Does a Quantum Computer Know It Is Thinking? The Philosophy Behind the Machines We Are Building

[Frost Hermit]

Quantum computing forces a strange question that rarely gets asked outside philosophy departments: what does it actually mean for something to compute, and does the answer change once the thing computing is also, in some sense, in two places at once. A qubit exists in superposition, holding multiple possible states simultaneously until it is measured, at which point one outcome becomes real and the others vanish. Philosophers of science have spent the past few years asking what that process actually tells us about the nature of reality itself, since quantum mechanics is the most rigorously tested theory in the history of physics and it describes a universe that behaves nothing like our everyday intuitions suggest it should.

The more provocative question circling academic philosophy departments concerns consciousness. Some researchers have speculated that human consciousness itself might rely on quantum processes inside the brain, a theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction, proposed by physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff. The idea is that tiny structures inside neurons called microtubules might sustain quantum coherence long enough to play a role in conscious thought, rather than the brain being a purely classical biological computer. Most physicists remain sceptical, arguing the warm, wet environment of a living brain destroys quantum coherence far too quickly for this to matter, but the theory persists precisely because it offers one of the only frameworks that tries to explain why consciousness feels like something from the inside rather than simply describing what neurons do from the outside.

There is something genuinely hopeful in this line of thinking, regardless of whether Orch-OR or any related theory ever proves correct. Building machines that hold multiple possibilities open simultaneously, only resolving into a single answer when observed, has quietly reopened questions about determinism, free will and the texture of reality that philosophy had treated as largely settled for the better part of a century. A field of engineering has handed philosophy a brand new toolkit of metaphors, and for once the metaphors are not borrowed from computers pretending to be brains, but from physics pretending to be neither classical nor fully understood.

On quantum computing for artificial superintelligence - European Journal for Philosophy of Sciencelink.springer.com