Facebook friend Tracey Domalik points me to this interesting story on the possible limits of artificial intelligence.
Excerpt:
Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has proposed an integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness…. One of the axioms of IIT is "Each experience is unified; it cannot be reduced to independent components." This means that a person's experience of a flower, for example, is the product of input from multiple physiological systems — various senses and other memories — but that product cannot be reverse engineered….
"In this paper, we prove that a process which binds information together irreversibly is non-computable," Maguire explained in an email. "If the human brain is genuinely binding information then it cannot be emulated by artificial intelligence. We've proved that mathematically."…
This is not to say that artificial intelligence cannot behave intelligently or pass the Turing Test. Rather, what Maguire and his co-authors have shown is that there's something fundamentally different between consciousness, at least under Tononi's definition, and artificial intelligence….
Asked whether there's a parallel between the unknowability of consciousness and the unknowability of quantum states, Maguire was cautious.
"Quantum mechanical effects occur when we reach the limits of measurement," he said via email. "Our definitions break down. There are properties that cannot be defined simultaneously. Similarly, if we try to model the integration of the brain, our models will break down. There will be computational properties that cannot meaningfully be defined. This possibility would rule out strong AI. And perhaps the irreversible integration of the brain is what causes quantum superpositions to collapse. But that's speculation for now."