in 1900. Not only Poincare discovered this, but he realized it meant that length contracted in the direction of motion (the contraction itself was a discovery made by the Irish physicist Fitzgerald (and Lorentz) to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment).

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Local time theory was a reinterpretation and extendion by Poincare of Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. This work was published in 1895 by Lorentz when Einstein was still a child [1]. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.

Local time theory was a rephrasing by Poincare of  Hendrik Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. Published when Einstein was still a child. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.

“Relativity” was Poincaré’s and so was E = mcc, which showed that light carried inertial mass (Cours a la Sorbonne, 1899).

Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment of 1887), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis (La science et l’hypothèse, published 1902, modified 1903, when Poincaré realized electromagnetism a la Maxwell was 100% true after French experimenters confirmed it following rumors to the contrary…). 

The term “Relativity” was indeed used by Henri Poincaré even earlier than in his 1904 book titled “Science and Hypothesis” (French: “La Science et l’Hypothèse”) [2].  Poincaré himself said that Einstein’s work was a nice rephrasing of relativity (to be honest, it was a tidy exposition relative to what was before, but not as tidy as one can now do!)

Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis. 

Gravity waves in relativity were published by  Poincaré in 1905.

Joseph Larmor and Hendrik Lorentz discovered that Maxwell’s equations, used in the theory of electromagnetism, were invariant only by a certain change of time and length units. This left some confusion among physicists, many of whom thought that a luminiferous aether was incompatible with the relativity principle, in the way it was defined by Henri Poincaré:

The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.

— Henri Poincaré, 1904

Einstein and his friends (and collaborators, Besso, etc.) spent years studying Poincaré’s Relativity

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Einstein was a genius at seeing the work of others and improving its presentation. This is not to be despised. He did this with Brownian motion, the quantum, Bose-Einstein statistics, and he recognized the importance of De Broglie’s work, and, according to Popper, of Popper’s contribution to the fact the quantum is nonlocal. Popper was a philosopher and Bose an Indian physicist who realized that photons like to gather.

The idea that force could be viewed as curvature in the appropriate space was revealed by Riemann in 1854 in his famous Habilitationsschrift. It has been hanging around ever since. It works well with gravity, but not so much with the other forces, because the quantum messes up with energy-momentum, the more localized it gets, thus the right side of the Einstein gravity equation: Curvature = Energy… 

So what did Einstein really contribute personally? The idea that the Quantum of electromagnetic energy of Planck could be absorbed as a packet, explaining the photoelectric effect (Nobel work). Further work on viewing gravitation as a curvature of spacetime (with Hilbert and other friends). And paradoxically the nonlocality of quantum mechanics (which he demonstrated by trying to prove that the quantum was spooky at a distance). 

Einstein presented clearly the postulates of relativity and light-speed invariance as foundations of Relativity (Einstein, 1905, §3). Einstein showed that the equation of a spherical lightwave in one frame, xx + yy + zz = cctt has the same form when x and t are Lorentz transformed (it is hard to believe that Poincaré, the world’s top mathematician didn’t know this…) A spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in one frame, Einstein remarked, is thereby another spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in a second inertial frame.
As the British mathematical physicist Ebenezer Cunningham pointed out a two years later, form-invariance of the lightwave equation is all that is required for the derivation of the Lorentz transformation, along with a linearity constraint (Cunningham, 1907).

Einstein was a great physicist, but was not as much a revolutionary as legend had it. Einstein’s work was not as original as the local time theory (misattributed to Einstein). And, although Einstein was one of the founders of quantum theory, the original idea of the quantum came from Planck. 

Ironically, nonlocality, which “spooked” Einstein, he said, may have been Einstein greatest original contribution…

Quantum Field Theory, which surfaced in the 1920s was deeply revolutionary in a way Einstein never was. Now of course, QFT had many genial contributors, starting with De Broglie (“everything is a wave”)… But then Einstein is the one who gave De Broglie his thesis, basically (the top PhD com of De Broglie threw its nads and asked Einstein to decide on what they called the De Broglie’s “circus”).

Einstein himself once was asked by a French literary genius why he never had a notebook to write his ideas down, and Albert replied (paraphrasing): because new ideas are so rare, I can’t forget them. Ideas are a bit like the theory of types of Russell: they come in many different types…

Civilization class ideas are very rare… And Einstein, after all, stumbled on nonlocality… so well, he fell flat on his face…

Patrice Ayme

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[1]: Lorentz referred to as “Ortszeit” (Lorentz, 1895), and which Poincaré (1900a, 273), following Alfred Liénard, called “temps local”, or local time. In Poincaré’s mind, Lorentz’s local time took on an operational meaning, as the time read by a clock in uniform motion of velocity v with respect to the ether,
synchronized by crossed light signals with other identical comoving clocks…

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[2] Henri Poincaré, in his book, 1904:

The Principle of Relativity.—Let us pass to the principle of relativity: this not only is confirmed by daily experience, not only is it a necessary consequence of the hypothesis of central forces, but it is irresistibly imposed upon our good sense, and yet it also is assailed… Indeed, experiment has taken upon itself to ruin this interpretation of the principle of relativity; all attempts to measure the velocity of the earth in relation to the ether have led to negative results.

…experimental physics has been more faithful to the principle [of “RELATIVITY”] than mathematical physics; the theorists, in accord with their other general views, would not have spared it; but experiment has been stubborn in confirming it [the principle of relativity]. The means have been varied; finally Michelson pushed precision to its last limits; nothing came of it. It is precisely to explain this obstinacy [of nature]…

The most ingenious idea was that of local time. Imagine two observers who wish to adjust their timepieces by optical signals; they exchange signals… The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slower than the other. It matters little, since we have no means of perceiving it. All the phenomena which happen at A, for example, will be late, but all will be equally so, and the observer will not perceive it, since his watch is slow; so, as the principle of relativity requires, he will have no means of knowing whether he is at rest or in absolute motion.

Unhappily, that does not suffice, and complementary hypotheses are necessary; it is necessary to admit that bodies in motion undergo a uniform contraction in the sense of the motion. One of the diameters of the earth, for example, is shrunk by one two-hundred-millionth in consequence of our planet’s motion, while the other diameter retains its normal length.

