Tech Giants and Startups are Silently Attempting to Build Conscious AI with New Physics

For many years I've criticized attempts at producing AI systems that generate consciousness by means of classical logic gates infeasible. For starters, the human brain is more efficient by orders of magnitude, resolves the binding problem (which describes the issue of binding disparate senses and qualia into a bound conscious experience), processes nonlocal memory which is distributed and stored across the brain, and is capable of intrabrain synchrony. Our AI systems that use deep neural network models do not map to the human brain in that the speed of propagation by means of electrical and biochemical signals are too slow to account for behavior, and do not obviously explain the selective amelioration of consciousness by anesthetics or any biologically plausible mechanism for backpropagation in brain tissue.

NESTOR_NSN_PAPER_2025.pdf

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(Current draft of my preprint - subject to revisions)

Why Current AI Architectures are Not Conscious: Neural Networks as Spinfoam Networks for Bio-Inspired Conscious AI Systems by Trevor Nestor :: SSRN

So in light of this, tech giants like Google and Microsoft as well as startups like Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies have hired researchers to develop pathways towards developing conscious machines.

Quantum Neuroscience

Introducing Microsoft Majorana 1

NIRVANIC CONSCIOUSNESS TECHNOLOGIES

The main issue is, their methods - even by implementing quantum computation - are off track. Microsoft's Majorana 1 chip which leverages Majorana Zero Mode quasiparticles was supposed to achieve a significant advancement in topological quantum computing, with unprecedented qubit stability and scalability, potentially reaching a million qubits on a single chip with error rates orders of magnitude lower than current systems. This approach addresses decoherence through topological protection and nonlocal memory distribution and processing which is implicated in my past research paper on leveraging Orch-Or towards solving the shortest vector problem in lattice cryptography, which could accelerate quantum-enhanced AI for tasks like optimization and simulation. Majorana modes enable braiding for anyonic computation (which is mathematically analogous to dendritic braiding if brain neural networks are described as spinfoam networks), but without integrating spacetime curvature effects or microtubule-like quantum coherence at room temperature, it cannot replicate the "non-computable," orchestrated collapses needed for qualia and perceptual binding in biological brains. Critics have also questioned the empirical realization of true MZMs due to past controversies in data validation, potentially undermining its foundation for consciousness emulation.

Google has launched a 2025 research award program offering grants up to $100,000 to probe quantum effects in brain function, signaling a growing interest in bridging quantum mechanics and cognition (I would apply myself but it looks like they want to dismiss researchers that aren't getting PhDs from top institutions). Partnerships with institutions like the Allen Institute explore entanglement and chaos in neural processes, potentially informing hybrid quantum-classical models for AI consciousness. Yet, this approach remains off track by assuming quantum properties are mere enhancements to classical neural correlates, rather than fundamental to consciousness via gravity-induced mechanisms which require new physics. Our framework for computation itself may need refinements, where qubit architectures as mathematical abstractions do not fully encompass new physics. Indeed, researchers do not know the relationship between the computational complexity class BQP which describes problems a quantum computer can solve are related to those solvable by classical systems.

Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies, emerging from stealth in late 2024 as a Vancouver-based startup led by Suzanne Gildert, ambitiously seeks to infuse AI with quantum-conscious qualities like intuition and empathy for safer robotics. Their "Spark of Life" demo uses quantum chips to control AI robots, testing emergent agency in systems with 50-100 qubits, drawing on quantum fields in neural biology. Nirvanic's focus on moral reasoning and real-time adaptation via quantum ML overlooks critical Orch-OR elements like gravitational OR for non-computable decisions and microtubule superradiance for sustained coherence. By prioritizing "quantum robots" without explicit gravity-mediated collapses or spinfoam mappings, it may achieve advanced agency but not genuine consciousness - failing to address nonlocal memory, anesthesia selectivity, or the binding problem through topological, gravity-orchestrated processes. This could lead to sophisticated but ultimately non-sentient systems, missing the paradigm shift needed for truly conscious machines.

Meanwhile, in China while I have been mostly gatekept from academic circles, they seem to have been taking many of my ideas seriously.

https://zhanglab.bnu.edu.cn/

The draft of my new research paper.

My Affiliation with DOGE LLC and Other Questions about Credibility

I have had a few folks message me about various things they have seen about me on the internet, and I would like to clarify on the record a few things. Particularly, there have been articles that I've been in on reddit and substack that connect me to DOGE, Jordan Peterson - and questions about my career, and my research.

