Subhuman lemmy posters: “We are spending way too much!!! $0.5m on scientific research!!! Outrageous!”

Me: “Bro we spend billions killing children around the world who tf cares there are other places you should be concerned about budget.”

Subhuman lemmy posters: “Errrm actually stfu stop bringing that up, we want to cut everything but that!”

kys you people are freaks, this place is just as bad as reddit, entirely comprised of genocidal US ultranationalist sociopaths. I need to go to a forum that is not English-speaking.

Interesting you get downvoted for this when I mocked someone for saying the opposite who claimed that $0.5m was some enormous amount of money we shouldn’t be wasting, and I simply pointed out that we waste literally billions around the world on endless wars killing random people for now reason, so it is silly to come after small bean quantum computing if budgeting is your actual concern. People seemed to really hate me for saying that, or maybe it was because they just actually like wasting moneys on bombs to drop on children and so they want to cut everything but that.

that’s only like, as much as a couple dozen of the 45,000+ of bombs we’ve dropped on babies in gaza

So many skibidi vibes here man, it was all vibes rizzing up this place and until I came and unvibed everything. The vibes are so joever vro I was just mogged. 😔

Do you even need quantum mechanics to make that argument, then? You’re basically saying weak emergence is evidence of being in a simulation because you can approximate nature much simpler when “zoomed out.” It seems like even if we did not have quantum mechanics you could still make that argument.

Why would an optimization make things more complicated? The point of optimizations in any simulation is to simplify the complexity of the computation. The entire reason why there is a multi-billionaire industry to research quantum computers is because they are exponentially more difficult to simulate than classical physics, so they are not practical to simulate on a classical computer. Seems weird to me that a simulator would “optimize” things by making them enormously more complex.

I wouldn’t, I’d just live there. Get to know the people and culture, get married, grow to old age and die. Just like almost everyone there, and most people in any country. I’d survive just like I’d survive in any other country: go to work every day to get income needed to eat, repeat the process ad infinitum until my body withers away from old age.

Yeah, the jacket is very different as well if you look at the front chest area. While people do say maybe he just changed his clothes, the problem is if he also changed his backpack, he couldn’t have just put the clothes in the backpack, meaning he would’ve had to have left them somewhere and there would’ve been a trail that probably would’ve been found by now. It doesn’t really add up for them to be the same person.

It’s nice when thing actually go down in price. We need to bring back those days.

We don’t know what it is. We don’t know how it works. That is why

If you cannot tell me what you are even talking about then you cannot say “we don’t know how it works,” because you have not defined what “it” even is. It would be like saying we don’t know how florgleblorp works. All humans possess florgleblorp and we won’t be able to create AGI until we figure out florgleblorp, then I ask wtf is florgleblorp and you tell me “I can’t tell you because we’re still trying to figure out what it is.”

You’re completely correct. But you’ve gone on a very long rant to largely agree with the person you’re arguing against.

If you agree with me why do you disagree with me?

Consciousness is poorly defined and a “buzzword” largely because we don’t have a fucking clue where it comes from, how it operates, and how it grows.

You cannot say we do not know where it comes from if “it” does not refer to anything because you have not defined it! There is no “it” here, “it” is a placeholder for something you have not actually defined and has no meaning. You cannot say we don’t know how “it” operates or how “it” grows when “it” doesn’t refer to anything.

When or if we ever define that properly

No, that is your first step, you have to define it properly to make any claims about it, or else all your claims are meaningless. You are arguing about the nature of florgleblorp but then cannot tell me what florgleblorp is, so it is meaningless.

This is why “consciousness” is interchangeable with vague words like “soul.” They cannot be concretely defined in a way where we can actually look at what they are, so they’re largely irrelevant. When we talk about more concrete things like intelligence, problem-solving capabilities, self-reflection, etc, we can at least come to some loose agreement of what that looks like and can begin to have a conversation of what tests might actually look like and how we might quantify it, and it is these concrete things which have thus been the basis of study and research and we’ve been gradually increasing our understanding of intelligent systems as shown with the explosion of AI, albeit it still has miles to go.

