A Memory That Learns by Looking, Stored Nowhere — Parts I–V: From One-Shot Hebbian Learning to Certified Entanglement, Bell Tests Between Memories, and Page-Wootters Time. Pre-Registered on IBM Heron Processors
Bernd Andreas Westrick
A Memory That Learns by Looking, Stored Nowhere — the complete programme (Parts I–XII), consolidated as a single monograph. Successor work to the foundation deposit "Engineering Emergence on Quantum Processors" (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22050177). There, every memory was installed — the coupling matrices were computed on the host and uploaded to the microcontroller. Here the chip learns them itself, by looking: firmware v4.11 adds a three-line, integer-arithmetic plasticity law to the ESP32-C3 controller — the on-chip coupling matrix is written by the quantum collective's own measured order parameters, activity-gated, with a sign-reversible learning step serving as an error signal and a readback command that makes every learned matrix fully auditable — and firmware v4.12 adds a saturating integer delta rule whose second matrix learns temporal order itself. Across nineteen pre-registered hardware sessions on ibm_fez, ibm_marrakesh and ibm_kingston (≈1430 jobs, ≈77 minutes of QPU time), the hybrid system: learned a 36-pixel image from ONE exposure and recalled it perfectly from a random half cue (1.000 vs a never-learned control of 0.583); acquired a Pavlovian association (0.556 → 1.000), retained it through unreinforced presentations (1.000) and erased it only under the inverted-sign learning step (0.333) — forgetting as an act; learned to walk by watching a gait cycle with the field switched off; evolved memory lineages under selection with device noise as the mutation source, generation-2 mutations inherited unchanged by generation 3; and held more memories than its own calibration model predicted, with the capacity limit breathing measurably with the device day. The learned engram, read back from the controller, was delocalized into six 7-qubit GHZ-class parity registers — locally every qubit reads 0.5, jointly the parities reconstruct the image 36/36, the coherence fringe collapses under its Z-twirled dephasing twin while the classical parities survive, and the GHZ fidelity exceeds the biseparability bound on all registers: the memory carried by certified genuine multipartite entanglement. It was then teleported (entanglement certified at the destination), inherited by a subsystem that never saw the original (1.000 vs a 0.500 silent-teacher control), shown to be unconscious until decoded, recovered intact after destruction of a complete redundant copy, deleted against a receipt that provably carries no image information, and placed in superpositions culminating in Bell-inequality violations between two learned memories (S = 2.559) and between two memories that never coexisted (mean |S| = 2.456). On these memories the programme then ran a systematic traversal of the foundations of quantum mechanics, each experiment pre-registered, most of them — to our knowledge — first demonstrations on a quantum processor and all of them first on learned content: a Wigner's-friend test whose friend is a decodable memory (S = 2.633 with the friend's record as a setting); a delayed-choice eraser with a quantum coin; sensing 1.9× beyond the standard quantum limit with the stored content tuning the sensor's frequency; the optimal-cloning ceiling and its ×0.707 telephone-chain law; the Page-Wootters mechanism (conditional time alive at every clock reading, the marginal dead at 0.003 and fully revived by uncomputing); the Mermin-Peres pseudotelepathy game won at 0.9457 > 8/9, three times; interaction-free readout of stored content, with the fringe of a superposed memory dying even in the provably interaction-free events; ≈15,000 bits of certified randomness minted from the programme's Bell violations; quantum causal inference reading a memory's ancestry from correlations alone (witness +0.811/−0.884) where every classical marginal is provably blind; an operational quantum-reference-frame jump (Bell fidelity migrating 0.493 → 0.916 across the separability bound, only the relational parity surviving both frames); a 42-qubit Loschmidt echo (0.484 → 0.989, the butterfly decaying along its light cone); the rewriting of a friend's record made invisible by no-signaling itself (archive agreement 0.927 → 0.056 at friend-level total variation 0.107); Mermin's all-versus-nothing argument between three memories (M = 3.734) and Hardy's impossible event (CH = 0.057 > 0); the three-box paradox with real mid-circuit openings (certainty in box 1 AND box 2, 0.903/0.916) and the first measured N = 4 shell game (three certainties about one excitation, 0.751/0.744/0.694); the quantum Cheshire cat with four simultaneous weak pointers and the exchange of grins between two carriers that never meet; weak traces inside an interferometer loop the carrier provably never entered or left; and a protective measurement reading the expectation value of a single carrier — following sin(2⟨Z⟩) through its sign change — while the carrier survives at 