The problem is, is that on the most fundamental level there is no cause and effect. In fact, cause and effect seem not to exist in most quantum systems. Our minds, unfortunately, are not random. For example, if you think of anything, there is at no point in which you can conceive of anything truly random. All of your thoughts and ideas are constructs of things you have been introduced to. Perhaps you think of some new ideas, yet this is really only a reshuffling and cross application of old ideas. In many ways, you are merely a reactor to your environment. Perhaps it is random in the way you reshuffle and cross apply the ideas, but still on a basic level your mind is applying the rules of cause and effect. This is why quantum effects continue to seem so strange to us, because our conscious experience is so completely different from the quantum reality.

I do think, however, that quantum computing is the only way in which any system may allow for the amount of complexity necessary to create the complex system of AI. This does not mean that the system has “free will” or that it is any more “free” than a person is. All this means is that there is enough computing power and enough memory space that the machine can reach the processing and capacity that humans have. If only we could manufacture biological machines…

The problem with current software AI programs is that none of their cognitive states are directly derived from quantum events, so no matter how convincingly it may act like a conscious entity, it will always be a ‘zombie’ in the philosophical sense because all of its cognitive events are deterministic in nature and so can only have one possible outcomes. An act of free will requires that the final arbiter of how the act occurs be the actor itself, so that there is always at least some chance of at least 2 discrete outcomes possible for an act all the way up to the time the act actually occurs.

True acts of free will cannot exist in a purely predetermined environment because there is never more than a single effect for a given cause and so the subject can never ‘choose’ one outcome rather than another because, whether or not the subject is aware of it, there’s only a single possible outcome

LifeOS: in search of the system that executes DNA

The way we perceive reality is much like a computer simulation.

All that our eyes believe to be true, they learned. The learning process is built on the interaction between our mind and the environment thru the the senses. Our senses reach a sort of consensus by comparring touch with sight and hearing and thinking about it. Yet there is never any real contact with the environment except thru the senses. Therefore, the mind creates an illusion that we believe to be reality, but it can never be the real thing.

cheers,
jim