.Scott said:
My key point here is that when consciousness exists, it has information content. Do you agree?
Sure, but that's a separate question from how, physically, the information is stored and transported. "Observing the characteristics of your consciousness" does not tell you anything about that, except in a very minimal sense (no, your brain can't just be three pounds of homogenous jello).
.Scott said:
Let's say we want to make our AI capable of consciously experiencing eight things, coded with binary symbols 000 to 111. For example: 000 codes for apple, 001 for banana, 010 for carrot, 011 for date, 100 for eggplant, 101 for fig, 110 for grape, and 111 for hay. In a normal binary register, hay would not be seen by any of the three registers - because none of them have all the information it takes to see hay.
I'm not sure what you mean by the last sentence. If you mean that the information stored in the three bits, by itself, can't instantiate a conscious experience of anything, then I certainly agree; what makes 111 code for hay is a whole system of physical correlation and causation connected to the three bits--some kind of sensory system that can take in information from hay, differentiate it from information coming from apples, bananas, carrots, etc., and cause the three bits to assume different values depending on the sensory information coming in.
If, OTOH, you mean that no single bit can "see" hay because it takes 3 bits (8 different states) to distinguish hay from the other possible concepts, that's equally true of the three bits together; as I said above, what makes the 3 bits "mean" hay is not that they have value 111, but that the value 111 is correlated with other things in a particular way.
.Scott said:
Now let's say that I use qubits. I will start by zeroing each qubit and then applying the Hadamard gate. Then I will use other quantum gates to change the code (111) to its complement (000) thus eliminating the 111 code from the superposition. At this point, the hay code is no longer local.
I don't understand why you are doing this or what difference it makes. You still have eight different things to be conscious of, which means there must be eight different states that the physical system instantiating that consciousness must be capable of being in, and which state it is in must depend on what sensory information is coming in. How does all this stuff with qubits change any of that? What difference does it make?
If you mean that somehow the quantum superposition means a single state "sees" all 3 bits at once, that still isn't enough for consciousness, because it still leaves out the correlation with other things that I talked about. And that correlation isn't due to quantum superposition; it's due to ordinary classical causation. So I don't see how quantum superposition is either necessary or sufficient for consciousness.