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I'm no expert on physics, but I do know a few things about the brain as a neuroscientist. When the article started discussing the brain, it was nonsense. This m

I'm no expert on physics, but I do know a few things about the brain as a neuroscientist. When the article started discussing the brain, it was nonsense. This makes me wonder about the veracity of the physics presented earlierbin the article. Sometimes it's best to stick to what you know, would be the most generous interpretation.

bperson 5y ago
The article talked about the brain because the researchers talked about the brain and they aren't modest about what they say they discovered. Blame the scien(ce/tists) not the journalist if the conclusion is disagreeable. > Douglas Hofstadter asserts that human thought entirely depends on analogy. In describing analogy, he says, “we build concepts by putting several concepts together and putting a membrane around them, and kind of miraculously these [interior] concepts disappear." Hofstadter also noticed that analogy could be achieved using the Ising model. > In one study, a human brain was scanned and compared to the 2D Ising model — it found that at the Ising model’s critical point, the two systems were indistinguishable from each other in all relevant statistical properties.
- ahevia 5y ago
  Not sure if “journalist” is the right term here. This isn’t even a news site. It looks like someone’s personal blog/website to promote Quantum Annealing as the solution to everything. Why do we blame the scientists here for something they didn’t write? Nobody forced the author of this post to misinterpret science. It is a reasonable assumption that a science communicator knows the science they’re communicating.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- krastanov 5y ago
  I do not think there is a "journalist" here. This seems all presented as coming from a researcher (although they do not seem to identify themselves?). I do not think this should be taken particularly seriously. It is just someones ramblings for the moment, and that is fine.
krastanov 5y ago
And as a scientist working in quantum physics I can confirm that the physics part of the article was fishy as well. It uses handwavy metaphors and flawed comparisons. It would work great for a scifi story, but I would not take it too seriously as popsci explanation of real science.
- jerf 5y ago
  The philosophy aspect is questionable as well. That the fundamental layer of the universe may be something amenable to quantum simulation is way less impressive than this author thinks; it is not clear to me what "fundamental physics" would not be so amenable to quantum computation. If such a fundamental theory of everything wasn't amenable to quantum computation I'm not sure we could ever discover it. If you hike over to the latest work that materials science has been doing you can also see that once you have a "qubit" it's pretty natural to make it sing and dance and do all sorts of related mathematical tricks. It's actually unsurprising there are things that might theoretically be able to simulate qubits in a more complicated universe. Materials science is past the point where it's proving these things exist and is into the process of engineering these states to spec, even if they haven't quite come up with a generalized quantum computer yet. Or, to put it another way, I'm not updating my Bayesian probability of "the universe is a simulation" simply because it seems like the universe seems to be something that could be simulated on a particular type of computer, on the grounds that I don't have and never had any probability assigned to "the universe is fundamentally not something that could be simulated", again on the grounds that if that statement is true somehow it is likely that for the same reason it is true we could never prove it, or even necessarily gather significant evidence for it. (How would I do that? By finding some event in the universe that fails to match my own computational models? The probabilities that this is evidence for the non-computability of the universe would be smaller than "my model is wrong", "my data fed into the model is wrong", and "the physical process of computing my model failed" almost no matter what I did.) I already had effectively 100% assigned to "any observation I can make with my senses, no matter what machines may be augmenting it, is something that could be simulated with a sufficiently advanced simulator"... in fact, a "sufficiently advanced" simulator could be faking most of the "quantum" nature of reality, even with my machines I only can ever observe a very few qubits directly at a time. (And I personally am observing basically none! I'm just reading articles about it. It is easy for the Great Simulator to be forging those articles for me, in a reality that is "generally" non-quantum except when it absolutely has to be for me.)

bperson 5y ago

The article talked about the brain because the researchers talked about the brain and they aren't modest about what they say they discovered. Blame the scien(ce/tists) not the journalist if the conclusion is disagreeable. > Douglas Hofstadter asserts that human thought entirely depends on analogy. In describing analogy, he says, “we build concepts by putting several concepts together and putting a membrane around them, and kind of miraculously these [interior] concepts disappear." Hofstadter also noticed that analogy could be achieved using the Ising model. > In one study, a human brain was scanned and compared to the 2D Ising model — it found that at the Ising model’s critical point, the two systems were indistinguishable from each other in all relevant statistical properties.

ahevia 5y ago
Not sure if “journalist” is the right term here. This isn’t even a news site. It looks like someone’s personal blog/website to promote Quantum Annealing as the solution to everything. Why do we blame the scientists here for something they didn’t write? Nobody forced the author of this post to misinterpret science. It is a reasonable assumption that a science communicator knows the science they’re communicating.
- deleted 5y ago
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krastanov 5y ago
I do not think there is a "journalist" here. This seems all presented as coming from a researcher (although they do not seem to identify themselves?). I do not think this should be taken particularly seriously. It is just someones ramblings for the moment, and that is fine.

krastanov 5y ago

And as a scientist working in quantum physics I can confirm that the physics part of the article was fishy as well. It uses handwavy metaphors and flawed comparisons. It would work great for a scifi story, but I would not take it too seriously as popsci explanation of real science.

jerf 5y ago
The philosophy aspect is questionable as well. That the fundamental layer of the universe may be something amenable to quantum simulation is way less impressive than this author thinks; it is not clear to me what "fundamental physics" would not be so amenable to quantum computation. If such a fundamental theory of everything wasn't amenable to quantum computation I'm not sure we could ever discover it. If you hike over to the latest work that materials science has been doing you can also see that once you have a "qubit" it's pretty natural to make it sing and dance and do all sorts of related mathematical tricks. It's actually unsurprising there are things that might theoretically be able to simulate qubits in a more complicated universe. Materials science is past the point where it's proving these things exist and is into the process of engineering these states to spec, even if they haven't quite come up with a generalized quantum computer yet. Or, to put it another way, I'm not updating my Bayesian probability of "the universe is a simulation" simply because it seems like the universe seems to be something that could be simulated on a particular type of computer, on the grounds that I don't have and never had any probability assigned to "the universe is fundamentally not something that could be simulated", again on the grounds that if that statement is true somehow it is likely that for the same reason it is true we could never prove it, or even necessarily gather significant evidence for it. (How would I do that? By finding some event in the universe that fails to match my own computational models? The probabilities that this is evidence for the non-computability of the universe would be smaller than "my model is wrong", "my data fed into the model is wrong", and "the physical process of computing my model failed" almost no matter what I did.) I already had effectively 100% assigned to "any observation I can make with my senses, no matter what machines may be augmenting it, is something that could be simulated with a sufficiently advanced simulator"... in fact, a "sufficiently advanced" simulator could be faking most of the "quantum" nature of reality, even with my machines I only can ever observe a very few qubits directly at a time. (And I personally am observing basically none! I'm just reading articles about it. It is easy for the Great Simulator to be forging those articles for me, in a reality that is "generally" non-quantum except when it absolutely has to be for me.)