Technology

I got interested in quantum computing as a way to combat quantum mysticism. Quantum mystics love to use quantum mechanics to justify their mystical claims, like quantum immortality, quantum consciousness, quantum healing, etc. Some mystics use quantum mechanics to "prove" things like we all live inside of a big "cosmic consciousness" and there is no objective reality, and they often reference papers published in the actual academic literature.

These papers on quantum foundations are almost universally framed in terms of a quantum circuit, because this deals with quantum information science, giving you a logical argument as to something "weird" about quantum mechanic's logical structure, as shown in things like Bell's theorem, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox, the Elitzur-Vaidman paradox, etc.

If a person claims something mystical and sends you a paper, and you can't understand the paper, how are you supposed to respond? But you can use quantum computing as a tool to help you learn quantum information science so that you can eventually parse the paper, and then you can know how to rebut their mystical claims. But without actually studying the mathematics you will be at a loss.

You have to put some effort into understanding the mathematics. If you just go vaguely off of what you see in YouTube videos then you're not going to understand what is actually being talked about. You can go through for example IBM's courses on the basics of quantum computing and read a textbook on quantum computing and it gives you the foundations in quantum information science needed to actually parse the logical arguments in these papers and what they are really trying to say.