> Regardless of our Turing or Super-Turing status; is a Turing machine sufficient for consciousness to arise?
In addition to the detectability problem, I wrote in the adjacent comment, this question can be further refined.
A Turing machine is an abstract concept. Do we need to take into account material/organizational properties of its physical realization? Do we need to take into account computational complexity properties of its physical realization?
Quantum mechanics without Penrose's Orch OR is Turing computable, but its runtime on classical hardware is exponential in, roughly, the number of interacting particles. So, theoretically, we can simulate all there is to simulate about a given person.
But to get the initial state of the simulation we need to either measure the person's quantum state (thus losing some information) or teleport his/her quantum state into a quantum computer (the no-cloning theorem doesn't allow to copy it). The quantum computer in this case is a physical realization of an abstract Turing machine, but we can't know its initial state.
The quantum computer will simulate everything there are to simulate, but the interaction of a physical human with the initial state of the Universe via photons of the cosmic microwave background. Which may deprive the simulated one of "free will" (see "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" by Scott Aaronson). Or maybe we can simulate those photons too, I'm not sure about it.
Does all of it have anything to do with consciousness? Yeah, those are interesting questions.
Yeah I think that's a good point, and my issue with Penrose. His point sounds more profound but it is like dropping everything in complexity analysis (Big O). An approximation only goes so far, and sometimes the specifics matter. More importantly, when they matter, they usually matter A LOT. I think people underestimate how many things we approximate, and approximate with only first or second order terms. But last I checked, most things are not simple harmonic oscillators (springs)[0]
[0] See the Taylor Series expansion. This is an only physics joke
In addition to the detectability problem, I wrote in the adjacent comment, this question can be further refined.
A Turing machine is an abstract concept. Do we need to take into account material/organizational properties of its physical realization? Do we need to take into account computational complexity properties of its physical realization?
Quantum mechanics without Penrose's Orch OR is Turing computable, but its runtime on classical hardware is exponential in, roughly, the number of interacting particles. So, theoretically, we can simulate all there is to simulate about a given person.
But to get the initial state of the simulation we need to either measure the person's quantum state (thus losing some information) or teleport his/her quantum state into a quantum computer (the no-cloning theorem doesn't allow to copy it). The quantum computer in this case is a physical realization of an abstract Turing machine, but we can't know its initial state.
The quantum computer will simulate everything there are to simulate, but the interaction of a physical human with the initial state of the Universe via photons of the cosmic microwave background. Which may deprive the simulated one of "free will" (see "The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine" by Scott Aaronson). Or maybe we can simulate those photons too, I'm not sure about it.
Does all of it have anything to do with consciousness? Yeah, those are interesting questions.