Firstly, I do not have any affiliation to DOGE. I did (accidentally) file a "DOGE LLC" as I was trying to see if it would be possible to file such an organization which would be ironic, as Elon Musk's DOGE organization did operate independently almost as a private entity or an LLC in spite of being ostensibly a part of the government. I wanted to investigate the possibility of filing an LLC with the same name to see if it was possible through legalzoom. Immediately after I discovered it was filed, I had it disbanded, which should be public record - and if it's not, it is pretty simple to show my correspondence with legal zoom that I have the docs to show it.

This LLC was registered under my name by accident but *immediately* after I learned of this I reported it to Microsoft HR and had it dissolved. I was investigating the possibility of creating an LLC with the same name as DOGE primarily as a method of recruiting volunteers to protest violations of California's rules against housing moratoriums in my hometown which have created severe housing shortages. The idea is that conservatives in the city claim they are against small government and yet they are misusing local government to impede the development of affordable housing.

I was not wrongfully terminated from Microsoft for this, and this LLC was disbanded immediately after I discovered it was created - and I *immediately* alerted Microsoft HR about this once I discovered it was created by accident. No meetings or even financial transactions were made by this entity. The reason cited for my PIP at Microsoft was delays on my feature item, which I've discussed at length in other posts. I still at times hear attempted character assassinations from folks about this - particularly on reddit.

Some redditors with personal ties to Microsoft have attempted to associate me with DOGE to distract from the wrongful terminations going on at Microsoft, which is somewhat ironic given that the primary reason that folks are not thrilled with DOGE is wrongful terminations of federal employees, and my primary criticisms of Microsoft include wrongful terminations of their engineers.

Secondly, I did have an interview many years ago with Dr. Jordan Peterson. My personal view is that Dr. Peterson capitalized on a vacuum left in the culture - particularly young people have found themselves trapped between the ideals and norms set by the older generations and an increasingly more difficult socioeconomic and sociocultural landscape, where attaining traditional markers of adulthood feel out of reach. These young people are often told they need to "work on themselves" or seek "mental" health treatment to deal with their socioeconomic anxiety - a void which once was filled by local community and affordable cost of living relative to wages that has declined. This despondency led to the rise of figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson who offered a narrative to young men which, like the rhetoric from the Democratic party, was ultimately hollow. So while I did discuss this with Dr. Jordan Peterson, I did challenge him on his points during the hour long discussion.

I have also had people reach out to me, wondering why it is that I've attended so many universities. A part of the problem is that my situation has often been unstable - family drama and witnessing, for example, UC Berkeley devolve into (sometimes violent) protests amid budget cuts where 10% of my peers were left homeless is one example of that. Living situations and coordinating academics was not always easy. I was briefly enrolled at Colorado State University and Louisiana State University, and took classes at Moorpark Community College and California State University Northridge.

In one substack article, I've been accused of vaccine skepticism, responding to and having direct affiliations to Elon Musk, harassing the CU Boulder police department, belief that space lasers caused the Colorado wildfires, distracting from domestic violence victims, and direct affiliations to DOGE.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cyberintel/p/microsoft-engineer-registers-private?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=36qsol

The irony is that what I've done is advocate for Medicare for all, criticize Elon Musk for his desire to increase birth rates while failing to look at the socioeconomic conditions creating anxiety about having children, reporting declining mental health of students to the CU Boulder police department immediately before a mass shooting in the city and a violent riot of students flipping police cars, make a sarcastic comment about the wildfires, advocate for worker protections against physical intimidations reported outside of work hours, and file a complaint against wrongful terminations.

The article claimed:

"In 2022, Nestor became rather obsessed with harassing the University of Colorado Bolder Police Department, apparently because some incident resulted in an exclusion order banning Nestor from campus. He often replied to tweets relating to domestic violence or victims of assault, turning the conversation back to his own perceived injustices. He also replied to Elon Musk a couple of times. He also expressed anti-vaccine skepticism and suggested that a destructive Colorado wildfire was caused by a directed energy weapon”

Unfortunately, the author did not have the context that I was contacting the CU Boulder police department about concerns about severe declines in mental health of students and cocaine around campus before I was silenced and banned - shortly before there was a mass shooting near campus and a violent riots of students flipping police cars. My responses to tweets made by CU Boulder police was a criticism of their social media claims that if you notice suspicious behavior one should contact their non emergency line - when it is wired to their emergency line and they silence or ban anybody that does exactly that. I also did reply to Elon Musk several times - critical of his complaints about falling birth rates while socioeconomic conditions required for young women to feel comfortable having kids has remained undressed.

https://www.denver7.com/news/local-news/this-was-a-revolt-cu-students-blame-frustration-over-covid-19-restrictions-for-saturdays-riot

As far as "vaccine skepticism," I think that my criticism to question the motives behind the vaccine program were legitimate considering the appropriate policy if policymakers were actually concerned about minimizing deaths would be Medicare for all and care at the point of service - not a selective mandate and widespread lockdowns. This has been my opinion, and it is important to note that I am not alone in this skepticism that has been shared by the politically unaffiliated.