However, when we talk about “consciousness,” it is just meaningless and plays no role in any of the progress actually being made, because nobody can actually give even the loosest iota of a hint of what it might possibly look like. It’s not defined, so it’s not meaningful. You have to at least specify what you are even talking about for us to even begin to study it. We don’t have to know the entire inner workings of a frog to be able to begin a study on frogs, but we damn well need to be able to identify something as a frog prior to studying it, or else we would have no idea that the thing we are studying is actually a frog.

You cannot study anything without being able to identify it, which requires defining it at least concretely enough that we can agree if it is there or not, and that the thing we are studying is actually the thing we aim to study. We should I believe your florgleblorp, sorry, I mean “consciousness” you speak of, even exists if you cannot even tell me how to identify it? It would be like if someone insisted there is a florgleblorp hiding in my room. Well, I cannot distinguish between a room with or without a florgleblorp, so by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence. Similarly, if you cannot tell me how to distinguish between something that possesses this “consciousness” and something that does not, how to actually identify it in reality, then by Occam’s razor I opt to disbelieve in its existence.

It is entirely backwards and spiritualist thinking that is popularized by all the mystics to insist that we need to study something they cannot even specify what it is first in order to figure out what it is later. That is the complete reversal of how anything works and is routinely used by charlatans to justify pseudoscientific “research.” You have to specify what it is being talked about first.

we need to figure out what consciousness is

Nah, “consciousness” is just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. The path to AGI has no relevance to it at all. Even if we develop a machine just as intelligent as human beings, maybe even moreso, that can solve any arbitrary problem just as efficiently, mystics will still be arguing over whether or not it has “consciousness.”

Edit: You can downvote if you want, but I notice none of you have any actual response to it, because you ultimately know it is correct. Keep downvoting, but not a single one of you will actually reply and tell us me how we could concretely distinguish between something that is “conscious” and something that isn’t.

Even if we construct a robot that fully can replicate all behaviors of a human, you will still be there debating over whether or not is “conscious” because you have not actually given it a concrete meaning so that we can identify if something actually has it or not. It’s just a placeholder for vague mysticism, like “spirit” or “soul.”

I recall a talk from Daniel Dennett where he discussed an old popular movement called the “vitalists.” The vitalists used “life” in a very vague meaningless way as well, they would insist that even if understand how living things work mechanically and could reproduce it, it would still not be considered “alive” because we don’t understand the “vital spark” that actually makes it “alive.” It would just be an imitation of a living thing without the vital spark.

The vitalists refused to ever concretely define what the vital spark even was, it was just a placeholder for something vague and mysterious. As we understood more about how life works, vitalists where taken less and less serious, until eventually becoming largely fringe. People who talk about “consciousness” are also going to become fringe as we continue to understand neuroscience and intelligence, if scientific progress continues, that is. Although this will be a very long-term process, maybe taking centuries.

When I was younger I would play X-Wing Alliance on my PC with an actual like pilot joystick controller with all the lights turned off. That game is a Star Wars game where you fly space ships and fight other space ships, but it’s all in first-person, so you see out of the pilot cockpit.

The space mechanics was definitely one of the great things about that game, in my opinion. Most space games when you land you just press a button and it plays an animation. Having to land manually with a landing camera is very satisfying. When you crash and parts of your ship break and you have to float outside to fix it, that was also very fun. I feel like a lot of space games are a bit lazy about the actual space mechanics, this game did it very well.

I don’t really understand why reddit pretty much succeeded in killing off all other forums. People love the format of reddit so much that even after killing off all the supporting apps it hasn’t really done much at all to cause people to go back to traditional forums. I’ve personally always found reddit far worse than a traditional forum because of the like system. This place has it as well, although I’m not sure how it compares to reddit’s in terms of algorithm.

