What Chance a Stone?

It's intriguing how often I'll chuck away a possible thread for an idea of a topic for a post [cf. last night's scribble], and then find myself faced with the potential substance of that post the following day. In today's case, I read with interest a piece in today's Financial Times about Cortical Labs' early stage experiments in implementing 'biological intelligence', using lab-grown human brain cells living on silicon substrates from which their responses can be 'read' and via which they can be 'trained' [or at least 'nudged']. So far they have created a machine they have dubbed 'CL1', with 200,000 brain cells. The aim of this endeavour is to create computing devices of enormous power that, like the human brain, '...consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics...'.

If realisable in genuinely practical terms, this would leapfrog current developments in the field of quantum computing, making the process of mass data-crunching more sustainable and less damaging to the environment. It's worth noting that the article relates that a predecessor device to the CL1, the rather crudely named 'DishBrain' was taught to play 'Pong' - the very first video game that humans played so many decades ago in pubs, bars and amusement arcades across the world. To 'nudge' its learning progress, the device fed 'reward' and 'punishment' into the system, consisting of sine waves [good] and white noise [bad], which the human-derived cells reacted to and learned from, figuring how to play the game as a result. 

OK, so to Roger Penrose. He posited more than thirty-five years ago that 'consciousness' is created at the quantum level: when a quantum superposition of states collapses through the influence of gravity, a position that Hartmut Neven, et al contest in their 2024 article in the journal 'Entropy'. Penrose contends still that we need to 'gravitise' quantum mechanics rather than 'quantise' gravity, in the search for the theory that will hopefully unify both. I don't profess to have more than a layman's feeling or understanding on the subject, however, there seems to be philosophical component to all of this. If 'consciousness' is instigated at the quantum level, it follows that all matter and things, given the 'opportunity' [quantum mechanics is 'probabilistic', after all], could in theory be said to be capable of 'consciousness'. 

There has been much understandable debate about consciousness and AI [blog posts passim] of late, and whether such things as Large Language Models could ever conceivably considered 'conscious'. Of course, this would normally be glibly dismissible as nonsense due to the simple fact that AI models are digital programs running on digital machines, unlike the totally analogue, organic entities we call the brains of sentient creatures. All well and good and apparently spot on. But in the case of these current developments away from the rigidity of binary data processing, it would seem that we have a couple of issues to deal with. Firstly, the notion that human - or for that matter any other species - intelligence and consciousness is solely centred in the organic, parallel-processing brains housed in our skulls [or otherwise housed/distributed in the case of say, the octopus and sundry other invertebrates], then these new developments in biologic[al] computing automatically throw into the arena of debate the notion that as a consequence of the origin of the cells employed, there should be the very distinct possibility of the creation of sentience as a natural consequence.

The flip-side is that given Penrose, et al, what is there to prevent consciousness evincing itself in the pebbles on a beach, or the waters of the ocean and not just in the neurons of brains? - something which appeals to the Zen Buddhist in me and makes me chuckle, at least. The strangest thing for me, though, is that the researchers involved in developing CL1 are worrying themselves over the 'issue' of how to '...represent digital information to these neurons...' in order to 'back up' data lost when the relatively short-lived organic structures eventually die, necessitating a complete rebuild from scratch: surely missing the wood for the trees, I would have thought; ain't that what the cycle of life is actually all about?