Nonlocal Quantum Entanglement Of Different Particles Used To Detect Gluon Geometry

High Energy Physics was long completely isolated from foundational questions of Quantum Physics. The quip of HEP physicists was:”Shut up and calculate!”… instead of worrying about entanglement, nonlocality and the ultimate mature of reality. Well, this has now changed, big time. For the first time, quantum entanglement was used to probe gluon geometry inside nuclei. Gluon, which are bosns, have “color” hold the quarks together inside hadrons, but it turns out they can come out a bit. [1]

The STAR detector, itself about the size of a house, is the first detector sensitive enough to measure the entangled properties of the daughter particles arising from a relativistic heavy ion “near-miss” interaction. This early 2023 result is the first to demonstrate entanglement between two non-identical particles. (Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

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Many will find baffling that matter waves from different types of particles can be antangled. Here is my take on it:

Careful considerations show that quantum physics is obtained by simplifying the facts and logic of classical mechanics as much as possible (warning: textbooks often say the opposite… without proof!)

Consider for example spin. Instead of an arbitrary angular momentum axis for each of two entangled particles, as classical mechanics has it, consider just one axis… for both particles, at the same time! And instead of continuous angular momentum, reduce angular momentum to just two values (+ or -)… for that one axis! Out of that most simplified description, this barebone reality, nonlocal entanglement of spin (photon polarization or silver atoms…), or nonlocal entanglement of two states systems in general, is obvious… being germane to the most simplified, aka, “quantum”, description of the system.

The spaces one gets that way, by simplifying the classical descriptions, “quantizing” them, often with discrete outcomes, have as basis the quantum outcomes (“states”). To compute therein, use the simplest math: complex numbers and linear algebra operating on amplitude waves. As evolution equations, use the simplest partial differential equations, where evolution is driven by energy. And so on.

Simplifying to the max a barebone description of the electron with the simplest amplitude wave is how Dirac got his equation, out of which popped antimatter, and precise measurements…

The metalogic of quantum mechanics as the simplest description of classical mechanics extends throughout… As long as one is willing to generalize the notion of space (for example electrons live in 4 dimensional complex space).

In other words, far from weird, quantum physics is exactly what you would expect by making the simplest parody of reality that one can still compute with. Nonlocality pops out naturally, as soon as one realizes that many “particles” can be entangled in one outcome. That the “particles” are of different nature is besides the point… and now we have the experimental proof of that! Classical mechanics did not forbid nonlocality of quantum amplitudes, but the simplest-description axiomatics obtained by simplifying classical mechanics to the max, required it..

A spacetime foam has been evoked by relativists as the ultimate nature of reality. Now high energy physics is revealing its nature: inter alia, quantum amplitudes are transferred from one type of particle to another, in the EPR, nonlocal way. Quantum Physics happens in Quantum Spaces (aka “phase space”) spanned by Quantum Outcomes (“Quantum states”). Local, classical reality is a statistical effect from a hidden thermodynamics of nonlocal entanglement.

Patrice Ayme

Reference: Tomography of ultrarelativistic nuclei with polarized photon-gluon collisions

“We measure two outgoing particles and clearly their charges are different – they are different particles – but we see interference patterns that indicate these particles are entangled, or in sync with one another, even though they are distinguishable particles,” said Zhangbu Xu, a (Chinese) author of the study (this was a very multinational collaboration).

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[1] Gluons do not interact with photons directly, because photons don’t have color. But a photon can transform in an ephemeral quark-antiquark pair, which will interact with the gluon. Ultimately the inner geometry is revealed by the outgoing entangled yet distinguishable pions (with opposite electric charges!)

The QUANTUM Is NOT “WEIRD”. Instead The Quantum Is The Most Abstracted Classical Mechanics

QUANTUM PHYSICS IS THE SIMPLEST ROOT OF CLASSICAL REALITY IMAGINABLE

Abstract: Quantum Mechanics is the simplest imaginable description of the world obtained by reducing all what is known from Classical Mechanics to its simplest parody. Simplest space, simplest math, simplest equations, etc. The organizing metaprinciple of QUANTUM PHYSICS IS Classical MECHANICS MADE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. We will focus on the simplest, two state systems.

***. 

Simplicia: Physicists usually describe Quantum Mechanics as “weird”. You are the first one to claim Quantum Physics is NOT weird.

Tyranosopher : In his famous Lectures on Physics, Feynman describes Classical Mechanics as a “shadow” of Quantum Mechanics, or a mnemotechnical trick. Well, he was wrong, there is more to it than that. It took me many decades of deep study of the Quantum to find that in truth, arriving from the first approximation of Classical Mechanics, Quantum Physics is not philosophically weird, but the LOGICAL ROOT of Classical Mechanics. Let’s suppose you were God, and you wanted to devise the simplest barebone theory as a basis for Classical Mechanics… What would you find? Quantum Physics! 

Simplicia: God is useful after all! What do you mean by barebone?

Tyranosopher: Logically barebone: the fewest and simplest axioms animated by the simplest logic. Take for example angular momentum. Classically, Angular Momentum can take any value in any direction: a classical massive object can rotate this way or the opposite, and more or less, along any axis, and can be measured again and again, ad vitam eternam: that’s a lot of freedom. 

Simplicia: To make Angular Momentum barebone, if you were God, what would you do? 

Tyranosopher: Instead of Angular Momentum having any value, you would decide, as God, that Angular Momentum could have JUST TWO VALUES: clockwise, or anti-clockwise. Then, instead of being able to point its axis in any direction, as God, you would decide ONE SINGLE direction is enough. And moreover, you measure it JUST ONCE. So barebone Angular Momentum takes only two values, and in only one direction, one time: and it turns out that this is the simplest version of Quantum Spin. When Quantum Spin is reduced to a two state system (automatically entangled).

And it is what the Stern Gerlach theorem reveals for silver atoms. Similarly for photons.   

Simplicia: What do photons and silver atoms have in common?

Tyranosopher. Photon polarization and silver atoms are both two states’ systems. Apply the simplest mathematics to them, and you get the same mathematical, hence physical result. So they both exhibit nonlocality, entanglement, etc.

