Quantum Minds, Block Universes, and Why AI Will Never Be Conscious

Presented by Valis Corp at SF Deep Tech Week 2025 (https://luma.com/valis-2025)
https://www.valiscorp.com/


Deep Tech Week is a decentralized conference hosting the worlds best entrepreneurs and investors bringing science fiction technologies to life
https://www.deep-tech-week.com/

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“Computers can’t do what your brain does — not even close.”

At Deep Tech Week San Francisco 2025, James Tag opens the session The Physics of Consciousness with a provocative question:

What if the human mind performs computations that no computer — not even an AI — can ever replicate?

In this talk, Tag explores the boundary between physics, computation, and consciousness, drawing from the ideas of Roger Penrose, Alan Turing, and Kurt Gödel to argue that consciousness may be a non-computable phenomenon — something that arises from physics itself, not just information processing.

He unpacks how quantum mechanics, general relativity, and computational theory each fail to fully explain the mind — and how their intersection might reveal why consciousness exists at all. Along the way, he challenges assumptions about:

• 🧩 Non-computable physics — why the brain might operate beyond algorithmic limits
• ⚛️ Penrose’s tilings and non-algorithmic math — the link between geometry and thought
• 🧠 Gödel’s incompleteness theorem — how it implies minds can “see” truths machines can’t
• 💻 The Turing paradox — why no computer can decide every problem, and why some ideas crash any algorithm
• 🌌 The block universe — the unsettling view that time doesn’t flow, and consciousness might be what breaks that illusion
• 🤖 AI vs human creativity — what computers miss about meaning, intuition, and insight

Tag argues that human consciousness might create new information — not merely process existing inputs — suggesting the mind taps into a deeper layer of physical reality still unexplained by current science.

This talk leads into a broader Deep Tech Week panel with Dr. Stuart Hameroff (on the biology of consciousness) and Dr. Rajnish Khanna (on photobiology and plant awareness). Together, they map a frontier between neuroscience, quantum physics, and computation — asking whether awareness itself could be a physical force.