D-Wave upends logical positivism

Logical positivism rests on a commitment to falsifiable theorems. The issue for urban primates -- whether they can ever 'understand' some kinds of physical phenomena -- puts an asterisk next to logical positivism in the big dictionary of philosophy.

A case in point; whether the D-Wave quantum computer is, in fact, conducting quantum computation, will be only understood by maths that we cannot comprehend. If not this time, by the next breakthrough. String theory may be never-comprehensible (falsifiable in the limit) to mere human minds. The asterisks here suggests a post-singularity version of logical positivism that we cannot ever understand because there will always be another barrier to the last wave of augmented human minds.

At some point there is an end to what some forms of matter can comprehend. The restaurant at the end of the universe is pure mind at the scale of the universe and is an impermanent self. There is a line of demarcation between 'recognizably human' and 'mostly machine' just as there is a line of demarcation between 'mostly machine' and pure computronium. There is therefore a line of demarcation between the outer limits of logical positivism and useful ontology. There is a rock that humans can create that is so large we cannot lift it.

Cue the Buddha. To become awakened is to leave the self behind. Without a self (pure computronium) there is no humanity and without human minds there is no human falsifiablity. You cannot get there from here.