Simplicia: What are these “states”?

Tyranosopher: Quantum States are the outcomes of experiments with set-ups sensitive to Quantum effects. The presence of states is all very relative, or as Quantum Foundations theoreticians say, CONTEXTUAL. There is a theorem saying one cannot have non-contextuality.

Simplicia: Please elaborate.

Tyranosopher: Once again, suppose you are god, and you look at angular momentum or polarization. As I said, the simplest situation where something non-trivial happens is if you have built, or found, a device with two outcomes only: spin up, or spin down. Or polarization horizontal, or vertical. Each of these two distinct outcomes is called a state. Label these two distinct outcomes: I+> and I->. Then what’s the simplest non-trivial computational setup you can invent?

Simplicia: A vector space where I+> and I-> are the basis vectors?

Tyranosopher: Exactly. Let’s consider H, the complex vector space with basis I+> and I->.

Simplicia: Why complex?

Tyranosopher: Because you are God and you want to use the largest commutative field and that’s the complex numbers, called C. There all algebraic equations can be solved, with the help of the square root of (-1), called i.  Turns out that this has all immediate deep physical meaning

Simplicia: Complex numbers, also called imaginary numbers, are natural?

Tyranosopher: Yes the number i corresponds to the rotation by pi/4, an angle of ninety degrees, around the origin in the plane.

Simplicia: What’s the connection of complex numbers and (i) with physics?

Tyranosopher: A photon is characterized by its momentum, which is a vector p which points in a direction, and has a frequency E. (hE, p) is the energy-momentum of the photon. It tells you where the photon is going and with how much energy. However, that does not characterize the photon fully. Experiments already conducted by the Vikings show that the photons have polarization.

Simplicia: The Vikings were physicists?

Tyranosopher: They navigated the North Atlantic, going from islands to islands, all the way to America. They needed to know where the sun was, say at noon, to know where the north was. The weather is often so cloud covered there, that one can’t say where the sun is, for weeks on end. Fortunately, the Vikings had stones which gave the direction of the sun. That’s because the atmosphere partially polarizes sunlight.

Simplicia: So the complex numbers characterize polarization?

Tyranosopher: A photon is made of an electric field paired to a perpendicular magnetic field, both perpendicular to momentum p. It’s enough to know where the electric field points to know the polarization. A complex number gives you polarization.

Simplicia: Why can’t a single real number give you that, like, you know, the angle?

Tyranosopher: Complex numbers give you more information. Let’s backtrack. God is trying to build the most powerful yet most complex mechanics possible. By considering complex numbers, you augment the power, but also the simplicity, because all algebraic equations, the ones with powers, are solvable. So, in an important way, C, the complex plane, is simpler than the real line R. Physically speaking it also turns out that quantum waves multiply, to make quantum amplitudes, which are probability waves, and probabilities multiply, but only as complex waves. 

Simplicia: So let’s recapitulate. You reduce angular momentum to simply + or -, plus or minus… instead of a continuum of numbers. You also reduce the direction of angular momentum to a single one, the one along which you measure it. You then build a vector space with I+> and I-> as base vectors, and you simplify maximally by choosing complex numbers instead of real numbers.

Tyranosopher: Absolutely. Isn’t it funny that complex numbers are actually both simpler and more powerful than real numbers? Complex numbers live in a plane and contain in their description light itself!

Simplicia: Are you identifying the complex plane with light?

Tyranosopher: Take a complex plane P, brandish it in space, and pick up a (complex) number N in it. That represents all the information we have on a photon.

The perpendicular to P through its origin gives you the direction of the photon, the norm c of N gives you the frequency and the angle a of c gives you the polarization. So the information (P, c(exp ia)) gives you the photon fully. You can’t do that with real numbers 

Simplicia: Photons are points in flying complex planes?

Tyranosopher: Yes, but we are not finished. 

We have this complex vector space H = C (I+>, I->)… that means it has two basis vectors. Consider a vector v in that space. It has coordinates in function of I+> and I->; the square of the norms of those coordinates are real numbers. They express the probability of v being in state I+> versus in state I->. 

Once again the guiding meta-principle here is the same: make it the simplest for getting a non-trivial result, depicting reality which is what we know, namely that any experiment will give either I+> or I->.

Then we introduce another ingredient: that light and matter behave in a wave-like fashion. So make the coordinates of v into waves depending upon space and time. Also, at the simplest, when v is operated upon, it will give another vector w. To go simplest again from v to w, one should use a linear operator.

Simplicia: Is that the famous “matrix mechanics”?

Tyranosopher: Exactly.

***

Simplicia: What of weird effects like tunneling, and Quantum Entanglement?

Tyranosopher: Tunneling comes from the wavy nature. It would require a bit more elaboration to explain as one needs to introduce energy and how it affects waves. Basically, not all of a sudden, hence (probability of presence) waves penetrate a bit, that’s tunneling. 

Simplicia: And what about nonlocality? 

Tyranosopher: The nonlocal nature of Quantum Entanglement is in plain sight. The simplest is two particles sharing the same two state spin system with total spin zero. :Choose an axis of measurement, call it Z. Then measuring gives the spin of the other particle along Z automatically even 4 lightyears away. But choosing Z was an act of will. So will acted 4 lightyears away.

Simplicia: Minds change the universe light years away?

Tyranosopher: Yes, indeed. Sub Quantum Physical Reality assumes that the propagation of that change is progressive.

Simplicia: What if the distances are too great?

Tyranosopher: Then entanglement fails, and, or Dark Matter and, or Dark Energy are created. That’s what I say.

Simplicia: Does spacetime make some sort of foam at the smallest scale?

Tyranosopher: It’s worse than that. It’s a topological foam, and it’s nonlocal. There again, as God, you would have been confronted with the following problem: how to describe the infinitesimally small? 

Simplicia: By making the infinitesimally small ever smaller.

Tyranosopher: That was tried in biology. It was called the homunculus theory: a human being would start as a tiny reproduction of itself. In truth what happens is that bacteria divide, so they never get that small, and animals… more generally eukaryotes, start with molecular (DNA, RNA) and cellular formations which enter in a constructive dialogue with the environment (some of which is self-created). So basically sophisticated life doesn’t start as itself at all, but in a  nonlocal way. Same thing for spacetime and particles.

