Quantum brains

I'm going to talk about quantum brains. But before I do, I have to take a bit of a philosophical detour. So bear with me and we'll get onto the meaty quantum bits (qubits?) soon.Disclaimer 1: This is a very general introduction article – it is probably not suitable for QIP scientists who may attempt to dispose of me (probably with giant lasers) for lack of scientific rigor.... *ducks to avoid flying qubits*IntroWe need to think about what we are trying to build. Say we want to build a brain (in silicon, for arguments sake). Well, for a start that's not really enough information to get on with the task. What we actually want is a mind in a box. We want it to think, and do human-like things. So we run into a problem here because the mind is a pretty vague and fuzzy concept. So for the purpose of this argument, I'm going to use Penrose's definition of 4 viewpoints of how the mind might be connected to the physical brain, which is given in his book Shadows of the Mind, but I will summarise here for those who are not familiar with the definitions:There are basically 4 different ways you can interpret the way the mind is related to the actual signals buzzing around and the physics going on in that wet, squishy 3lb lump that sits in your skull. Here they are:(A) – The 'mind' just comes about through electro-chemical signals in the brain. You could fully reproduce a 'mind' in any substrate using standard computer providing you could encode and simulate these signals accurately enough. It would think and be conscious and self-aware in exactly the same way as a human being.(B) – The workings of the brain can be simulated in exactly the same way as in (A) but it would never be conscious or have self-awareness, it would just be a bunch of signals that 'seemed' to be behaving like a human from the outside. It would effectively be a zombie, there would be no 'mind' arising from it at all.(C) - There's no way you can simulate a mind with a standard computer because there's some science going on that creates the 'mind' that we don't yet know about (but we might discover it in the future).(D) – There's no way you can ever simulate a mind because our minds exist outside the realm of physical science. Period. Even that science which we are yet to discover. (This is a somewhat mystical / spiritual / religious argument). Interestingly Penrose goes for C – mainly because he believes that there are quantum processes occurring in the brain, and the quantum mechanics going on in there cannot be simulated using a conventional computer. So it's not that we don't understand the science yet, but we can't build computers that are able to take that science into account (i.e. model the quantum mechanics correctly). Or can we... don't we have, like quantum computers now?Now back to the quantum braaains... What do I think is the most exciting prospect for quantum computers? Forget factoring, what about building quantum brains? Note: I'm using the phrase 'brain' here in a rather unscientific sense to mean a large collection of interconnected agents – essentially a large neural network.I am a supporter of (A) - which is a variant of the Strong AI hypothesis. That is, a human-level intelligence could be fully simulated on an alternate substrate using a standard, 'classical' computer and actually BE conscious and self-aware. However, with this point of view, one might wonder what a similar level of integration would be capable of if it could use some aspects of quantum mechanics as an integral part of its operation.My viewpoint conveniently makes my argument for the further development of QCs pretty watertight. If quantum computers ARE required to simulate the human brain, (which I do not believe to be the case), then we should probably develop them anyway. If they are NOT required, but are believed (at least by some) to be fundamentally more efficient for certain computational tasks, then wouldn't it be a cool experiment to make a brain which could harness that extra computational power? I mean... it would be a fundamentally different type of intelligence. Doesn't that sound cool? Doesn't that just make you smile and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end? Or maybe that's just me...Attentive readers may note that I have subtley disregarded option D here. That's because D stands for Deepak Chopra, who is much better at explaining how QM ties in with that viewpoint than I am.Quantum Neural Networks have already been explored theoretically. (See here, here, here for just a taste). I think very small QNNs could be realised experimentally at present. If they can be shown to work in principle, they can be scaled up and investigated further.Adiabatic Quantum Systems based on the Ising model are perfect for this task. Their structure and behaviour resembles a spin-glass, which is mathematically equivalent to certain types of neural network. A spin glass can store patterns in 'stable' configurations of spins, just as the brain stores memories as patterns in configurations of the synaptic strengths between neurons (a simplistic model but it's kinda the main point).Of course there's always the problem of decoherence – and it most likely will be a problem in large scale quantum systems. There's probably some puddles of coherence around the place, maybe they overlap, maybe they don't. No-one really knows. Could those puddles of local coherence provide any extra computational power? How connected (or perhaps disconnected) would they have to be? Can we design scalable solid state systems with larger puddles?Again, that sounds to me like something we should investigate.In conclusionWe should be able to simulate anything that the brain is doing (even if we need quantum computers). If the brain IS using large scale coherence in its operation, it shows us that it IS possible to build large scale coherent quantum systems (if nature can do it then so can we). This would be useful for all sorts of things, like simulating protein folding. In fact this would arguable be the best outcome. I kinda hope Roger Penrose is right...However, I don't believe he is right, as I currently believe the level of large-scale quantum coherent phenomena in the brain is very close to ZERO. But that means we can only IMPROVE the level by which quantum mechanics could be leveraged in brain-like systems, by building huge and densely connected NNs using quantum devices such as superconducting qubits. We can explore completely new territory in the building of intelligent systems...Thus we have a win-win situation :)In other words, QCs are cool and we should build them.And we need more money *ahem*Note: I argue this and a bunch of other stuff in my QC & AI lecture. Here is the link to my post about thatDisclaimer 2: This topic has also probably been debated to death and back on various places around the internet but it's always good to exhume it once more for a guest appearance. In fact if I wasn't feeling so lazy (and cold, the heating in here appears to be broken at the moment) I might have bothered to dig up some references. It's also a useful place to send people to if they want to know my point of view on this.EDIT: To perfectly illustrate both my points that a.) there's loads of stuff on the internet + I'm lazy and b.) software systems are surprisingly intelligent already (WordPress helpfully pointed out the link for me) here's some stuff that Geordie wrote about this a while ago:Can an artificial general intelligence arise from a purely classical software system?