The current economy of the world is bifurcated into two parts: a post singularity economy and a pre singularity economy. The post singularity economy is often called “tech”. The pre singularity economy includes things like housing, medicine, and education. As deflation occurs in the post singularity economy money moves into the pre singularity economy. This is why housing, medicine, and education are getting more expensive as televisions are getting better and cheaper.

Update: Example available here. The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that there are infinitely many universes. The universe branches with each measurement. The act of measurement is similar to the activation functions used in neural networks. The output of a neuron could be fed into two activation functions. The ReLU and its complement could be used: max(0, x) and min(0, x). When added together in a neuron: w1 * max(0, x) + w2 * min(0, x) = x (for w1 = w2 = 1) which is the identity function, so gradient descent decides if the Everett activation function is an identity function.

Update: Simulation available here. In Quantum Computing with the Human Brain I introduce the idea of quantum genetic optimization: Genetic optimization uses simulated evolution to solve problems. For instance, it could be used to factor numbers. In this case the genome is two numbers: a & b, and the fitness function is |n - (a * b)|. In the case of a quantum implementation the genome would be the quantum computer configuration.

There is a theory that the human brain is a quantum computer. I believe this idea is connected to the placebo effect. Chemistry is quantum mechanics and placebos are typically sugar pills. Is it quantum information that causes the effect? Is information on its own sufficient? Can faith heal? If this is the case the government should spend lots money on positive ads. This would be more useful than helicopter money.

I propose a quantum communication system using quantum computation. In this system there are two pools of qubits: a sender and a receiver. Some of the qubits of the sender are entangled with the qubits of the receiver. Three entanglement configurations are selected: A, B and C; A and B are configurations of the sender, and C is the configuration of the receiver. The overall system has two configurations which result in known qubit states with high probability.

Genetic optimization uses simulated evolution to solve problems. For instance, it could be used to factor numbers. In this case the genome is two numbers: a & b, and the fitness function is |n - (a * b)|. In the case of a quantum implementation the genome would be the quantum computer configuration. The configuration would be evolved until the number is factored. This system searches for a quantum program that factors the number.

I have been reading Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution, The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin, and the chapter ‘Physical Collapse of the Quantum State’ caught my attention: One consequence is that energy is no longer precisely conserved. A metal block should slowly heat up as a result of all the collapses the wave functions of its atoms undergo. A similar claim is made in the article Objective-collapse theory.

I have been reading Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, and about half way through he points out that quantum systems are linear until they are measured. From a machine learning standpoint this is not good. Linear artificial neural networks are of limited use and can only be used to model the simplest data sets. When a non-linear transform (activation function) is added after each linear layer in a neural network then it is able to solve difficult problems.

Unlike the principal of flight, the principal of consciousness is an unsolved problem. Before airplanes, people tried to build flying machines that emulated birds, but it turned out that replicating the complexity of birds was unnecessary. We still can’t build machines that are as complex as a bird. Synchronicity is a concept which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

Sync is the mathematics of how independent systems can synchronize their state. (Hacker News discussion) When multiple metronomes are placed on the same table they sync up their ticking over time, but if more metronomes are placed on the table they don’t necessarily sync up. The additional metronomes can form their own sync clusters. I think sync can serve as a more general theory of music, explain why there are different types of particles in the universe, and explain high temperature superconductors (and perhaps lead to room temperature superconductors).