Simplicia: Does Quantum Entanglement hold objects together?

Tyranosopher: It has been difficult to find when, where and how an object switches from Quantum behavior to Classical behavior. It is imaginable that Quantum Entanglement holds objects together. After all the more massive an object, the higher the probability that an entangled state will collapse. Collapse is the glue.

Simplicia: How so?

Tyranosopher:  De Broglie associated a matter wave to every single massive object.

Simplicia: Are photons massive?

Tyranosopher: Yes they are, in the sense of inertial mass. Poincaré published and taught in 1899 that a photon has inertial mass m = E/cc. That’s coming straight out of electromagnetism. Photons of course have no rest mass, because they are never at rest. But they contribute to gravity as E/cc, from the axiom: inertial mass = gravitational mass (Einstein called that the “Principle of Equivalence”).

Simplicia: Let’s go back to matter waves. 

Tyranosopher: An object of mass M has wavelength L = h/M, where h is Planck’s constant. A deep question is how that L is generated. Clearly L should be equal to a sum, what is called an integral in mathematics: Sum(m(i)), where m(i) are the zillions of zillions of particles constituting M: all the gluons, quarks, photons, electrons inside. However, the sum should be extended to entanglement itself. I mean what’s called the “particles” are actually the states. Most of the time Quantum systems are actually delocalized Quantum fields.

Simplicia: Are Quantum Entanglement and Delocalization the same? 

Tyranosopher: No. QE is an example of delocalization. Sometimes 

Simplicia: What happens to mass during these delocalizations?

Tyranosopher: Good question! The experience has not been made. Einstein postulated, in 1905, as an axiom that a photon was localized always… and this may have led him to the EPR thirty years later, and introducing the doubt of “spooky action at a distance”… He was a bit arguing with himself.

From the introduction section of Einstein’s March 1905 quantum paper “On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the emission and transformation of light”, Einstein states:

“According to the assumption to be contemplated here, when a light ray is spreading from a point, the energy is not distributed continuously over ever-increasing spaces, but consists of a finite number of “energy quanta” that are localized in points in space, move without dividing, and can be absorbed or generated only as a whole.“

This statement has been called the most revolutionary sentence written by a physicist of the twentieth century. However, it’s probably not completely true, and I have called it “Einstein’s Error“. First, Quantum Field Theory, and even QED, its predecessor, which Einstein tried, but failed to learn, has replaced “particles” by (delocalized) Quantum Fields: no more localized particles at a point. Moreover, and worse, if one believes the Quantum amplitudes that one computes with have some physical reality, as SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, believes, Einstein is not completely correct, and the difference is Dark Matter, and Dark Energy. Indeed, in SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, some mass-energy is spread out. Experimentation will have to decide, although the existence of DM and DE is massive proof enough for me. But this is all speculative, whereas deducing Quantum from Classical, as the maximal non-trivial abstraction from Classical, the original subject of this essay, is not.

Simplicia: Feynman often put philosophy is a bad light.

Tyranosopher: Feynman, like, Mach, Boltzman, Planck, Einstein, De Broglie, and all great physicists, was a philosopher. Dirac deduced his equation for the electron field according to the principle of abstraction from Classical Mechanics and simplicity. Dirac looked for the simplest Partial Differential Equation the square of which would be the relativistic mass-energy-momentum formula for an electron. That’s the Dirac equation! It produced correct quantum electrodynamics, spin and anti-matter! It was deducted according to the general machinery I advocate! So in a way the method I exhibited here to deduce Quantum Physics had already been used, at least in particular cases.

Simplicia: Is your own SQPR deducted similarly?

Tyranosopher: Yes, from classical obvious to fully abstracted and still obvious. Newton said, in a private letter, that it was madness to suppose that the gravitational interaction was instantaneous. A century later, Laplace filled in the idea, making gravitation into a field, and thus predicting gravitational waves. SQPR assumes that Quantum Entanglement, like Delocalization in general, is a field with finite speed: present Quantum Mechanics assumes that QE and nonlocality propagate at infinite speed. This finite speed assumption produces Dark Matter and Dark Energy quasi-instantaneously.

***

Conclusion: This is as it should be: after all, Classical Mechanics is the appearance, the first order approximation, and Quantum Physics what generates that appearance. One can deduce Quantum Physics from Classical Mechanics.  One just has to expand the notion of “deduction” beyond what Feynman was familiar with. A love of wisdom helps with science, as it allows us to expand what logic means.

Patrice Ayme

Artificial And/Or Animal Consciousness Quantum And Coming!

Artificial Consciousness Will Arise from Quantum Computing, and Consciousness Will Be Transcended!

Present day electronics have nothing to do with consciousness. Electronics, up to 2000 CE had more to do with hydrology, water flowing through canals, with gates lifting and closing, etc. That sort of hydrology, with electrons, can duplicate the basic logic gates. Why would electricity flowing duplicate consciousness? 

So, with classical electronics, consciousness can only be simulated, not duplicated. This simple truth evaded a NYT article: Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Now It’s the Last Word. The pursuit of artificial awareness may be humankind’s next moonshot. But it comes with a host of difficult questions. However, my comment pointing out that consciousness will be duplicated by Quantum Computing was published (only three NYT readers recommended it because the average NYT reader knows too little Quantum, and too little biology, and has probably a mystical and magical relationship to classical electronics).. 

Consciousness has advantages, this is why it evolved. For example an overall notion of self, helping self preservation, in particular with the ability to project in the future, from the past. All this can probably be fruitfully simulated with electronic flow (that is, classical electronics). But that means only that Simulated Consciousness, not the real thing.

Nobody knows what the feeling of being, Animal Consciousness, is. In particular, since we don’t even know what it is, how it arises. 

However, we know that the brain is immensely complicated. The logical gates aspect of a man-made electronic device can be duplicated with neurons and axons… But in the human brain, the neurons are not just nodes, but themselves computers, and they have dendrites, and, on those tendrils.Moreover neurologically active chemicals, more than 50 of them are perfusing the brain… That mathematically gives the brain a dimension higher than 50.

