Justin Riddle Podcast

In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin dives into the concept of Knightian Freedom where large enough computational spaces become intractably complex to the point where maybe freewill is possible. The focus of this episode is a paper put out by Hartmut Neven (of Google’s Quantum AI Lab) and colleagues from 2021 entitled “Do robots powered by a quantum processor have the freedom to sw...

In this episode of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin explores a novel conceptualization of time as comprised of three distinct dimensions in an attempt to make sense of our subjective experience. Traditional physics does not account for the experience of always being in the present moment, time flowing from the past into the future, and the openness of the future versus the locked in events from t...

In episode 40 of the Justin Riddle Podcast, Justin provides an update of the Nested Observer Windows (NOW) Model. The paper describing this theory was recently published in the open-access Neuroscience of Consciousness journal (link below) and this video is an extended version of the Plenary talk that Justin gave at the Science of Consciousness conference in April of 2024 in Tucson, AZ (link below...

In episode 39 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle explores the mechanism behind natural selection in evolution. This is not a question about humans evolving from animals, but instead is raising the question about what is the driving force behind the process of evolution. Charles Darwin described evolution as a random expression of features that are then selected by the environment....

In episode 38 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle takes on the concept of the multiverse and provides arguments for why he thinks we live in a single universe. The concept of the multiverse arose from the recognition that at the fundamental level quantum systems are splitting into different possible futures. This split in space-time reality if taken at face value implies that the un...

In episode 37 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle takes a deep dive into Donald Hoffman’s conscious agent model and relates it to the leading theories of quantum consciousness. The structure of this episode is an introduction to Hoffman’s model of conscious agents, then an interview with Don Hoffman in November 2022, and finally some reflections on the implications of this model. Ho...

In episode 36 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle describes the popular simulation hypothesis and discusses the implication of running the simulation using quantum computers. First off, Justin makes the argument that the foundation of the simulation hypothesis is strictly based in a digital computer framework. If the world is deterministic and digitizable, then it could in principle...

In episode 35 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle explores the role of quantum computers in the current revolution in digital artificial intelligence (AI). First, Justin describes some of the basics of large language models at a high level. In essence, digital AI can be conceptualized as a series of weighted matrices trained by fitting and updating the weights according to patterns...

In episode 34 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle puts forth a defense of freewill. In a deterministic universe guided by physical principles, there is no room for freewill. Surely, we must succumb to the crushing reality that our choices do not matter, that the self is an illusion, and that the very concept of time is illusory – nothing more than a social construct or hallucination...

In episode 33 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle interviews Kelvin McQueen on his recent theory on how consciousness might collapse the wave function. Kelvin is a professor of philosophy at Chapman University who investigates the nature of consciousness and role it might play in quantum mechanics. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics is that there is a smoothly and determin...

In episode 32 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle interviews Andres Gomez-Emilsson, the director of research of the Qualia Research Institute. Andres is passionate about understanding qualia, which is the feeling and quality of subjective experience. In this interview, we discuss many of Andres’ theories: mathematical fictionalism, symmetry of valence theory, neural annealing as it...

In episode 31 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the role of geometry in our understanding of the universe. The discussion begins looking at the manifestation of geometric forms in the world around us in the form of crystals. Crystals are a cornerstone of modern technology as they increase the controllability of the physical world around us through their structure. Many r...

In episode 30 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle sits down with Stuart Hameroff to get an update on current events in the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) Model. This interview took place on August 30th, 2022 in his home in Tucson, AZ. The interview covered four major topics. Our discussion of these topics is interleaved with my reaction, summary, and commentary on the to...

In episode 29 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the phenomenon of synchronicity and possible mechanisms through quantum mechanics that could give way to its rigorous scientific study. Synchronicity was coined by the psychologist Carl Jung and is defined as an apparently meaningful coincidence between your thought and some event in the world around you. Examples of synchr...

In episode 28 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle describes how quantum teleportation works and wonders whether a quantum computer mind could be teleported out of the body. The episode begins with a discussion of the bizarre, yet common, experience of leaving one’s body during a traumatic event to observe the unfolding of events from the outside. These near-death experiences are baf...

In episode 27 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the proposal of a quantum soul. The soul is the part of you that survives your entire lifetime. In this episode, we discuss three properties of quantum mechanics that might provide a novel solution to this age-old mystery. First of all, we discuss the curious discovery of Bose-Einstein Condensation. This state of matter was...

In episode 26 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the idea that every quantum bit comprises a bit of information and a bit of entropy such that knowledge of one dimension reduced knowledge of the other. We can think of each qubit has having two perpendicular axes: zero/one and plus/minus. The state of the qubit represents a point moving...

In episode 25 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses quantum error correction, a protocol by which noise from the environment is actively counteracted in order to create quantum computations that are robust against the destructive chaos of the environment. Quantum computers are on the near horizon with companies like Google and IBM actively working to improve the technology....

In episode 24 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses why neuroscience is in need of a quantum revolution. This revolution is underway in the field of information technology and low-level biology. Quantum computers are actively being developed and are on the precipice of overcoming the computational power of digital computers. Meanwhile, biology is increasingly acknowledging t...

In episode 23 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses quantum interrogation, the observation that in certain scenarios a quantum system can access the result of a measurement without actually making that measurement. This counterfactual measurement is best exemplified in the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb test, in which a bomb is determined to be real or a dud by sending a superposition...

In episode 22 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the quantum Zeno effect, the idea that with rapid measurement a system can be locked into its current state indefinitely. In the previous episode, we talked about how movement is the transition of a system from a fixed physical state into a superposition of many different states, and then upon measurement again will end up...

In episode 21 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the idea of quantization in quantum mechanics. Early models of the universe viewed reality as comprising a continuous domain of space and continuous domain of time. However, observations in physics revealed that these simple models were inaccurate. All things in the universe are quantized into chunks of matter or light or e...

In episode 20 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses language as fundamental to a description of reality. It’s tempting to view linguistics as a luxury science only for humans with some free time on their hands. But language is fundamentally mysterious. Just as mathematics cannot be reduced down to simple principles, language has similarly avoided an easy description. Could i...

In episode 19 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses how our use of language for communication should be updated to account for life in an ever-changing quantum reality. We have been conditioned to think that we live in a physical world governed by physical laws; however, attempts to strictly define our reality using simple logical principles has failed (see Godel’s incomplet...

In episode 18 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses the potential for a third form of computation beyond digital and quantum computation: fractal computation. In the metaphysical model presented in this series, the body is a digital computer, the mind is a quantum computer, and (now) the spirit is a fractal computer. First off, the concept of a fractal is introduced using ex...