Sir Roger Penrose on the math of consciousness

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Some interesting commentary, not just on the joint theory he has with Stuart Hameroff but really explaining why he considers consciousness impossible to be one-to-one with complex computation.

Look up Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. A lot of Penrose's assumptions are simply a means to answer the collapse of the wave function in terms of conciousness.

But hey eternal nothingness is inherently unstable, and thus, grounds for reincarnation right?

I am inclined to agree with Penrose. The human brain and nervous system has little physical resemblance to any computer built, designed or imagined by humans. The manner is which the brain works, even when grossly observed has little or no resemblance to the way any computer works (even computers with multiple logic units).

I think likening a brain to a computer is a category error in much that same way the early enlightenment philosophers imagined the human body as a kind of mechanical puppet or automaton. I think the current view is mistaken in the same way. In any case all of our attempts to emulate "intelligence" based on the computational model have failed.

I liked what he said to the effect that perfect accuracy in processing is a very brittle state and one where the kinds of learning, cognition, etc.. that the human brain employs seems to have no use or place.

On a side note, with one of the Stuart Hameroff videos I saw someone mention the question deductive vs. inductive reasoning, seemed to be indicating that if we were computers in the typical sense the inductive side of our logic would be a bit of a mystery? I'd have to look into that a bit more, my understanding of the implications of inductive vs. deductive reasoning is somewhat basic and I'd be a bit shocked if it was really that cut and dry an issue.

If you like this, you might also like the scifi book Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which integrates and embellishes Penrose's concepts. And tiles too.

If I get the time I'll check it out; illustrative fiction can be quite good.

I'm already on the Hermetic path, quite active in a couple mystic orders, so I'm doing quite a bit to really size up my own inner potentials. The biggest thing is just sizing up what's real to this stuff, what isn't, and how much in the middle I can take up the reigns on.

Actually, Orch OR is a done deal: http://m.phys.org/news/2014-01-discover ... rates.html

Stuart Hameroff actually put Max Tegmark on blast a bit in the lecture below, largely because Max put the proverbial oak steak in the chest of the theory back in 2000. Stuart seemed to be calling him out for making a specious and perhaps politically convenient claim that cost him 15 years (probably funding and all of that), and the funny thing about this conference is that if anyone of these three speakers sounded sloppy, wish-washy, or weakly philosophical in an 'Ahh buleeve...' sort of way it was Max (which is unusual).

Goedel's Incompleteness theorems have nothing to do with the so-called collapse of the wave function...

The general problem with Penrose is that he keeps scientifically discrediting the kind of ideas he passes as a defender of, by the flawed details he puts inside. It is possible to argue from the incompleteness theorem that the mind is not a machine, but definitely not in the way he puts forward. As for his Orch-OR, the only times I saw claims of its validity were either from the mouths of Penrose and Hameroff themselves, or from people who just repeat the rumor without having any relevant competence to confirm. If it meant something to claim having a scientific confirmation of a well-publicized theory like this, I expect the news to be brought by other experts in the field than their original authors.
Generally the main debate, unless I missed something is that they try to argue the existence of some quantum computations in the brain (as if it had something to do with his other idea that is the non-algoritmicity of the mind, but I am not aware of any possible logical link between these). However while I do support these ideas of the non-algorithmicity of the mind and the importance of the quantum wave function collapse in mind-matter interaction, I never found any reason why, in guise of involved aspect of quantum physics, some macro quantum coherence (some quantum computation) could more precisely be what operates or facilitates this interaction. Instead, I see the operation of free will by wave function collapse as in principle very possible in any "natural environments", where decoherence affects everything very quickly already at molecular scales, while any idea that biological systems could keep quantum coherence to operate quantum computations looks quite dubious to me.
Sorry I did not take the time to see this video. Does it bring any clearly justified news I missed here ?

Birds and airplanes have very little resemblance in the way how they are made and function.
Using the same "logic" you can easily "prove" that airplanes will never fly.

Penrose's beliefs about the nature of consciousness are a bunch of hocus pocus. It's unfortunate to have this sort of stuff come from a scientist of such status.

Absolutely agreed.

I think he defends himself pretty well here. At a minimum he's pointing out just how badly we're sizing up chip computation against neural cognition. My bigger problem is that as long as we suggest that consciousness pops in from nothing we're calling neurons magical and that's not a whole lot better than Chopra woo, it just has a different political and social flavor. If what he's offering can help us get under what's actually happening we might stand a chance of being able to sort out our ethics with AI on much more solid ground and I also think it could help us make major inroads to biology.

One of the things I thought was absolutely hilarious, though perhaps not in a good way, was the Q&A for Jim Al-Khalili's Is Life Quantum Mechanical? lecture. He's clearly an atheist materialist, he's talking about QM in photosynthesis and then tests that showed that similar things are indeed going on with birds and their capacity for tracking magnetic fields in orientation for flight patterns.

The first few questions he got 1) What does Richard Dawkins think of this and (worse), 2) Do you believe in dowsing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUFHbfYG83c&t=1s

I'm starting to think Max Planck's quote that science progresses one funeral at a time might be as literally true as metaphorically true.