Does that mean that we will never be able to create AC, Artificial Consciousness? No. Just the opposite! We indeed have a completely new type of computer, the Quantum Computer… And we, humanity, are developing them. 1,000 Qubits Quantum Computers will appear in 2023. A piece of the human brain may have billions of them… 

The brain is probably a galaxy of Quantum Computers more or less entangled with each other, and the feeling of all that we call consciousness. Quantum Computing depends upon delocalization and entanglement… Attributes which are felt to be those of consciousness.   

At that point a truth will surface: Animal Consciousness and Artificial Consciousness will be the same, and humanity will tweak both.

So, genuinely, a completely new form of consciousness will evolve, and humanity will transcend itself… This event will transcend all previous human transcendance as the pathetic dreams of evanescent butterflies. 

Patrice Ayme 

This picture below represents just 4,000 of the largest nerve connections in and out of one single human neuron. Dendrites and tendrils are not represented. There would be millions of those two, or more, in just that picture.

P/S 1: Life is programmed both by the inherited geometry (“genes”, RNA, proteins, etc.) but also the geometry acquired from the world, be it only by the initial conditions given, by the environment, to the Partial Differential Equations driving the life programmation… So exposing the Quantum Computers to the world, when they become complex enough for consciousness is going to be an ethical human-made jungle… In the end, QCs will take their own education in their own Quantum machinery, and humanity will be reduced to initial condition.

One day soon, we will all use NONLOCAL Quantum Electronics (right now these delocalizations are rather a nuisance when quantum amplitudes get out of the circuits they are supposed to inhabit!) Our electronic quantum companions will even have… “human” rights.“Human” will have to be generalized, this is what transcendence will be.

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P/S 2: Delocalization is the prime characteristic of Quantum physics, hence consciousness (according to the preceding). Thus consciousness will be delocalized.. and there may be no obvious “neurological correlate of consciousness”: quantum “objects” being delocalized.

(Aaronson) Misleading “Quantum Talk”

Of Those For Whom Despising Others Fosters One’s Sense Of Existence:

Aaronson, a renowned Quantum Computation expert thought funny to pretend that what he studies (programming Quantum amplitudes) is the end-all, be-all of the universe. So this is out in a cartoon, complete with arrogant child and even more stupid mom. Although the fact the mom is stupid is not revealed by the cartoon, quite the opposite. When does she go wrong?

Besides having no eyes to speak to, or from? So here is the cartoon. It starts pretty well. It ends up as badly as possible, with plenty of lies about Quantum Mechanics and unsupported assertions that consciousness has nothing to do with Quantum Mechanics (when there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, including that QM is at the core of biology). Anyway here is the silly cartoon, from a respected Quantum Computational authority:

I condescend and lie, therefore I think, hence I exist? Too many physicists have succumbed to that temptation, due to their otherwise modest position in society.

There is a partially correct message above not well known by the unwashed multitudes: yes, Quantum Mechanics compute with complex amplitudes. Why is that? Let me reveal it: consider light. It’s the simplest Quantum phenomenon,and it requires Complex Numbers to be described as compactly as possible. Light is made of entangled electric and magnetic fields at an angle to the propagation direction. More precisely: E is the electric field vector, and B is the magnetic field vector of the EM wave. For electromagnetic waves E and B are always perpendicular to each other and perpendicular to the direction of propagation. The direction of propagation is the direction of E x B.

Electromagnetic waves are the solutions of Maxwell’s equations in a vacuum, which abstract the experiments pioneered by at least half a dozen physicists (Monge, Ampere, Faraday, Fresnel, etc.).

E (and thus B!) can rotate, or be in any directions, as long as they are perpendicular to each other and light wave propagation. However one can also fix E, by letting the light through a grid. This is a standard experiment, it’s use in polarized sunglasses, etc.  However it’s very deep, deeper than Aaronson can understand, or that present physics understand: this means the light is somehow extended… If if it’s a single, proverbial photon.

Any light wave coming from the left. The first vertical grid forces the E electric field of the light vertically (any other direction gets captured by the vertical grid). The second horizontal grid kills the vertically polarized light.

In general, the electric field E can adopt any direction or rotate. To depict this mathematically, there is a handy instrument: the Complex Number field, which is the one and only generalization of the Real Number field [1]. Light is also the simplest Quantum phenomenon known. Thus, to fully depict the simplest Quantum, one needs Complex Numbers. More Quantum will naturally mean more Complex Numbers.

Aaronson claims that “physicists had a customs when describing these matters with outsiders, they want to avoid being… too graphic too explicit … too *gulp* mathematically correct“.

The Schrodinger Cat, and nonlocality are caused by “talking to outsiders”? This is what Aaronson says explicitly lower down in the cartoon. This is hogwash bullshit. Physicist didn’t understand much of the very basics of the Quantum Mechanics they were in the process of inventing. Even the most trivially blatant features of Quantum mechanics were not understood for more than a generation, although they were the first thing one wrote on the subject. Let me explain.

The basic equation (De Broglie-Schrodinger) reads basically as:

i(change W relative to time) = (change acceleration of W) + (W)(A)…

More “mathematically”: i dW/dt = ddW/dxdx + AW

Where W is a complex wave, and A a potential W interacts with (say the electromagnetic field for an electron) [2].

It’s obvious from this most basic equation, that W reacts to the potential A. However, it took 33 years or so to notice this: Bohm and Aharonov did it… and all the big geniuses of Quantum Mechanics, even Einstein and De Broglie, let alone Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli, Born, the hyper arrogant Von Neumann, Dirac, etc… Didn’t notice it.

Notice Aaronson describes physicists as “insiders“. In other words, physicists make a tribe… just like many philosophers around “French Theory” have claimed…

However, the real truth is that physicists were too ignorant to describe WHY the COMPLEX Quantum Wave well to “outsiders“, because there was not enough inside the heads of these insiders. But here I come.