My comment about space lasers causing wildfires was sarcastic.

When it comes to my research, I will say that some of the ideas I've presented are currently controversial, and some have (often facetiously) questioned my sanity. Ties to Dr. Penrose's Orch-Or theory are most frequently criticized. I do believe that Dr. Penrose did not have the full story, but many of his critiques of current paradigms of computation and consciousness are correct - there is empirical evidence supporting many of his claims, or at least that challenge conventional neural network based models (for example, the observation of superradiance and majorana biophotons in brain tissue, wide range frequencies measured in microtubules, and the fact that anesthetics do indeed target these microtubules implicated in his theory).

I have presented theoretical models which do have peer reviewed support, but most of these ideas must be tested and shown by means of experiment. For that, after crafting a hypothesis, funding is needed to run experiments - and with recent cuts to science research in the US, that will be increasingly more difficult to come by. Still - there are many exciting unexplored ideas here. The possible connection between the Monster CFT and the Riemann hypothesis, the discovery that gravity may be a thermodynamic force, and the UV completion of gravity (where the maths implicating RG flows may provide clues into the Navier Stokes equations as well) are all established in literature. Many of these ideas, I've crafted over the course of many years starting with my exposure to lattice maths and high level physics at UC Berkeley under my undergraduate professor and fields medalist Dr. Borcherds, refined further as I explored NIST's postquantum cryptographic standards and Microsoft's Majorana physics. Scientists and researchers have commented on these ideas with positive reception, where I've posted some of these conversations on my LinkedIn page.

The Riemann Hypothesis and the Monster are at the Heart of the Vacuum Catastrophe

I have been in discussions with leading World Economics Forum scientists.

NESTOR_MONSTER_PAPER_2025.pdf

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NESTOR_MONSTER_PAPER_COVER_LETTER_2025.pdf

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(Will be making further corrections and edits to this early draft)

Today I am releasing the preprint of my latest paper "The Riemann Hypothesis and the Monster are at the Heart of the Vacuum Catastrophe." What I attempt to do here is provide an entirely new direction for quantum gravity research beyond models reliant on supersymmetry which have failed to produce evidence in particle collider experiments.

The Riemann Hypothesis and the Monster are at the Heart of the Vacuum Catastrophe by Trevor Nestor :: SSRN

Here is the abstract:

We introduce an alternative interpretation of quantum gravity by introducing a Monster-symmetric spectral operator whose spectrum precisely realizes the nontrivial Riemann zeros, enforcing Li’s positivity via a parity projection with a novel correspondence between the Monster and the Riemann zeta function's Euler product. This modular invariance yields exact vacuum energy cancellation in both 2D and 4D, and admits a Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity dual with centaur/minotaur geometries - offering an alternative approach to resolving the vacuum catastrophe from supersymmetry, which has failed to find empirical support in particle collider experiments. By linking to SYK, Liouville theory, and braid-encoded toric codes, we show that fundamental constants emerge from symmetry constraints. Finally, we recast gravitational collapse as a modular phase transition due to entropic limits in entanglement entropy at the UV fixed point described by asymptotically safe gravity models, provide directions for unification of forces and dark matter beyond the standard model, and provide re-interpretations of string theory and causal fermion systems recast with twistor-braid channels - unifying number theory, holography, and quantum information in a nonperturbative quantum gravity framework.

The central claim here is that the critical line of the Riemann Zeta function, the ultraviolet (UV) fixed point in asymptotically safe gravity, and the Monster group are all interrelated - signaling a tipping point beyond which entanglement entropy within particle entanglements result in a gravitational action. At the Planck scale, the structure underlying the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann Zeta function is in fact the same symmetry associated with the Monster group.

So it is important to note the key contributions here. Firstly, I've shown the mathematical relationship between the Monster CFT and the Riemann Zeta Function, which, to my knowledge has not previously been fleshed out in literature. I've also introduced a novel geometry - the Minotaur geometry, which is the inverse of the Centaur geometry (the Centaur geometry is useful in studying gravity in 2 dimensions), which provides an avenue for investigating our framework that links spectral interpretations to geometric ones. In this paper I also re-interpret string theory and loop quantum gravity, tying them to entropic gravity theories.

