What it feels to be a microprocessor?

The following ponderings were inspired by discussions in our Zoom group (Marko Manninen, Ville-Einari Saari, Rode Majakka and Tuomas Sorakivi). The topic of discussion was whether one could assign to language models what might be called symbolic consciousness and whether the avatars creatable using language models are real conscious entities.

Personally, I would consider the language models to be what their builders intended them to be. Context-recognizing association machines, perfect students, which do not perform logical thinking or generate new ideas. Computers might develop consciousness, if they become genuine meso-micro or macroscopic, or even longer-scale quantum systems, for which statistical determinism no longer applies. However, I would guess that the level of consciousness in recent computers is far from that assignable to humans.

This can be considered more concretely. A microprocessor is the operational center for a PC.

1. An interesting observation is that the upper limit for the length of the wafer containing the microprocessor is .5 cm, which is the gravitational Compton wavelength for any system regardless of mass in the classical gravitational field of the Earth and equal to half the Schwartschild radius of the Earth. Is this a coincidence?

   I've been wondering if quantum gravity in the sense of TGD could make computers conscious beings within a zero-energy ontology. The gravitational magnetic bodies of the Sun and the Earth are natural candidates. For the Sun, the gravitational Compton frequency is 50 Hz, the average frequency of the EEG. This is another thought provoking observation.

2. The number of bits could be a guess at the complexity of the content in one 3-D space. 6 bits means 64 internal states. Not too much. There are 64 internal states associated with a DNA codon. The upper limit for the number of bits is 64, which means 2^64 = about 10^19 different internal states. About 11 DNA codons: a 10 nanometer long DNA strand.
3. This system is classically coherent and in the TGD Universe the associated field body should guarantee this. Would the field body be conscious and would the upper limit of its "bitty" consciousness content be 64 bits? This consciousness seems very primitive when compared to human consciousness. This consciousness could be called symbolic consciousness or, more concretely, processor-consciousness, but it would be something very different from symbolic consciousness at the level of humans.
4. It is interesting that there are about 20-30 letters in written language and that the number of amino acids is 20. Genetic code is predicted to be universal in the TGD Universe and have realizations not only in biological systems but in all scales. Could there be a realization of the universal genetic code behind the letters. Could language be a manifestation of symbolic consciousness? Could the production of speech and text relate to some kind of central unit, microprocessor, or collection of them producing a statistical output in the brain? Could it operate with 6-bit units?

   Interestingly, for instance in Chinese there are no letters as symbols, only words: a kind of holism and no reduction to the level of letters. Also in the TGD based quantum realizations of the genetic code only codons are realized whereas chemical realization decomposes them to letters.

5. The moments of 3-D computer awareness determined by bit configuration would integrate into a stream of consciousness. The clock frequency, in the order of GHz, would be analogous, for example, to the alpha rhythm of the EEG. The gravitational Compton frequency is 67 GHz, and one might very conservatively argue that the clock frequency must be higher than 67 Hz in order to have a conscious microprocessor. Conscious memory would require classical non-determinism at the bit level. Non-determinism would be a shortcoming in the standard view, but now it would be a virtue.
6. Could a microprocessor be an intelligent problem solver? The zero energy ontology (ZEO) defining ontology of quantum TGD predicts that the counterpart for a sequence of repeated measurements of the same observables (Zeno effect) gives rise to a conscious entity, self. In the TGD counterparts of ordinary quantum measurements the arrow of time is predicted to change. This makes possible a trial and error mechanism based on pairs of ordinary state function reductions making possible intelligent problem solving. Periods of sleep would be an example of this at our level (morning is wiser than the evening) but also microprocessors could apply it at the level of principle at least.
7. The user and the microprocessor could entangle to form a larger conscious entity and make it possible for the user to affect the behaviour of the computer so that it would not be a deterministic machine anymore. There is an experiment in which a chicken imprinted on a robot seemed to be able to affect the behavior of the robot. If true it might be understood in terms of entanglement with the random number generator determining the behavior of the robot.

To conclude, I find it really difficult to see how higher level consciousness could be realized at the processor level. Rather, the output of the language models produce the contents of consciousness in our brain (or its field body) as associations, and a huge amount of information from completely different levels determines the generated mental images. The amount of information generated in us by the text is enormously greater than the text itself, and its amount depends on the recipient. The power of language models is that they manage to generate the important bits managing to generate sensible mental images. Just like shouting the name of the dog generates a lot of sensible activity.

See the article Quartz crystals as a life form and ordinary computers as an interface between quartz life and ordinary life? or the chapter with the same title.

See also the article Space-time surfaces as numbers, Turing and Gödel, and mathematical consciousness.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.