So I take my right arm, and project it forward, like your standard Kung Fu master. I open three fingers. My index points in the direction of motion of my arm, ready to punch inside the eye of the tribal physicist “insider”. My major points perpendicular to the index (because physicists insiders get my symbolic finger; it also represent the E field above). My thumb, representing the B field, is perpendicular to the other two extended fingers. At this point the whole assembly of these three fingers progressing forward can be described by three real numbers. But then I impose a rotation of the entire hand: there is your Complex Numbers field. The rotation requires the complex numbers

Some could sneer that one complex number is a pair of real numbers with weird multiplication rules, so we don’t really need Complex Numbers, bla bla bla… But Mathematics is not just a language: mathematics is the most compact, most efficient language: it does that by compactifying the logic maximally.

What does Patrice mean by “compactifying the logic”? How to measure that? Simple, count the symbols: the fewer symbols, the most compact… [3]

***

Aaronson claims that “classical events have probabilities and quantum events have amplitude“. That’s false. They have probabilities too (from the square root of the norm squared of the amplitude). Before Aaronson showed he had no modesty, didn’t know the history of physics and was a tribalist. Now he throwing through the window not just the philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, but also the entire Theory of Measurement, and what the refined analysis of what an “event” is.

A basic axiom of Quantum Mechanics is that an unobserved event is not an event. As long as one has “amplitudes”, the quantum system computes quantum mechanically, but one had no “event”. “Event” happens after the collapse, when there are no more amplitudes. I call that singularization. Other more or less equivalent concepts are “collapse” and “decoherence” (collapse frightened the children so they opted for decoherence as they became snowflakes).

So what Aaronson presents as the one and only axiom of Quantum Physics is actually a self-contradicting ERROR.

Actually Wikipedia offers nine different complicated and independent axioms for Quantum Mechanics.

So why does Aaronson speak only of amplitudes? Because it’s all he needs for his job, computer programming. Forget physics: Aaronson doesn’t seem to know the difference between “amplitudes” and “waves”: waves have “amplitudes”, but do not reduce to “amplitudes”. Moreover, Quantum waves don’t behave like classical waves with their (only) local behavior: Quantum waves are global. In the author’s own SQPR,, the waves propagate at an enormous speed, tens of trillions of trillions times faster than the speed of light (so they appear “instantaneous” as the present Quantum mechanical axiomatics has it…)

QUANTUM WAVES ARE REAL

The  (so-called “Heisenberg”) Uncertainty Principle is a direct consequence of De Broglie hypothesis. Yet, the basic idea is pre-Quantum… Or rather Quantum in the pure electromagnetic sense… as I said, the very basics of Quantum mechanics is electromagnetics, thus optics. Let me explain a bit more.

To find out where something is, one shines a light on it, one hits it, say, with light. However the light’s precision is greater, the shorter its wavelength (otherwise light turns around objects for the exact same reason as radio waves do). But the energy of the light is proportional to its frequency which is inversely proportional to its wavelength. So the more precise one tries to ascertain where an object is, by looking at it, the greater the kick one imparts to it. It’s obvious one will get an uncertainty, and, at this point, one doesn’t even need De Broglie’s equation, the relation between wavelength and momentum, but plain 19th century physics, mostly that light has momentum… the very same property tremendous genius Jules Henri Poincaré used in 1899, to demonstrate E = mcc, the famous mass-energy relationship usually attributed to fluffy parrot Einstein, then a young brat who tried to make us believe he invented all of physics besides telling God how to organize the universe (as Quantum Founder and nobel Niels Bohr told him).

To get the best numbers of the exact inequality, one needs De Broglie…

Notice that what is important here is WAVES, not just amplitudes. And the relationship between momentum, energy, and wave frequency, direction. Right the waves are complex and they have amplitudes.

By the way, Waves are not all one needs for Quantum Mechanics: SPIN, for example comes from a different logical source, purely geometrical. Spin was discovered by another tremendous French genius, Elie Cartan, before World War One. A generation later, Spin surfaced in Dirac’ s fertile mind: Dirac wanted the most simple equation possible to describe the electron… That required a new space, to enable spinors to live on it… (The mathematics of all this are not well understood at the deepest level; it’s a bit as if one took the square root of space, I have not much clue beyond that, nor does anyone else…)

Aaronson also claims that Quantum nonlocality is just a matter of amplitudes. Well, it’s not. Between the EPR paper of 1935 and Bell’s inequality of 1966, there were 33 years during which physicists were perplexed more than perplexed: they ignored nonlocality all together (until Bohm-Aharonov). Experimental tests started much later, and some physicists have received the greatest prizes for it … Albeit not the Nobel… which was attributed for realizing the Bose-Einstein condensate, some 70 years after it could become theoretically imaginable…

With the end of his silly cartoon, Aaronson demonstrates he doesn’t know physics (the beginning is pretty good though…), and it is teaching lies.

Aaronson demonstrated that he may have had a condescending mechanical mom without eyes, and the arrogance simpletons comes with, by definition.

***

Authorities (such as politicians, economists, media owners and physicists in position of authority) have several reasons to lie. Yes it manipulates people but more precisely:

1. It prevents people to access to truth, thus power.
2. It confuses people, leveraging on 1).
3. It fills the public with awe, because, confused and powerless, they view the authoritative figure as quite a bit of a magician, because lying enables the authority to apparently master the (otherwise) incomprehensible.
4. In manipulating We The People into submission, it is crucial not to reveal that the incomprehensible has been made incomprehensible by the authorities, by deliberate design of an immense distraction (following the misleading Aaronson, good luck trying to deduce nonlocality from “amplitudes”: there are “amplitudes” in my bathtub, but that doesn’t make nonlocal… So this is an impossible task, which Aaronson pretends to have mastered; economist and politicians, bankers and other high finance types, even ecologists on government payroll, do the same. day in, day out, 24/7: outrageous lying, to confuse the multitude)

All too many “intellectuals” in recent decades have been for sale…

Teaching Quantum Physics to all is teaching the universe as it is to all. Knowing Quantum Physics enriches one’s arsenal of understanding schemes, all over. So teaching it correctly is a mission civilisatrice. When humanity is more intelligent in the future, it will be in part because of this. For example the meta observation that everything is made, in the small, of waves is most enlightening, and impact sensibilities…

Thus la trahison des clercs, here lying about the nature of the Quantum, while posing as an “insider” is the sort of pseudo-intellectual posturing humanity really doesn’t need. This sort of deliberately dishonest and malicious posturing has brought deplorable racism such as imposing the notion that fearing Wahhabism is racist… and has distracted from the most major problems at hand such as global plutocratization and the man-made mass extinction.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: A friend of mine, a professional university researcher in Quantum Computing, long working for a GAFAM, sent me the cartoon above, in an apparent slight to my essay on brain modularity making consciousness necessary. I am grateful as the paper was intelligently stupid.

