MACHINES THAT THINK? NUTS!

STUART A. KAUFFMAN

Pioneer of biocomplexity research; affiliate, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle; author, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

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The advent of quantum biology, light-harvesting molecules, bird navigation, perhaps smell, suggests that sticking to classical physics in biology may turn out to be simply stubborn. Now Turing Machines are discrete state (0,1), discrete time (T, T+1) subsets of classical physics. We all know they, like Shannon information, are merely syntactic. Wonderful mathematical results such as Gregory Chaitin’s omega—the probability that a program will halt, which is totally non-computable and nonalgorithmic—tell us that the human mind, as Roger Penrose also argued, cannot be merely algorithmic.

Mathematics is creative. So is the human mind. We understand metaphors (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace . . .”), but metaphors aren’t even true or false. All art is metaphoric; language started gestural or metaphoric; we live by these, not merely by true/false propositions and the syllogisms they enable. No prestated set of propositions can exhaust the meanings of a metaphor, and if mathematics requires propositions, no mathematics can prove that no prestated set of propositions can exhaust the meanings of a metaphor. Thus the human mind, in Charles Sanders Peirce’s “abduction,” not induction or deduction, is wildly creative in un-prestatable ways.

The causal closure of classical physics precludes more than an epiphenomenal mind that cannot “act” on the world, be it a Turing Machine or billiard balls, or classical physics’ neurons. The current state of the brain suffices to determine the next state of the brain (or computer), so there’s nothing for mind to do and no way for mind to do it! We’ve been frozen in this stalemate since Newton defeated Descartes’s Res cogitans.

Ontologically, free choice requires that the present could have been different—a counterfactual claim impossible in classical physics but easy if quantum measurement is real and indeterminate. The electron could have been measured to be spin-up or spin-down, so the present could have been different.

A quantum mind, however, seems to obviate responsible free will. False, for given n entangled particles, the measurement of each alters the probabilities, by the Born rule, of the outcomes of the next measurements. In one extreme, these may vary from 100 percent spin-up on the first to 100 percent spin-down on the second, and so on, for n measurements, entirely nonrandom and free if measurement is ontologically indeterminate. If probabilities of n entangled particles vary between less than 100 percent and 0 percent, we get choice, and an argument suggests we can get responsible choice in the Strong Free Will Theorem of John H. Conway and Simon Kochen.

We’ll never get to the subjective pole from third-person descriptions. But a single rod can absorb a single photon, so it’s conceivable to test whether or not human consciousness can be sufficient for quantum measurement. If we were so persuaded, and if the classical world is at base quantum, then the easy hypothesis is that quantum variables consciously measure and choose, as Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, in “Orch-OR” theory, and others suggest. We may live in a wildly participatory universe. Consciousness and will may be part of its furniture, and Turing Machines cannot, as subsets of classical physics and merely syntactic, make choices where the present could have been different.