Traditional forums did not have it. You just saw posts sequentially. There was also no character limit. This meant on traditional forums everyone’s position was not only presented equally but you could also go into as much detail as you wanted. If the topic is complex you could write basically an essay if you wanted, which in reddit you have to break up into multiple posts. Reddit’s like system also tends to facilitate echo chambers because popular opinions show up first while unpopular opinions show up last and can even be hidden, and it encourages people to misrepresent you and not act in good faith because they’re looking for an “own” to farm likes rather than a real discussion.

Sure, there might be sometimes when a person’s opinion is so out there and disingenuous you don’t even want to take it seriously and have a real discussion, but I’ve never once in my entire history of using reddit had a decent conversation with someone. Even things as benign as like /r/nintendo, I say I enjoyed a game and I got a bunch of people shitting on me calling me a bad person for liking a particular game. No matter how benign and non-serious the topic is, people always find ways to turn it into an attack to “own” you to farm upvotes.

Complex numbers are just a way of representing an additional degree of freedom in an equation. You have to represent complex numbers not on a number line but on the complex plane, so each complex number is associated with two numbers. That means if you create a function that requires two inputs and two outputs, you could “compress” that function into a single input and output by using complex numbers.

Complex numbers are used all throughout classical mechanics. Waves are two-dimensional objects because they both have an amplitude and a wavelength. Classical wave dynamics thus very often use complex numbers because you can capture the properties of waves more concisely. An example of this is the Fourier transform. If you look up the function, it looks very scary, it has an integral and Euler’s number raised to the negative power of the imaginary number multiplied by pi. However, if you’ve worked with complex numbers a lot, you’d immediately recognize that raising Euler’s number to pi times the imaginary number is just how you represent rotations on the complex plane.

Despite how scary the Fourier transform looks, literally all it is actually doing is wrapping a wave around a circle. 3Blue1Brown has a good video on his channel of how to visualize the Fourier transform. The Fourier transform, again, isn’t inherently anything quantum mechanical, we use it all the time in classical mechanics, for example, if you ever used an old dial-up model and wondered why it made those weird noises, it was encoding data as sound wave by representing them as different harmonic waves that it would then add together, producing that sound. The Fourier transform could then be used by the modem at the other end to break the sound back apart into those harmonic waves and then decode it back into data.

In quantum mechanics, properties of systems always have an additional kind of “orientation” to them. When particles interact, if their orientations are aligned, the outcome of the interaction is deterministic. If they are misaligned, then it introduces randomness. For example, an electron’s spin state can either be up or down. However, its spin state also has a particular orientation to it, so you can only measure it “correctly” by having the orientation of the measuring device aligned with the electron. If they are misaligned, you introduce randomness. These orientations often are associated with physical rotations, for example, with the electron spins state, you measure it with something known as a Stern-Gerlach apparatus, and to measure the electron on a different orientation you have to physically rotate the whole apparatus.

Because the probability of measuring certain things directly relates to the relative orientation between your measuring device and the particle, it would be nice if we had a way to represent both the relative orientation and the probability at the same time. And, of course, you guessed it, we do. It turns out you can achieve this simply by representing your probability amplitudes (the % chance of something occurring) as complex numbers. This means in quantum mechanics, for example, an event can have a -70.7i% chance of occurring.

While that sounds weird at first, you quickly realize that the only reason we represent it this way is because it directly connects the relative orientation between the systems interacting and the probabilities of certain outcomes. You see, you can convert quantum probabilities to classical just by computing the distance from 0% on the complex plane and squaring it, which in the case of -70.7i% would give you 50%, which tells you this just means it is basically a fair coin flip. However, you can also compute from this number the relative orientation of the two measuring devices, which in this case you would find it to be rotated 90 degrees. Hence, because both values can be computed from the same number, if you rotate the measuring device it must necessarily alter the probabilities of different outcomes.