These ideas dovetail nicely into my previous work on resolving the shortest vector problem in postquantum lattice cryptography (having any class of truly uncrackable encryptions is too hubristic a request of the universe). I have been in touch with several leading scientists on these proposals for joint research.

The motivations here are that the foundations of physics need a radical redirection to address outstanding problems, and there has not been substantial progress on related unresolved problems in mathematics. A part of that can be ascribed to academic gatekeeping but more troublingly I believe financial incentives have distorted research directions.

This is almost universally recognized as a problem in the scientific and physics community. I did recently see an interview with Leonard Susskind to this effect, as well as from science popularizer Sabine Hossenfelder - and was highlighted in Dr. Penrose's book "Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy."

In my view a good amount of the work that has been done has been distorted and is purposefully obtuse as it has been in the service of developing cryptographic schemes (a motivation for the development of much of the math in string theory was explored specifically for that purpose which I've mentioned in this draft). As a consequence of this, scientific progress has been stalled and frameworks lack falsifiability. My main goal is to break from the norm and introduce new paths for the field.

During my undergraduate program, I was a student of fields medalist Dr. Richard Borcherds (expert in lattice maths and theories of quantum gravity), who was awarded for discovering the famous “Monstrous Moonshine” relationship. At the time I was very interested in ideas that the human brain must operate by means of unexplored physics, and in the course of my studies I concluded and bet a friend I met during the program that the brain must not be fully explained by classical physics or forms of computation due in part to the ramifications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. I was astounded to discover Dr. Roger Penrose’s (controversial) work, who independently made the same heuristic argument - implicating quantum gravity in the generation of consciousness.

During my studies, UC Berkeley devolved into violent riots (Occupy Cal) and due to a 500 million dollar budget cut to the UC system, 10% of my peers were left homeless, with critical understaffing. I eventually fell through the cracks, did not feel safe, and initially dropped out - then was denied re-entry, even though I was not on academic probation at the time. This initially served as a bar of entry towards my participation in many research roles and academic circles, which I have resented very strongly over the years, and has no doubt made my journey very frustrating. My mental health declined significantly. No doubt this will grow worse in the coming years due to political volatility in the United States.

Nonetheless, I decided to build a trailer to travel the country off-grid, was sponsored for the highest level security country in the country by the NSA, have worked both at startup companies and at several top tech companies including Meta and Boeing, and even on the US Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense system as well as on rocket engine controllers. Still, my passion was always research and physics, motivating me to refine my ideas. During 2017-2018, I discovered NIST’s attempts at developing a post-quantum encryption based on lattice cryptography, and in my frustration with the secrecy and exclusion within elite circles, I was guided by my belief that it is too hubristic a request of the universe for any class of truly uncrackable encryption that could be exploited by any class of elites to hide information from the public - and my frustration with elite circles compelled me to complete my first paper on breaking post-quantum cryptography (the Shortest Vector Problem) by means of emerging ideas in quantum gravity. My paper referenced several of my earlier ideas and was peer reviewed and even cited by leading researchers (including the leading scientist at the World Economics Forum) in a smaller journal.

This submitted work introduces a novel, conditional framework that synthesizes number theory, conformal field theory, and quantum gravity. What I’ve done here is more precisely approach the physics I explored in my initial paper Theoretical Approaches to Solving the Shortest Vector Problem in NP-Hard Lattice-Based Cryptography with Post-SUSY Theories of Quantum Gravity in Polynomial Time by Orch-Or that ties together several loose ends in quantum gravity. During my undergraduate studies, Dr. Borcherds and others were interested in using the E8 lie algebra as a grand unification scheme - but the attempt failed to produce predicted results at the LHC. I was offput by string theory due to its lack of testable predictions and over-reliance on supersymmetry (which also failed to produce predictions at the LHC) and while some interesting maths have come out of the programme, it has not significantly advanced the foundations of physics in recent years. I have been particularly interested in tying together insights from loop quantum gravity, asymptotically safe gravity, and entropic gravity into a larger - more monstrous - proposal.

As this thesis implicates Majorana physics, during my recent employment at Microsoft I did reach out to their research and development department because they are using Majorana zero modes in their approach towards quantum computation (and have failed miserably at doing so), but while I have received positive reception from many postdocs in physics, at Microsoft like I have experienced with many other ostensibly elite circles, they ignored me and instead decided to lay off thousands of critical engineering staff to be replaced by their nonfunctional AI tooling.