Well-written overview of the excitement generating around quantum and topological physics. Databases of candidate materials numbering in the thousands are currently being compiled.
Superconductivity. Memory and computation embedded in braiding of world lines. Valleytronic stability in bi-layer graphene that scales to infinite dimension in the transverse dimension and could scale quantum computation to arbitrary numbers of qubits.
It's worth remarking that the highly dendritic structure of neurons in the brain and its exponential efficiency above what modern silicon photo-lithography based supercomputers are capable of today is no coincidence.
We are still very much at the experimental and early prototype stage for any topological devices. And it will take a massive re-tooling of current manufacturing. But somewhere in this space is room for the next Intel to emerge.
What is required is a ten-fold or more increase in current levels of funding for quantum initiatives. And not just computing, but quantum biology as well.
Those who enjoyed this should check out Roger Lewin's "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos". It's a bit dated now but covers the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, which was more or less founded to answer an even more fundamental question: what are the varieties of persisting configurations of information that we can describe (ideally, mathematically).
(Any persisting state of matter we can recognize must also be a state of information... But we can race ahead in discovering data configurations before we identify physical phenomena that embody then!)
One of the more compelling insights in that book are parallel discoveries by Wolfram and others about ways of categorizing systems into high entropy and low entropy states -- plus a thin membrane of stable configurations in between that admit both constant change and useful summary.
You make the assumption that material existence is somehow less than other (religious/spiritual). It doesn't need to be. For what it's worth, my takeaway was that there is so much mystery, wonder and complexity in the material existence that it's just as deep and exciting as any spiritual worldview.
Normally life and consciousness were considered to be spiritual things. By claiming they are states of matter, the author seems to be stating matter is all there is to existence. This is a huge assumption. It's very speculative to claim life and consciousness can be reduced to matter, with no evidence to back it up to date.
No, exactly the opposite. All scientific evidence we have is filtered through the first person perspective. The most directly evident view is that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary.
Well-written overview of the excitement generating around quantum and topological physics. Databases of candidate materials numbering in the thousands are currently being compiled.
Superconductivity. Memory and computation embedded in braiding of world lines. Valleytronic stability in bi-layer graphene that scales to infinite dimension in the transverse dimension and could scale quantum computation to arbitrary numbers of qubits.
It's worth remarking that the highly dendritic structure of neurons in the brain and its exponential efficiency above what modern silicon photo-lithography based supercomputers are capable of today is no coincidence.
We are still very much at the experimental and early prototype stage for any topological devices. And it will take a massive re-tooling of current manufacturing. But somewhere in this space is room for the next Intel to emerge.
What is required is a ten-fold or more increase in current levels of funding for quantum initiatives. And not just computing, but quantum biology as well.
Those who enjoyed this should check out Roger Lewin's "Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos". It's a bit dated now but covers the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, which was more or less founded to answer an even more fundamental question: what are the varieties of persisting configurations of information that we can describe (ideally, mathematically).
(Any persisting state of matter we can recognize must also be a state of information... But we can race ahead in discovering data configurations before we identify physical phenomena that embody then!)
One of the more compelling insights in that book are parallel discoveries by Wolfram and others about ways of categorizing systems into high entropy and low entropy states -- plus a thin membrane of stable configurations in between that admit both constant change and useful summary.
Seconding this recomendation. This book really had a large influence on me / led me in a lot of other interesting directions.
reminded me of this (old?pfff) film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Ten_(film)
and, dont remember who of science-fiction or phylosophy writer said, "matter is an encoding of information". Might be Pirsig? not sure
If material existence is all there is, why qualify existence?
Does the author say material existence is all there is?
He think life and consciousness are states of matter.
You make the assumption that material existence is somehow less than other (religious/spiritual). It doesn't need to be. For what it's worth, my takeaway was that there is so much mystery, wonder and complexity in the material existence that it's just as deep and exciting as any spiritual worldview.
Normally life and consciousness were considered to be spiritual things. By claiming they are states of matter, the author seems to be stating matter is all there is to existence. This is a huge assumption. It's very speculative to claim life and consciousness can be reduced to matter, with no evidence to back it up to date.
Shouldn't that be the other way around? There seem to be no evidence for life and consciousness being something other than complex states of matter.
No, exactly the opposite. All scientific evidence we have is filtered through the first person perspective. The most directly evident view is that consciousness is primary and matter is secondary.