You technically don’t need to ever use complex numbers. You could, for example, take the Schrodinger equation and just break it up into two separate equations for the real and imaginary part, and have them both act on real numbers. Indeed, if you actually build a quantum computer simulator in a classical computer, most programming languages don’t include complex numbers, so all your algorithms have to break the complex numbers into two real numbers. It’s just when you are writing down these equations, they can get very messy this way. Complex numbers are just far more concise to represent additional degrees of freedom without needing additional equations/functions.

Well, what is boring and non-boring I guess is in the eye of the beholder. What I moreso was referring to is what is difficult to wrap your head around.

The nondeterminism is kind of unavoidable as long as you don’t want to change the mathematics of the theory itself, but I also don’t really consider nondeterminism to be that unintuitive or difficult to “understand.” I mean, throughout most of human history, it wasn’t that common for humans to actually believe in determinism in the Laplacian sense of being able to make absolute prediction to the future based on complete knowledge of the past, that was largely popularized with the rise of Newtonian mechanics, and even by the 19th century you had even a lot of materialist philosophers calling it into question on grounds of logical consistency. Personally, I think the strong desire to maintain Laplacian determinism is really a physicist thing. They work with Newtonian mechanics first and it becomes so intuitive some don’t want to let it go when it comes to quantum mechanics. But I doubt if you went and talked to the average person, most probably wouldn’t be that strongly adherent to Laplacian determinism.

The kinds of views I was talking about are more things like people who try to interpret the state vector as literally representing a physical wave spreading out in space that collapses like a house of cards when you perturb it, or try to envision a literal multiverse where everything is just a big “universal wave function.” A lot of these bizarre views are not only unintuitive but literally impossible to visualize, and they run into a lot of problems in logical consistency and there have been mountains papers and books published on the subject trying to work out all the conceptual issues. If you are a person just learning QM and the philosophical interpretation around it bothers you, if you listen to people who talk about these weird things, you will need to read through dozens of books and maybe even hundreds of papers just to get a general idea of what is going on, and even then most of these interpretations still have not resolved their mountain of conceptual issues.

To me this really bothered me when I got into quantum computing for the first time. I wanted to not just learn the math but have some sort of intuition of what is actually going on. I then went down a rabbit hole of reading tons and tons and tons of books and academic papers to try and find some way to make the math make sense on a philosophical level. Most of the mainstream views you see in the popular media just overcomplicate things for no reason because the person wants to make QM sound more mystical than it actually is. What I ultimately came to realize is that most of this confusion is just self-imposed in the sense that they are based on assumptions which are not actually demanded by the mathematics and entirely optional (such as interpreting a list of probability amplitudes a literal entity in a physical space) and thus most can be stripped away.

You can’t strip away every aspect of QM that makes it unique, because it clearly does differ from classical mechanics, but by dong this you do really hone down on what actually makes QM unique and what is genuinely an unavoidable consequence of the mathematics. And what you get down to is just interference effects, which arise from the fact that probability amplitudes are complex-valued, thus can cancel each other out, which can’t occur in classical probability theory. Nondeterminism and context-dependence then follow from this as a necessity for the theory to be logically consistent, but both of those are fairly easy to have an intuition for.

This is a rather reductive view of quantum cryptography.

Correct = reductive?

The two most common applications of it I hear about is the development of encryption algorithms resistant to being broken on quantum computers

First, I was talking about quantum encryption, not quantum cryptography, which is a bit more broad. Second, we already have cryptographic algorithms that run on classical computers that are not crackable by quantum computers, known as lattice-based cryptography which are way more practical than anything quantum cryptography could offer.

the way, say, Shur’s algorithm is known to break RSA

Shor’s algorithm. Yes, it breaks asymmetrical ciphers like RSA, but we have developed alternatives already it cannot break, like Kyber.

and techniques like quantum key distribution

Classical key exchange algorithms prevent someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets between you. QKD is entirely impractical because it does not achieve this. Rather than preventing someone from reading your key if they intercept the data packets, it merely allows you to detect if someone is intercepting the data packets. You see, in regular cryptography, you want people to be able to intercept your data. It’s necessary for something like the internet to work, because packets of data have to be passed around the whole world, and it would suck if your packets got lost simply because someone read them in transit, which is why QKD is awful. If a single person reads the data packet in transit then they would effectively deny service to the recipient.

