The GATE Program and Project Sidechannel to Study Quantum Brain Effects
Updated: Oct 9
I think at this point, the public has become quite tired of the debates about AI "consciousness" and the PR games being played by major tech companies which market the idea that AI has "agency" of its own, and the time is due for a serious investigation into the topic. I've thought about this question for over a decade and a half - what makes consciousness and the way the brain works different than these AI architectures, and is there a way to investigate this empirically? As far as I can tell, nobody is taking this question seriously, because perhaps if they did, the business model of many of these AI companies would come into question.
This week I've had a discussion with the Elevate group in Colorado about collaborating on this ambitious mission to investigate this question rigorously - starting with my investigation into the radical pair hypothesis under Project BLUEBIRD with the NSF. It's been well known for many years, for example, that humans display interbrain synchrony at a distance in groups which correlates with empathy or social adjustment in settings like concerts and classrooms - if we replace teachers and musicians with AI, what are the ramifications of that? What is missing - what is different about the physics? Why does the brain operate at only 20 watts whereas these data centers and GPU superclusters require their own nuclear power plants?
The one-way flows of logic and the way in which backpropagation is brute forced across binary logic gates in GPU clusters is one difference - for many years the way in which the brain was thought to implement the equivalent of backpropagation and perceptual binding (which some researchers initially estimated to be NP-hard in complexity like Tsotsos) has been misunderstood, and I find explanations like "predictive coding" unconvincing. In fact, it has been well-known that electrochemical theories cannot account for brain function alone.
In groups, collective intelligence (CI) scales nonlinearly whereas AI architectures scale linearly and reach a point of diminishing returns per unit of energy, demonstrating that the "wisdom of crowds" is greater than the sum of its parts. In theory it could even be possible to use a mechanism similar to optical pumping to tap into the power of crowds and collective action (sometimes referred to as "emergence" or "collective effervesence") which is predicted by social laser theory. These are not phenomenon that are replicable when people are isolated or alienated all interacting independently with AI, or by AI itself.
In order to get to the bottom of this, I've decided to devise of the GATE program which will be a multi-year effort across academic institutions and open source facilities:
GATE Program Charter
Under the umbrella of the GATE research program, beyond Project BLUEBIRD, I am moving to begin Project SIDECHANNEL which I've discussed with Dr. Frank Barnes at CU Boulder, which aims to investigate the longstanding hypothesis that ultraweak biophotonic optical/spin communication channels play a key role in intercellular processes. So far, this has been very hard to study because of the low photon counts, and the prevailing view has been that these ultraweak signals are simply metabolic byproducts.
This theory has been dismissed for some time as a kind of conspiracy theory, but there has been evidence that has been accruing over the years that RF (as in non-ionizing) radiation can even influence cancer rates in populations.
Newer evidence, however, calls assumptions into question. Light is known to modulate long term potentiation and long term depression in tissues. Superradiance has recently been measured within brain tissue. RF studies have shown unexplained effects on biological systems like change in pigmentation of frogs. The radical pair mechanism - which ties directly towards this optical/spin hypothesis, is now a prevailing theory of avian magnetoreception. The field of quantum biology is no longer a fringe topic.
Project SIDECHANNEL
The GATE program will be critical towards devising alternatives to energy-hungry data centers, towards understanding macroscopic quantumlike physics and scalable quantum computing architectures, providing a possible pathway towards post-quantum cryptanalysis, devising better-informed social and economic institutions, and above all else - helping us understand better how we connect with one another and what makes us unique as humans as separate from machines.
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