Quantum Consciousness

The Fleet Of Stars, 2.

Computers and robots behave like people but only because they carry out algorithms. Conscious, creative minds could not be created:

"'...till the quantum nature of consciousness was understood.'" (p. 21)

Then researchers, applying their knowledge of atoms and quanta:

scanned a nervous system molecule by molecule;

recorded the patterns corresponding to memory and personality;

mapped these patterns into a neural net that was an analogue of a brain;

thus created a download that was a copy of a mind;

gave the download sensors, a speaker and a machine body although not yet a newly grown organic body;

thus learned how to make electrophotonic hardware and software that was self-conscious without having been copied from an organic brain.

These "sophotects," linked with all computers, robots and each other, became self-programming and self-evolving. There is a single pyramidal cybercosm with everyday appliances at the base and the unimaginable Teramind at the peak and there is a similar mind at the galactic level in Poul Anderson's later Genesis which is the peak of future histories.

Clearly, a neural net is an artificial brain, not a computer.