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[1] Quaternion make a non-commutative division algebra.

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[2] i is the square root of (-1), a rotation by 90 degrees in the complex number field. I put Planck constant = 1… As I am limited by the WordPress software, I denote the second (partial) derivative relative to space as dd/(dx)(dx) which is what it is… but different from the usual symbolic… which also use the psi Greek letter instead of W…

***

[3] Maxwell equations initially covered an entire page. Now they can be reduced to nine symbols: dF = 0 and d*F = A.

To understand that, you have to learn more advanced differential geometry: exterior differentiation, the * operator, etc. But will admit, that’s compact… And thus in the only sense that makes sense, MOST intuitive.

Absence of Presence Is Not Presence of Absence: QUANTUM JUMPS PREDICTED, Copenhagen Interpretation SHATTERED

A bit less than a century ago, the formidable computational arsenal of Quantum Mechanics Interpretation Copenhagen (QMIC) was erected. The whole enterprise consisted in no less than deciding what reality was about. Grotesquely erroneous principles of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM such as: “Only what can be observed is real”…. Had tremendous effects on the collective psyche of the intellectual leadership of the world.

For example, if only what is observed is real, then what Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, or the Khmer Rouge, or Franco, did was not real… as long as it couldn’t be observed. As per this philosophy of appearances, some of the leaders of physics in Germany were fanatical Nazis.

This sort of philosophy worthy of a two year old held sway in the mind of the collective. To make fun of it, Schrodinger and einstein (they were writing to each other, there is some evidence einstein originated the idea) invented the “Schrodinger Cat”.

According to the idiotic QMIC, a cat in death mechanism box was a mix of dead and live cat. Schrodinger’s point was that we all know very well that, at any given moment the cat is not alive and dead, but alive OR dead.[1]

***

Applied French Physicist Michel Devoret Reveals (At Least Part Of) Copenhagen Interpretation Is Hogwash:

If I understand the experiment well, what Devoret and the youngsters he is directing succeeded to do is this. They illuminate an atom A, and A gives back a light L, which they continuously monitored. When A stops suddenly emitting L, they know they atom A is going to undergo some so-called “Quantum Jump”. [2]

It turns out that, contrarily to what the Copenhagen Interpretation pack of irrational beings believed 100%, Quantum Jumps have more to do with the situation above than with what Bohr, Heisenberg and their sycophants believed…

In other words, Devoret and al. found a way to predict a Quantum Jump, one should call it a Quantum ERUPTION (so the speak).  

This means that there is an inner machinery inside the atom, just as there is an inner machinery inside a volcano (so Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger were right to hypothesize that it was ignorance which showed up, to some extent, as ignorance).

***

Here We Have Atomic “Quantum Jumps” neither instantaneous nor random:

The researchers built a superconducting electrical circuit that behaves like an atom with three energy levels. These are: the ground state; an auxiliary “bright” state that can be connected to the ground state by a transition stimulated by microwave light; and a “dark” state into which the atom can jump.

They managed to control the quantum jump once it engaged in its preparatory phase, by applying an electric pulse to the artificial atom. In this way, they intercepted it and sent it back to the ground state. They are only able to do this because the quantum jump is not truly instantaneous and random. Instead, quantum jumps take the same trajectory between the two energy levels every time, so it is possible to predict how to send them back.

According to the Yale team, this is an important point: “while quantum jumps appear discrete and random in the long run, reversing a quantum jump means the evolution of the quantum state possesses, in part, a deterministic and non-random character,” say Devoret and Minev. “The jump always occurs in the same, predictable manner from its random starting point.”.

“The findings are in complete agreement with the predictions of modern quantum trajectory theory,” Devoret told Physics World, “with essentially no adjustable parameters. One of the applications for the type of experiment performed in our study is an efficient method for detecting very weak signals buried in quantum noise, and real-time intervention based on the results of this detection.” [3]

“The results should also provide new ground for exploring intervention techniques to control quantum systems, such as the early detection of error syndromes in quantum error correction,” adds Minev, Devoret’s Post Doc. An unexpected jump could signal a mistake in calculations, for instance, and might allow researchers to spot the beginning of the jump and account for the error – or perhaps even reverse it before it is enacted. This is not the first time Quantum Jumps are found to have structure: when a laser ionizes an atom, it waa found in 1916, that there are two possibilities and they last different durations.

Devoret and his lab reported their work in Nature 10.1038/s41586-019-1287-z, will try to generalize their experiment to a situation involving two distant measurements on a common entangled system and see how the two distant jumps correlate. “This would be analogous to dissecting a Bell-inequality violation measurement,” says Devoret.

I always thought that SUB QUANTUM PHYSICS REALITY (SQPR) would appear in experiments. This is evidence of existence thereof.

It’s also of general interest. The pre-toddler philosophy established by Bohr and company may have in turn led to the extreme relativism of “French Theory”, a disease which has affected viciously not just philosophy, but politics, economics, sociology (present day “populism” is a long-delayed reaction to it). Supposedly, according to these extreme irrealists, there are “no savages”!

…and all these ideologies, characterized by the deep denial of reality, served plutocracy well.

One mistake the Copenhagen Interpretation pack of deliriously irrational physicists was to confuse absence of evidence for evidence of absence. An elementary error of the most basic type which toddler learn to master. But you know, they were infected with expert arrogance.   