Both of these are real problems that don’t become meaningless just because one-time pads exist - you need to somehow securely distribute the keys for one-time-pad encryption.

One-time pad encryption is awful as I already explained, it would cut the entire internet bandwidth in half because if you wanted to transmit 10 gigabytes of data you would also need to transmit 10 gigabyte key. QKD is also awful for the fact that it would be unscalable to an “internet” because of how easy it is to deny service. It also doesn’t even guarantee you can detect someone snooping your packets because it is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack. Sure, the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is also susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, but we solve this using public key infrastructure. You cannot have public key infrastructure for quantum cryptography.

The only proposed quantum digital signature algorithms are unscalable because they rely on Holevo’s theorem, which basically says there is a limited amount of information about the quantum state of a qubit you can gather from a single measurement, thus creating a sort of one-way function that can be used for digital signatures. The issue with this is that Holevo’s theorem also says you can acquire more information if you have more copies of the same qubit, i.e. it means every time you distribute a copy of the public key, you increase the probability someone could guess it. Public keys would have to be consumable which would entirely prevent you from scaling it to any significantly large network.

That’s why one-time pads aren’t used everywhere, (“it would cut the whole internet bandwidth in half overnight” would not have been a sufficient reason - that’d be a tiny price to pay for unbreakable encryption, if it actually worked).

You are living in fairy tale lala land. Come back down to reality. If you offer someone an algorithm that is impossible to break in a trillion, trillion years, and another algorithm that is in principle impossible to break, but the former algorithm is twice as efficient, then every company on the entirety of planet earth will choose the former. No enterprise on earth is going to double their expenses for something entirely imaginary that could never be observed in practice. You are really stuck in delulu town if you unironically think the reason one-time pads aren’t used practically is due to lack of secure key distribution.

Even prior to the discovery of Shor’s algorithm, we were issuing DHKE which, at the time, was believed to be pretty much an unbreakable way to share keys. Yet, even in this time before people knew DHKE could be potentially broken by quantum computers, nobody used DHKE to exchange keys for one-time pads. DHKE is always used to exchange keys for symmetrical ciphers like AES. AES256 is not breakable by quantum computers in practice as even a quantum computer would require trillions of years to break it. There is zero reason to use a one-time pad when something like AES exists. It’s the industry standard for a reason and I bet you my entire life savings we are not going to abandon it for one-time pads ever.

Yep. Technically you could in principle use Grover’s algorithm to speed up cracking a symmetrical cipher, but the size typically used for the keys is too large so even though it’d technically be faster it still not be possible in practice. Even with asymmetrical ciphers we already have replacements that are quantum safe, although most companies have not implemented them yet.

No, they are not, they are incredibly wealthy millionaires whose campaigns are bought and paid for by billionaires. The Democrat party is actively supporting an ongoing holocaust, an industrial scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions of people from their homeland. The idea that these people are all secretly saints who are just too scared to act on it is such a completely ridiculous belief. They do not do moral things because they are not moral. They are not saints. They simply do not represent those values. You elect a party that openly believes X and then claim they don’t do Y because they’re too scared to do it. No, they don’t do Y because they don’t represent Y, they represent X. Democrats are by no means in any way “soft-willed.” Whenever it comes to something they actually believe in, they are very good at rallying the votes to get it passed, such as when they are passing something in favor of the military industrial complex or the Israel lobby.

Democrats are heartless genocidal freaks, and hardly “spineless” they just don’t care. It’s a party of billionaires. I have no idea how you can unironically believe this ethos that they’re all a bunch of bleeding hearts but are just too scared, quivering in their boots to act but they all mean well… apparently! No, they just never fight for those values you want them to fight for because their party does not represent those values, and pretending they do at this point… I have a bridge to sell you.