Scott Aaronson Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question I Throw at Him

Scott Aaronson has one of the highest intelligence/pretension ratios I've ever encountered. I wasn't really aware of him before last fall, when I attended a conference at New York University on an ambitious new theory of consciousness, integrated information theory. Most speakers touted IIT or tried to tease out its implications. The striking exception was Aaronson, a boyish (he turns 35 on May 21 but looks younger) computer scientist at MIT (soon leaving for the University of Texas--too bad, MIT!). Although at first he seemed nervous, even jittery, he proceeded to demolish IIT. He focused on a key IIT variable, phi, which denotes the inter-connectivity, or synergy, of the parts of a system. The more phi a system has, the more consciousness it has, supposedly. Aaronson argued--or showed, actually--that IIT's mathematical definition of phi implies that a simple information-storage device, like a compact disc, can be more conscious than a human being. Browsing Aaronson's blog, "Shtetl-Optimized," I discovered that he writes not only about quantum computation, his specialty, but also about artificial intelligence, mathematics, cosmology, particle physics, philosophy… Aaronson has things to say about almost everything. Even when he is at his most technical, he expresses himself in a down-to-earth, funny, self-deprecating and above all clear way. He exudes the spunky enthusiasm and curiosity of a 10-year-old kid, a kid who happens to have a firm grasp of mathematics and physics. He thinks I'm wrong about the end of science, and that's fine with me. Hell, he might be right! I won't say more about him here, because I don't want to embarrass him--or myself--more than I already have, and because he reveals so much of himself in what follows. Warning: this is an extra-long Q&A, but if you read it, I predict, you too will become an Aaronson fan. Come on, that's too high a bar! When I was a kid, I wanted to be the founder and ruler of a rationalist space colony, who also wrote video games and invented the first human-level AI and led a children's liberation movement and discovered the mathematical laws underlying society. On the other hand, as far as childhood dreams go, I have no right to complain. I have a wonderful wife and three-year-old daughter. I get paid to work on engrossing math problems and mentor students and write about topics that interest me, to do all the things I'd want to do even if I weren't getting paid. It's one of those things, like a joke, that dies a little when you have to explain it--but when I started my blog in 2005, it was about my limitations as a human being, and my struggle to carve out a niche in the world despite those limitations. It also gestured toward the irony of someone whose sensibility and humor and points of reference are as ancient as mine are--I mean, I already felt like a senile, crotchety old man when I was 16--but who also studies a kind of computer that's so modern it doesn't even exist yet.