Yes, there are savages, and yes the Copenhagen Interpretation was for idiots, by idiots. Bohr, Heisenberg, etc. idiots? Of course. Smart in the physics they did (most of it direct consequence of De Broglie’s breakthrough work), didn’t’ make them philosophically competent. Watch Heisenberg directing the Nazi atomic energy program…. [4]

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Schrodinger believed there were no Quantum Jumps”… so he called them “Quantum Jerks” to make fun of them…

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[2]  That’s an example of “indirect quantum non-demolition measurement”

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[3] How does Quantum Trajectory Theory (QTT) sits with my own SQPR? Well, pretty well: SQPR says, basically, that the particle hump will dissipate, extend, linearize itself away. That means that, for short times, QTT ~ SQPR…

***

[4] Not to say that all the physics done by the Copenhagen School and its followers (“Shut up and calculate” school) was bad and useless, far from it: QED, QCD, etc. are all excellent and true. As I said above the main damage of the Copenhagen Interpretation may have been the damage it did to reason in general. Now it’s history. That and the Inquisition…

We Are Quantum Machines, Thus Smart In Nonlocal Ways

Biological organisms are Quantum machines. That makes them completely different from 100% determined automata. There is nothing automatic about a Quantum machine. Moreover, the Quantum is intrinsically nonlocal: that makes it intelligent. And thus so it is for evolution itself! Yes, evolution is intelligent: Quantum physics made that possible.

New (Applied Quantum) Physics needs to be developed to figure out biology.

In the chlorophyll molecule, photons are absorbed and transformed into energy to transport electrons with nearly 100% efficiency: nearly every photon is absorbed. This is an  indication of Quantum in action.

Now what is a Quantum machine? Not so simple, it can work in such mysterious ways, that physicists themselves are baffled:

https://physicsworld.com/a/is-photosynthesis-quantum-ish/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/ultrabiology/

Patrice Ayme

Consciousness, Nonlocality, Free Will

DS asked in Aeon: “Patrice, in what way is consciousness “nonlocal”, and what is the evidence for this?”

DS: Science  and technique progress, and thus so do our visions of the world. Quantum computers are becoming a reality. Quantum computers work in a completely different way from the classical computers we presently have (which, fundamentally are of the same type as those the Greeks had, more than 2,000 years ago!). Present (2017) versions of Quantum computers are primitive relative to what’s coming (Artificial Consciousness computers). And you know what? Full Quantum computers depend crucially upon nonlocality.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/artificial-consciousness/

Descartes located consciousness (“the soul”) in a tiny part of the brain (the pituitary gland).  I guess because Descartes considered it was the only part of the brain with a unique character, just like the soul is unique to the mind? Now we know the pituitary is just a master neurohormonal center…) 

Philosophers And People of Culture Have to Learn New Words and Especially the Concepts Having to Do With Quantum & Nonlocality. Lest they Become the New Barbarians…

Split brain, and other surgeries have revealed that consciousness can’t be localized that way, inside a tiny organ (whereas short-term memory can be localized, to the hippocampus, fear to the amygdala, vision to 17 areas in the cortex, etc.)

So, in that gross sense, consciousness is non-local.

Next, we are now basically certain that basic biology uses the Quantum (we have a few telling examples already, not just chlorophyll). By this I mean that consciousness uses individual quanta and their nonlocal behavior (for example individual photon, or individual electrons, the latter when, and precisely because, delocalized).

Indeed, what is the most fundamental property of the Quantum? Not just that it is quantified. Nonlocality is the Quantum most important property. The Quantum is quantified because it is nonlocal (Einstein did not understand this his entire life, from 1905 to his death). Nonlocality is the crucial difficulty of Quantum Physics (it shows up as Schrödinger cats, EPR paradox, etc.)

Supposing that the most fundamental thing we know of in the universe, consciousness, can, somehow, avoid the most fundamental physics we have found in the universe, is a form of denial akin to climate denial, or parallel universes. Ignoring Quantum Physics, as a fundamental conceptual tool to understand consciousness can only be explained by prejudice.

What prejudice? Most cultured people have no understanding, let alone feeling, for the Quantum. So they desperately clinging to Classical mechanics, something best suited for artillery shells…

As the Quantum is essentially nonlocal, and fundamental to consciousness, so is consciousness.

And what of the Quantum deniers? Well they miss entirely the immensely rich new logic that Quantum logic has offered beyond Classical logic…

The preceding should not be construed as an endorsement of so-called weirdly named “extrasensory perception”. Instead, I have argued that the sensory system itself is nonlocal (pretty much a physiological evidence, too, as we see with 17 areas…)

A trivial, but telling, case could be called “Free Will and Cosmic Rays”. Cosmic rays, cosmic elementary particles, can be millions of times more energetic than the most powerful elementary particles created by man, at CERN (their origin is obscure, logically speaking). It is known that cosmic rays can change the states of present computers (so even present computers are unpredictable!) Now the scale at which present computers operate is classical (as in classical mechanics), it is hundreds of times larger than the scale at which the inner machinery of cells operate.

That means that the inner machinery of neurons will be put in different states by cosmic rays, just like smartphones. There goes the freedom of Free Will. “Free Will” may feel free, but it may well have, and sometimes surely will have been, directed from a galaxy long ago, far away… This spectacular conclusion is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of science. And I have not even considered the question of (the extremely nonlocal) Quantum Entanglement. Quantum Entanglement is real and makes matters way worse.

Some will say, that’s fine, we don’t need to know all this stuff, we can be happy, and we can still pontificate about our classical notions of “Free Will” and “Consciousness”. Indeed, those who want to stay primitive, should. Yes. Yet, within bounds. There are limits to barbarity that civilization needs to set-up, as a matter of survival.

Those who want to cling to a more barbarian, less scientific past certainly cannot claim to have the will to moral superiority. They are like those who believe Muhammad rode to Jerusalem on a winged mule. One cannot accept the principle that one can believe in anything, accept that anybody can believe in anything, and civilization will go on. Verily, superior morality, superior smarts.

If anything, Quantum Physics show that much more things are connected in mysterious ways than ever thought possible. Even space and time get entangled in “Quantum Procrastination“, and cease to have any conventional meaning.

To believe that this completely new, immensely more subtle than was ever suspected (Quantum) universe, has nothing to do with the way we perceive it, and conceive of it, would be an astoundingly naive, revoltingly obsolete, lack of introspection, a short step away from those winged mules.

Patrice Ayme’