We had a great turnout for the re-launch of Rogue Tech Hub, after about nine months on hiatus due to a variety of events beyond our control: weather, schedule conflicts, government stuff, venue issues, and worst of all. . . lack of interest.
Tonight, the weather cooperated. We all met at Outback Steakhouse.
Tonight’s scheduled topic was Qubits.
Qubits are Quantum Computing Bits. Although the word bits is a portmanteau of Binary Digits the powers-that-be have contorted the word bits to attach a modifier identifying the Quantum Computing aspect. In short, instead of a single entity defining a single digit, it’s a process. Watch the (linked) video above for details.
The Qubits discussion lasted long enough to prompt a discussion of ChatGPT and how some people might be shirking their responsibilities and using the Chat Monster to do their work for them by providing enough information to launch the process (of, for example, producing a report.) The output can then be reviewed and modified to personalize the output.
Via email, I asked the individuals who had used the product to summarize our discussion from their own perspective; to describe how they used it and what the experience was like. Here’s the result:
Corey’s Summary
From my perspective, we explored how AI can be a valuable tool for enhancing productivity, whether through drafting content, summarizing discussions, or generating industry-specific documents more efficiently. We also touched on ethical considerations, the importance of human oversight, and how AI should be used as an assistant rather than a replacement for critical thinking.
Additionally, we discussed how AI is learning at an exponential rate but will never gain consciousness. This led to an interesting conversation about the distinction between intelligence and consciousness, with examples such as AI being able to analyze the chemical composition of cinnamon but never truly understanding what it tastes like or the emotions tied to sensory experiences.
Beyond AI, our conversation covered a variety of topics, including property taxes in Jackson and Josephine counties, Ben’s struggles with poison oak (and potential remedies), whole-home generators that Ben is researching, and some of our past and upcoming travel plans.
Corey noted that the above summary was drafted by ChatGPT when he asked it to reply to my email request for a summary, without any additional details, and it generated a surprisingly-accurate summary. Corey then refined the response by providing his own input. The process took only a few minutes.
Ben’s Summary
I really did not have that much to say, basically that as a software engineer I find it useful for jogging my memory about APIs and function calls and sometimes for optimization, but not so much writing production code. Both Copilot and ChatGPT can sometimes write functional code from scratch, with really good prompting (for my purposes) but it’s typically not optimized or all that well constructed.
Jon’s Summary
Our last cruise in September was from Galveston to Roatan, Honduras, where we only visited the port but the people were nice. Then Puerto Costa Maya and Cozumel Mexico.
We have visited Dominican Republic but that was several years ago.
Gunnar’s Summary
Corey had the most interesting use cases. I personally have been playing with it lately as a toy, creating non-sequitur images such as a goat as a laboratory researcher.
We have been exploring the possibilities of AI at my place of work, finding ways it can make difficult tasks easier. But also finding places where its accuracy is not reliable enough to be of help.
Glen’s Summary
During the AI discussion, I mentioned that I’d mostly used Leo, the Brave Browser’s built-in AI, to help with searches for information I couldn’t quickly find using Brave’s search engine (or other search engines like Yandex, which is less heavily censored than most popular search engines), and have found Leo to be useful for gathering statistical and other information quickly—basically instantly—that would take me multiple minutes or even hours to gather with queries to a search engine. In some cases, it has found information that I might NEVER have found via search engine queries.
On the other hand, Leo (like most AI) is heavily censored on topics where truthful information is often blocked or labeled “misinformation,” so there’s that.
We also talked about the rapid increase in AI abilities generally, including the possible dangers (known and unknown). A less-than-extinction-level example mentioned was illustration and video artists being rapidly replaced by AI renderings of images and videos. Quality of AI graphic output has become astonishing, and the time and cost to create such output is negligible compared to traditional human methods.
The AI discussion led to some talk about consciousness, and whether AI will ever become conscious, and from there to the nature of consciousness. My comment was that consciousness is likely the fundamental element of the universe, mediated by the universal fields that create all mass and effects (including conscious awareness, which begins much lower than human intellectual consciousness). Fields are fundamental; particles (i.e., all material items) are not. A subatomic particle is a point excitation of a particular field.
As counter-intuitive as that is, it has been an established fact in physics for nearly a century.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_quantum_field_theory
It was between 1928 and 1930 that Jordan, Eugene Wigner, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Enrico Fermi discovered that material particles could also be seen as excited states of quantum fields. Just as photons are excited states of the quantized electromagnetic field, so each type of particle had its corresponding quantum field: an electron field, a proton field, etc. Given enough energy, it would now be possible to create material particles. Building on this idea, Fermi proposed in 1932 an explanation for beta decay known as Fermi’s interaction. Atomic nuclei do not contain electrons per se, but in the process of decay, an electron is created out of the surrounding electron field, analogous to the photon created from the surrounding electromagnetic field in the radiative decay of an excited atom.[3]: 22–23
What does that mean for consciousness?
Matter (including the matter of the brain) does not create consciousness—and really, how could it?—but rather can trap and dissociate a small bit of consciousness when a highly complex and specific type of matter is arranged in the right way.
Consciousness as recursive, spatiotemporal self-location
The brain focuses and amplifies consciousness of what is happening in the brain and body, within the dissociated bit of consciousness the massively recursive design of the brain traps within itself. Our consciousness—our soul—is a walled-off bit of the Universal Consciousness experiencing what happens in our brain, including the bodily sensations processed by the brain.
That’s the theory I’m going with, anyway.
For more on this idea (or one theory utilizing the idea), see:
The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality by Bernardo Kastrup
or Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup.
Could machines become conscious?
If a machine could create the same conditions that exist inside a brain—not just the same level of computational ability, but the massively parallel and recursive (and other) architecture—then possibly. But no computer is anywhere near the complexity of the human brain, which is often described, by scientists, as “the most complex structure in the known universe.” (Not everyone agrees on that, but clearly the brain is at least in the running.)
https://mindmatters.ai/2022/03/yes-the-human-brain-is-the-most-complex-thing-in-the-universe/
It seems more likely to me that computers will be able to mimic the behavior of a conscious human, which to an extent they already do. They’re getting pretty good at it.
That doesn’t mean they are conscious, any more than a thermostat “feels cold” just because it registers a drop in temperature that triggers it to turn on the heat.
Related News Stories
3/11/25 Via Newsmax.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink filed applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on March 3 to trademark “Telepathy” and “Telekinesis” as well as other names for future products, Wired reported Wednesday.
Next Month
Join us next month on April 3, 2025 at 6:30 when we return to Outback Steakhouse for dinner and a talk.
Thanks!
Outback provided great service during our meal (Thanks, Maya!)