There’s a whole field with a group of scientists which says that consciousness is a product of quantum effects, but Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis doesn’t seem to belong in that camp.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says that he believes that consciousness isn’t necessarily quantum in nature, and can possibly be recreated by classical computers. “Do you think consciousness — there’s this hard problem of consciousness, about how information feels — do you think consciousness is a computation?” Lex Fridman asked him in a podcast. “And if it’s information processing, like you said everything is, is it something that could be modeled by a classical computer? Or is it a quantum mechanical in nature?” Fridman added.
“Well, look, Penrose is an amazing thinker, one of the greatest of the modern era, and we’ve had a lot of discussions about this,” Demis Hassabis replied, referring to fellow Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, who espouses the quantum nature of consciousness. “Of course, we cordially disagree. He collaborated with a lot of good neuroscientists to see if he could find mechanisms for quantum mechanics behavior in the brain. And to my knowledge, they haven’t found anything convincing yet. So my betting is that it’s mostly just classical computing that’s going on in the brain, which suggests that all the phenomena are modellable or mimicable by a classical computer,” Hassabis added.
“But we’ll see, there may be this final, mysterious things of the feeling of consciousness, the qualia, these kinds of things that philosophers debate where it’s unique to the substrate,” Hassabis conceded. “We may even come towards understanding that if we do things like Neuralink and have neural interfaces to the AI systems, which I think we probably will eventually — maybe to keep up with the AI systems — we might actually be able to feel for ourselves what it’s like to compute on silicon. And maybe that will tell us. So I think it’s gonna be interesting,” he added.
Hassabis presented a tantalizing idea — when human brains are augmented with neural interface devices like Neuralink, he suggested that it could lead to the creation of a different kind of consciousness, which could tell humans how artificial consciousness felt different from conventional consciousness. Hassabis has previously said that current AI systems aren’t conscious, but future iterations could be, but now seemed to suggest that conventional AI systems built on classical computers, when implanted into human brains, could lead to the creation of new kinds of consciousness.
Along with Stuart Hameroff, Roger Penrose has proposed the Penrose-Hameroff theory, also known as orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR), which says that consciousness arises from quantum computations within microtubules inside neurons. These computations are thought to be orchestrated by the neuron’s structures and terminate through a process called objective reduction (OR), which is linked to the fine-scale structure of the universe. The theory suggests that consciousness is not merely an emergent property of neural networks, but rather a fundamental aspect of reality, rooted in the quantum realm. It’s not something that Demis Hassabis seems to agree with, but recent advances in AI and quantum mechanics could shed some light onto the nature of consciousness, which remains one of the biggest mysteries in science to this day.