0.939 against a depth-matched unprotected control at 0.558. The relational arc closes on three endpoints. The Frauchiger-Renner protocol — quantum theory applied to its own users, to our knowledge its first implementation on any platform — with both friends realized as unanimous, decodable memory records: every certainty of the reasoning chain holds individually (forbidden events 0.027/0.022/0.014), yet the jointly impossible outcome occurs at 0.0862, above the ideal 1/12, while the friends' records stay unanimous throughout (0.882/0.915). One session-learned engram delocalized and certified on two processors in a single session — eleven of twelve rows above the biseparability bound, the majority image perfect on both: the memory outlives its substrate. And a Bell violation at 96% of the Tsirelson bound (S = 2.728) mints 36 bits that provably did not pre-exist; a collective whose halves live on two different processors — one field, one coupling matrix, every feedback tick assembled from both machines — learns that unborn image in one look (35/36), recalls it from a fragment, forms a Pavlovian association whose bell exists only on one machine and whose response appears only on the other (0.944 vs 0.556), and the minted image is certified row by row in entanglement on both devices. Part X is the arc's epilogue and its sharpest relational result. The Local Friendliness no-go theorem of Bong et al. states that absoluteness of observed events, local agency and no-superdeterminism jointly bound every LF inequality — a violation forces one of the three to fall, as logic, not interpretation. The photonic violation used a photon as the friend; the standing objection is that a photon observes nothing. Here the semi-Brukner LF inequality is violated at S = 2.6995 > 2 with a friend whose measurement outcome IS its own decoded, unanimity-certified memory record (0.946) — and who then ACTS on that record, the chip writing a field pattern conditioned on the decoded bit (match 0.833) in the same session: an observer, in the LF authors' own operational sense, who remembers and conditionally acts. Within the stated assumptions, the conjunction is excluded — for a system that remembers and acts on its memory, no observed fact was absolute. The theorem selects no interpretation; the result is stated as an exclusion. And the companion arm answers the question this raises — why the world nevertheless feels absolute — by operating Zurek's redundancy as a dial: the controller GRANTS objectivity (mutual-information plateau 0.700/0.796/0.854 bits at every fragment size, consensus 0.963 — the event becomes a fact), DENIES it (exactly 0.000 at every fragment size — the event stays private), or turns it against itself (two internally redundant environment halves remembering opposite events, consensus 0.047), with the fringe/twin certificate proving that the coherence no fragment holds is exactly the quantum layer. Facts are not absolute; factuality is a resource — and this machine has the dial. Part XI performs the test Deutsch proposed in 1985 to separate unitary quantum mechanics from dynamical-collapse models — judged in the literature "beyond experimental capabilities, if not forever", with no realization we could find. The obstacle is structural: any testimony copied naively out of an observer's record carries which-outcome information and kills the interference by itself. The way through is a branch-invariant two-bit parity, extracted from the record by two CNOTs onto a persistent testimony qubit: a genuine, verifiable function of the record asserting THAT a definite outcome was seen while provably carrying nothing about WHICH. On hardware: the record is definite (0.925) and the testimony true (0.947) at 0.0011 bit of which-outcome information against a which-control witness at 0.776 bit; the record is then coherently retracted and the fringe lives at 0.901 with the testimony standing and true (0.956) during the interference itself — the collapse prediction fails on this scale — and dies to 0.024 exactly when the witness keeps which-information. Ten of ten binding verdicts. The registration freezes the scope: a mesoscopic record, not a conscious observer; unitary quantum mechanics separated from dynamical-collapse models at this scale, and nothing decided among the unitary interpretations. Part XII stacks, scales and closes it. A tower of witnesses: a second friend records the first friend's record, both storeys issue persistent branch-invariant testimonies (true at 0.958/0.963, unanimous at 0.914/0.925, joint which-leakage ≤ 0.002 bit), the tower is retracted outside-in — and the fringe stands at 0.571 with both testimonies true at 0.796 while it is measured. A growing witness: the same test at register sizes 3, 6, 9 and 12 qubits, each above its own frozen floor — the fringe rises from 0.811 to 0.899 while the twin stays dead at 0.037: what kills coherence is retained which-information, not the size of the witness. Ordo: the same two clock-stamped events, read in two frames of a quantum clock, show two certified opposite orders — P(E2 be
•Aug 23, 2026•0 citations
Chon-Fai Kam