Is Consciousness Research the Next Big Quantum Use Case?

I don&#x27;t have anything to say about quantum computing but I did form an opinion about consciousness&#x2F;self-awareness research in AI: we should actively attempt to develop an AI with these characteristics.<p>My logic first assumes that if it could happen it will. Based on that it would be better for it to happen while we&#x27;re trying than it to happen when we&#x27;re not even paying attention. It also means that if the AI exhibits some of the intended behaviours that we will be more skeptical of it being fake, where-as if it arises accidentally it could more easily be viewed as real and emergent. We we have cases of behaviours which appear to be self-directed and counter to our continued existence, we can learn to manage it from small cases to larger ones. This last point assumes that we won&#x27;t have a big-bang step of going from nothing to the full thing to deal with in which case we only accelerated the timeline.

It has always been obvious to me that consciousness is something that sits outside the computational realm because if it wasn’t, you would end up with self-contradictions, much like Gödel&#x27;s incompleteness theorems. Intuitively, this would be related to quantum mechanics, as this is a part of physics which does not seem to be fully computational (ie. have things which we can only describe as random).<p>The problem with using quantum computing to explore this is that quantum computers, as they are now, use quantum phenomena that can be fully modelled computationally.

There are plenty of experiments that show that this is pseudoscience and we don&#x27;t need quantum phenomenon to explain consciousness.<p>Maybe none of those theories explain the hard problem of consciousness, which is why do we feel or sense anything? Why does anything feel anything?<p>Maybe you can get close enough to an explanation (that could satisfy SOME philosophers but maybe not very many) just by coming up with an explanation of how it works. Something like, predictive coding feedback and global circuitry integration, connected to a body with senses.<p>Assuming we eventually can come up with a functional explanation then we may find out that humans are just the starting point for a type of organism that is much larger. Maybe we will have a new metasystem transition in this century. Possibly facilitated by high bandwidth BCI?<p>Or maybe someone will come up with a way to make some portion of the internet with AI servers &quot;wake up&quot; and form a unified consciousness. Still a reasonable chance that happens before GTA 6 comes out.

I am sceptical and think this sounds a lot like bullshit.<p>Quantum entanglement as an abstract theory how the brain works was already discussed in the 1980s. This was always a non experimentally validable theory and therefore not really accepted in psychology.<p>(Elitist reference: I work in QC my partner in conciousness research.)<p>Obvious xkcd style comic reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;comic&#x2F;the-talk-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;comic&#x2F;the-talk-3</a><p>&quot;Quantum computing and conciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent&quot;